Writers’ Career Paths, Part 1: Prolific vs. Painstaking

I’m going to devote a couple of blogs to the different types of careers that writers can have. I’d like to start by talking about volume. There are some writers who are extremely prolific. They write almost every day, often for several hours. These writers spin out book after book. Other writers are extremely painstaking in their process. They sweat every adjective. If they produce one poem or one short story every few months, that’s a lot.

Here are a couple of poets who represent those two extremes.

The Japanese author Yosano Akiko (1878–1942) was renowned for her ability to write as many as fifty poems in one sitting. She wrote mostly five-line tanka poems, but still! In her lifetime, she is said to have written more than 50,000 poems. That’s an average of about three a day for her entire career. In addition, she was the author of eleven books of prose, including literary criticism, an autobiographical novel, and a translation into modern Japanese of one of Japan’s classics, The Tale of Genji. You might wonder if she was able to do this because she was a single woman who had no children. No, actually. Yosano Akiko gave birth to and raised eleven children. She must have been a hurricane of energy. 

Yosano Akiko

Here’s my translation of a poem by Yosano Akiko that I like a lot:

that hateful fan

endlessly wafting

sandalwood incense

in my direction—

I snatched it away

At the other extreme, there’s the U.S. poet Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979). I’m holding her book, The Complete Poems 1927–1979. It weighs less than a loaf of bread. Excluding her translations, it’s 228 pages, and even with her translations from Portuguese and Spanish, it doesn’t reach 300 pages.

Yosano Akiko lived to her 66^th year; Elizabeth Bishop, 68. Roughly the same lifespan, but a difference in output of about 10,000 pages.

Who is the greater writer? Well, it’s hard to say. I don’t read Japanese, and only one book of Yosano Akiko’s has been fully translated into a European language. Claire Dodane translated into French the poet’s masterpiece, Midaregami, or Tangled Hair. Dodane’s translation is titled Cheveux emmêlés—same meaning in French. Yosano Akiko wrote this book about her scandalous love affair with the leading male poet of the day, Yosano Tekkan, whom she married and had such a large family with. The book contains 399 tanka poems, a fair sampling of her work in that form. Not every poem is a masterpiece, but there are a remarkable number of excellent poems, especially when you consider that Yosano Akiko wrote this book when she was 22 years old. But quite a few of the poems—I’d say the vast majority—are not at the same level as the best of the collection.

Elizabeth Bishop, on the other hand, must have produced endless drafts of her poems. She published only a handful a year, maybe 120 in her lifetime. Each poem is a sapphire, with every facet cut and polished. Is that a better way to write?

Elizabeth Bishop

I like to think that Elizabeth Bishop and Yosano Akiko wrote roughly the same number of pages of great poems, even though their output and process were so different. But that’s not necessarily the case. And who is in a position to make such a crazy calculation?

There are dangers both to being a prolific writer and a painstaking writer. The danger of being a very prolific writer is that quantity becomes so central that quality may never enter into the equation. Fortunately, that wasn’t true for Yosano Akiko. Some of her poems are bad, some mediocre, some great, some absolutely classic.

The danger of being a painstaking writer is that authors of that sort are such perfectionists that they sometimes never finish anything. Or if they do, what they produce is so precious that it lacks spontaneity and juice.

For some writers, a painstaking process works well, and is absolutely necessary to satisfy the perfectionist within. For prolific writers, the method is to set free all the thoughts and images and emotions and stories and then let the reader sift through and pick favorite pieces.

There is not a right or a wrong answer about how prolific to be. I think it’s a question of personality. Readers may have similar preferences, liking writers who are great stylists, or ones who can tell a good story. Personally, I enjoy the work of both prolific writers and painstaking writers.

Other recent posts about writing topics: 
How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka
How to Be an American Writer

Haruki Murakami and Globalization

I just finished listening to the audiobook of Haruki Murakami’s After Dark, a novel that takes place in the space of only seven hours in Tokyo. The plot follows four main characters and several minor characters from midnight to dawn of one day in the grungy downtown entertainment district. I didn’t like the novel as much as Murakami’s stellar The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Norwegian Wood, or his short stories in The Elephant Vanishes, but After Dark does have a couple of classic Murakami scenes where he is at his best, and those scenes alone make the novel worthwhile.

Haruki Murakami with jazz records

Murakami is a master at creating a situation where two characters encounter one another by chance and start talking deeply, and suddenly their hearts and thoughts spring open up in a way that is extraordinary and reveals surprising truths.

I love Murakami's writing, so I was quite surprised when I heard him taken to task at an international symposium on literature I attended a few years ago. At the Third Seoul International Forum for Literature in 2011, eminent Korean scholar Yu Jong-ho, professor emeritus at Yonsei University, criticized Murakami at a session where I also spoke on “The Globalizing World and the Human Community.” Though his criticisms of Murakami didn’t focus on the globalization of literature per se, Professor Yu’s comments appeared to me to be prompted in part by the Westernized cultural references in Murakami’s fiction.

