“It would have been better if I’d taken the time.” I was dumbfounded when I heard a novelist friend say this. I still am, if I think about it, which I don’t. It’s none of my business. But if the writing can’t be made as good as it is within us to make it, then why do it? In the end, it’s all we have, the only thing we can take into the grave. I wanted to say to my friend, for heaven’s sake go do something else. There have to be easier and maybe more honest ways to try and earn a living. Or else just do it to the best of your abilities, your talents, and then don’t justify or make excuses. Don’t complain, don’t explain.
These are harsh words from the usually gentle and genial Carver, but I totally agree with what he is trying to say. I don’t know how things are at present, but back in the old days there were quite a few Japanese writers who went around bragging that they couldn’t complete a novel unless a deadline was hanging over their heads. This was considered cool in the literati tradition of that era, I guess, but there is a limit to how far that kind of helter-skelter, seat-of-the-pants approach to writing can carry you. You may be able to get away with it when you are young, even turn out some fine work, but it is my impression that a writer’s style becomes strangely impoverished if he carries on like that over the long haul.
In my opinion, using your willpower to control time is what makes it your ally. You mustn’t let it go on controlling you. That just makes you passive. “Time and tide wait for no man,” they say, so if time isn’t going to wait for you, you have no choice but to take it to heart and actively construct your schedule on that principle. In other words, assume command of the situation and stop being passive!
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I have no idea if my work is any good, or if it is, to what degree. As the author, it’s hardly my place to voice an opinion. Readers have to decide for themselves. As for the value of my books, well, all an author can do is wait quietly for the passing of time to make that clear. At this stage of the game, all I can say is that I gave of myself unsparingly—to quote Carver again, my works are “as good as it is within me to make them.” Since I put everything into their creation, I will never have to say, “It would have been better if I’d taken the time.” Whatever limitations they have are the result of my own deficiencies at the stage I wrote them, nothing more. That’s too bad, but nothing for me to be ashamed of. Deficiencies can be overcome if you work hard enough. A missed opportunity, however, can never be regained.
Over the years, I have taken pains to maintain and preserve the system that has made this approach to writing possible, making sure to keep it well oiled and free of dirt or rust. In my own small way, I feel proud to have sustained it to this point. In fact, I think I enjoy talking about my system much more than I do talking about the value and specific qualities of the various books I have written. I think this kind of talk has more practical value as well.
If readers experience even a little of the warmth from a hot-spring bath when reading my works, then I am truly happy. I myself seek such warmth in the books I read and the music I listen to.
Forget all the chatter—we should trust in our felt experience above all else. For the author, and for his readers, that alone is the ultimate standard.
A Completely Personal and Physical Occupation
Writing fiction is an entirely personal process that takes place in a closed room. Shut away in a study, you sit at a desk and （in most cases） create an imaginary story out of nothing and put it in the form of writing. The formless and subjective is transformed into something tangible and objective （or at least something that seeks to be objective）。 Defined simply, this is the day-to-day work we novelists perform.
I’m sure there are many people who will say, “But wait, I don’t have anything like a study.” The same was true for me when I started out writing—I had nothing resembling a study to work in. In my tiny apartment near the Hatonomori Hachiman Shrine in Sendagaya （in a building that’s since been torn down） I sat at the kitchen table late at night after my wife had gone to bed, scratching away with a pen on Japanese-style manuscript paper. That’s how I wrote my first two novels, Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973. “Kitchen-table” fiction is what I’ve dubbed these early works.
When I first started writing Norwegian Wood, I wrote at cafés in various places in Greece, on board ferry boats, in the waiting lobbies of airports, in shady spots in parks, and at desks in cheap hotels. Hauling around oversized, four-hundred-character-per-page Japanese manuscript paper was too much, so in Rome I bought a cheap notebook （the kind we used to call college-ruled notebooks） and wrote the novel down in tiny writing with a disposable Bic pen. I still had to contend with noisy cafés, wobbly tables that made writing difficult, coffee spilling on the pages, and at night in my hotel room when I’d go over what I’d written, sometimes there would be couples getting all hot and heavy beyond the paper-thin walls separating my room from the room next door. Things weren’t easy, in other words. I can smile at these memories now, but at the time it was all pretty discouraging. I had trouble finding a decent place to live, and moved all over Europe, all the while continuing to work on my novel. And I still have that thick old notebook, with its coffee stains （or whatever they are; I’m not really sure about some of them）。