The Productive Writing Routines of Haruki Murakami, Stephen King, and Virginia Woolf, Explained
Just days ago, Haruki Murakami’s Japanese publisher announced that his sixteenth novel will come out this summer. A brief section of The Tale of KAHO, translated into English by Philip Gabriel, appeared in the New Yorker in 2024. The full book will run to 352 pages, making it a fairly hefty work for a 77-year-old novelist who’s been at it for almost half a century now. Murakami’s unflagging productivity must owe something to his famously rigorous construction of his life around the twin poles of writing and running, two activities that demand long-term endurance. In the video above, the YouTuber MariWriting attempts it herself: waking up every morning at 4:00 a.m., working on a single project for five to six hours, then running ten kilometers — or, in her case, at least getting out and walking for a while. However indispensable Murakami may consider running to his writing life, he’s also employed other idiosyncratic and seemingly effective techniques of which others can make use. Take, for example, the way he got over the block stopping him …