After Dark is a prime example. Though the novel takes place in Tokyo, it begins in a Denny’s Restaurant. There are numerous discussions of music in the book, partly because one of the main characters, Takahashi Tetsyta, is an aspiring jazz trombonist. Almost all the music referred to in Murakami’s novel is from the U.S.A. or the U.K. All the food the characters eat is Western, from chicken salad (there are some hilarious bits about Denny’s chicken salad!) to tuna sandwiches to a fluffy omelet (which, like the love that develops between the two protagonists, is never actually indulged in).

One of the only things in the novel that is distinctively Japanese is a love hotel, not exactly what you’d call classic East Asian culture. Even the love hotel is named for a Jean-Luc Godard movie, Alphaville (sometimes After Dark seems to take place in the futuristic world of Godard’s Alphaville).

So, is this a problem that Murakami’s characters seem to move in a world where Japanese culture, so rich and venerable, no longer seems to exist? The references that Murakami’s characters make to vintage jazz tunes, which he knows extremely well (he once ran a jazz club in Tokyo), are fascinating to me, and they make his characters appealing and endearing, from my standpoint. I’m a huge jazz fan myself. I would never want Murakami to feature Japanese culture in a way that would Orientalize or exoticize his own country. Nor would I want to see Murakami respond in an extremely nationalistic and negative way to Westernization, in the manner of Yukio Mishima, for instance, perhaps the other best known Japanese novelist of the last three generations.

Maybe that’s part of why Murakami has immersed himself so deeply in Western culture, as an antidote to his country’s militaristic nationalism and to the conformist culture of the “salaryman” that has dug so deeply into Japanese life. But I can’t help but wonder why Murakami sees no precedents for his own rebellion within Japanese literary and artistic culture. What of the great poet Yosano Akiko, for instance, who defied expectations that she would continue to run the family business and fled to Tokyo from a provincial town in order to elope with her lover, the poet Yosano Tekkan? She was also a foe of the status quo. What of the poets of the Arechi or Waste Land movement in post-World War II Japanese poetry, such as the wonderful Tamura Ryuichi? Why doesn’t Murakami see his legacy through these and other Japanese writers? Has he become infatuated with the culture of the U.S.A. to the point where he can no longer see the strengths of his country’s own legacy?

Other recent posts about writing topics: 
How to Get Published: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10
Putting Together a Book Manuscript, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8
Working with a Writing Mentor: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5
How to Deliver Your Message: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6
Why Write Poetry? Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4
Using Poetic Forms, Part 1: Introduction; Part 2: The Sonnet; Part 3, The Sestina;
Part 4, The Ghazal; Part 5, The Tanka

Why Are Certain Writers Popular in Other Countries?

I remember when I first started traveling abroad, if French people realized I was an American interested in books, they wanted to tell me how much they admired and enjoyed the novels of Chester Himes. “Chester who?” I would ask. Well, it may be that Chester Himes is a writer we should all know more about—he was an African American mystery writer of the 1950s and 60s, totally unknown to me or any of my acquaintances. In France, he was one of the most famous American novelists. It’s true, Himes wrote about race relations at a time when few were taking on that subject: “All that tight, crazy feeling of race as thick in the streets as gas fumes. Every time I stepped outside I saw a challenge I had to accept or ignore.” (from If He Hollers Let Him Go). But even if Himes deserves a closer look, he’s no Langston Hughes or Zora Neale Hurston. Why is Himes so popular in France?

Chester Himes

French readers also all seem to know authors of the Beat Generation, especially Jack Kerouac. But very few are aware of most of the terrific poets and novelists in the U.S. since the Beats.

Similarly, readers in the U.S.A. and all over the world are fascinated with Gabriel García Márquez. Márquez is one of my favorite novelists, too—Love in the Time of Cholera is right near the top of my all-time list. But there are other equally deserving classics in El Boom, the wave of magical realist writers, books that don’t seem to attract as large a following—novels such as Mario Vargas Llosa’s Conversation in the Cathedral and Manuel Puig’s Heartbreak Tango; or Julio Cortázar’s stellar collection of short stories, All Fires the Fire. I believe that their reputations will equal Márquez’s novel in the long run.

Haruki Murakami, also a big favorite of mine, has millions of readers worldwide. But other Japanese authors such as Kenzaburo Oe, who, unlike Murakami, has actually won the Nobel Prize for Literature; or the poet Yosano Akiko, author of 50,000 tanka poems, are relatively unknown outside their own countries.

Why do certain writers attract readers in other countries, and others do not? Some of it may have to do with having a connection to a particular country. Chester Himes, for instance, moved to France in the 1950s, and he had the advantage of being able to publicize his books on the ground in that country. Jack Kerouac’s ancestors came from Brittany (the name “Kerouac” is like “Smith” in the Celtic region of Northwestern France), but I don’t think that’s the key to his success in the land of Sartre and de Beauvoir. There is something about Kerouac’s spirit of adventure and vitality that says “American” with a capital “A” to people in other countries, similar to the way that cowboys and gangsters do.

Haruki Murakami is immersed in the popular culture of the U.S. and Western Europe, even naming one of his novels after a Beatles song, “Norwegian Wood.” That might explain part of why readers in the West find his work so accessible, even though his books are mostly set in Japan, and the world of his novels often shades into fantasy, which only a minority of English-language novels do. But why is Murakami one of the ten top-selling foreign authors in Mainland China? True, he’s a terrific writer, funny, thought-provoking, moving, willing to take on the status quo and business as usual. Well, O.K., I think I just explained his global popularity to my own satisfaction. 

Haruki Murakami

It does seem to me that certain writers just translate better into other cultures, maybe because they play off the stereotype that we have of those cultures in a complex way. Love in the Time of Cholera is about a passionate, Latin lover, but Márquez takes that stereotype and inflates it so much it explodes into thousands of fragments, into meandering sentences that each has a life of its own. Kerouac’s On the Road takes place in the wide-open spaces of North America where the cowboys toted six-shooters and the buffalo roamed, but his bebop descriptions of the West in the 1950s create a new American myth that seems more applicable to our time. Haruki Murakami's characters refuse the image of the Japanese “salaryman” and stay-at-home woman and become instead existential heroes who buck the system, almost in spite of themselves. It’s these new turns on the old national and regional clichés that make these books accessible but still eye-opening for cultures outside the ones that give rise to them.

Other recent posts about writing topics: 
How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka
How to Be an American Writer

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout, Part 6

One thing that’s vital in sustaining your career as a writer is to keep a balance between your engagement with the world, and your distance from it. Virginia Woolf famously argued that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction…” By that I think Woolf meant that a writer needs solitude and time to create, two things that are extremely difficult without money and space. 

                                           Virginia Woolf

Solitude and time are often hard to come by in a world filled with jobs, debts, searching for jobs, crowded housing, children, aging parents, problematic relationships, health challenges, and so many other important things to pay attention to. Giving yourself and getting the time to work on your writing is sometimes a matter of complex negotiation with your boss, or your loved ones, or yourself—sometimes the most difficult person to work out a deal with. We risk being accused of selfishness if we demand time for our writing, at the expense of any of our other commitments. There is no easy way to cross this narrow log over the rushing stream. You just have to keep your footing and look straight ahead at the opposite bank.

But distance from the world is not the only thing important to a writer. Immersion in the world is equally important for an author. The things that may be pulling you away from your writing today will be the material for your work in a few years, whether it’s the ones you love, or used to love, or would like to love if only they’d realize how much they need you. It could also be a political cause, your students, or the neighbor you shop for occasionally—all the ways you are knotted to the world are important, both on their own and for your soul as a writer. As Ezra Pound says in ABC of Reading, “More writers fail from lack of character than from lack of intelligence.” And he should know, right? Pound was notorious for being a great stylist with a feeble sense of humanity. Any engagement with the world that builds your character and your soul can ultimately be good for your writing, even if it takes away from your writing time in the short run. 

It is possible to go too far into the room of one’s own, to become so involved in one’s own thoughts and struggles that engagement from the world is weakened. Writers are seekers, aren’t we? Seekers of truth and beauty. But not all seekers are writers, not by a long shot. We’ve all known writers and/or seekers, talented and sensitive souls, whose knots to the world become unraveled because they have gone too deeply into their own thoughts, and their own internal worlds. It’s a real danger, particularly for writers who are among the most visionary and daring, since their minds crave that solitary and unique undersea world of the imagination. It’s best to dive into that world for limited times, to come up for air occasionally, and not resurface too quickly. There is such a thing as getting the bends from a literary standpoint, or having your lifeline cut, and humans can’t live long in the domain of chameleon squids and bioluminescent fish.

That balance between immersion in the world and distance looks different for each person. The Japanese poet Yosano Akiko raised eleven children and helped found a school for girls, but she was still able to write more than 20,000 tanka poems and eleven books of prose, not to mention translate the classic Tale of Genji into contemporary Japanese. For Yosano Akiko, deep immersion in the world was what she needed to harvest the material for her writing. 

                        Yosano Akiko (holding baby) and her family

The poet Frank O’Hara was known for writing his poems in crowded cafes, surrounded by chattering friends. 

                                             Frank O'Hara (left) and friends

For a writer such as the French novelist Marcel Proust, the opposite was true. Proust had only a passing involvement with other people, though he avidly attended Paris salons and entertained guests at the Ritz Hotel, where he lived. He seemed unconnected to people and superficial to many, even to the perceptive. This seemed to be so true of Proust that when he submitted the first volume of his novel, Swann’s Way, the great novelist André Gide rejected the book out of hand for the publisher la Nouvelle Revue Française. Gide just assumed that the Marcel Proust he knew socially could never write a serious book. 

                                         Marcel Proust

Ultimately, Proust lived primarily for his writing, even to the point of befriending people because he thought they would make good characters for his novel In Search of Lost Time, which he spent his whole life writing. The human being Proust may have been closest to was his housekeeper.

From what I’ve heard about him, the Alaskan writer John Haines was most at home as a writer when he lived in a cabin on a homestead far from any city or town. 

                                 John Haines outside his cabin in Alaska

On the other hand, Haines also found time to marry five different women, so he did achieve a counterpoint of his own sort between solitude and engagement.

The balance looks different for each writer, but you have to find that balance for yourself, the one that allows you to be at home both on land and in the kelp forests. Emulate the sea otter, which swims like a fish but breathes the sweet sea air.

Other recent posts about writing topics:

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka

Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer

Using Poetic Forms, Part 5: The Tanka

Many know about haiku, that ultra-short form of poetry from Japan that captures a flash of consciousness in only three lines. But a thousand years before haiku was created, Japanese poets developed and perfected the tanka form. Tanka is slightly longer—five lines—but it’s significantly different from haiku in the type of moment that sparks it.

Like haiku, which crystallizes one specific moment in time or consciousness, tanka is about a particular observation of the poet. But unlike haiku, tanka can reach both backwards and forwards in time to include a broader observation, or even a story. How can just five short lines of poetry tell a narrative? It’s not easy, but with the conciseness of tanka, a poet finds the fulcrum of a story, the moment of truth in that encounter.  Here’s one of my favorite tanka poems, by the great Japanese woman poet Yosano Akiko, who lived from 1878 to 1942, and wrote over 50,000 poems:

early evening moon
rising over a field of flowers
somehow I knew
he was waiting for me
and I went to him

(translated by Leith Morton and Zack Rogow)

Here the poet describes the moment when she made her choice to embark on a difficult relationship. The image of the evening moon suggests the expectant lover, wishing for her. The field of flowers makes me think of the fullness of her love.

I haven’t said anything yet about the rigorous form of the tanka. In Japanese, each of the five lines must have a specific number of syllables. The number of syllables per line is: 5-7-5-7-7. I haven’t mentioned this because this form works beautifully in Japanese, but when English-language translators or poets attempt to duplicate the form exactly, it often takes away from the freshness and the gentle punch of the tanka. Personally, I prefer poems that follow the spirit of the tanka and don’t count syllables like pennies. On the other hand, if you’re up to twelve syllables per line, you’re losing the concentrated flavor of the language in tanka.

Another fascinating side of the tanka is that the poet often sharply splits the five lines between two seemingly unrelated images. The writer does not directly link these two worlds, but leaves it entirely up to the reader to make the connection. Yosano Akiko does this in the poem just cited about the moon over the evening field and the lover’s impulse. Here’s another example, a thousand-year-old tanka by the 10^th century poet Fujiwara no Toshiyuki:

in the Bay of Sumi

waves crowd the shore

even at night

by the corridors of dreams

I come to you secretly

(adapted from the translation of Kenneth Rexroth)

The poet never says that the waves are like him, the lover. He never directly mentions that the shore is a metaphor for his beloved. It’s all just understood. That’s what I love about it! And the fact that the waves are not simply approaching the shore, they are crowding it. It is a little invasive to tell your beloved that you can visit her at night, even when she’s dreaming. The poem acknowledges that, in the midst of a wonderfully romantic moment. That’s an amazing amount of emotional complexity to pack into five lines.

Another classic tanka that I love is one by Ariwara no Narihira, who lived from 825 to 880 C.E.:

I always knew
that I would take this road
but yesterday
I didn’t know
it would be today

(adapted from the translation of Kenneth Rexroth)

There are so many amazing things about this poem—the ease and simplicity of the metaphor of the road, the way the poem can be applied to a myriad of situations, the way it doesn't hit you till the last line. Beautiful! 

If you’d like to read more tanka, here are some collections of the form:

Kenneth Rexroth, One Hundred Poems from the Japanese

Makoto Ueda, Modern Japanese Tanka

Yosano Akiko, Tangled Hair: Selected Poems from Midaregami

Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle

Zack's own tanka poems appear in his books Irreverent Litanies and My Mother and the Ceiling Dancers.

Other recent posts about writing topics: 
How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 


Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer