What I write about when I don’t know what to write about

Day 187 / 366

Murakami is one of my favorite authors. My respect and admiration for him grew even more when I read his book “What I talk about when I talk about running”, in which he talked about his writing process.

Murakami did not have a background in literature. When he was 30, he was running a Jazz bar. Then one day out out of nowhere, he got the idea that he should write a novel. And so the same day, he started writing. He had a really disciplined practice. Each night after he closed his bar, he would come back home and write for a couple of hours before sleeping. He had a finished draft in less than a year, which he entered into a competition and won.

This is what I think about everyday when I sit down to write this blog and my brain just goes blank. Some days, the words just come to me from thin air and I am done writing in 5 minutes, but those days are few and far between. Most days it’s a struggle. When I just stare at the empty medium page, and watch the clock tick close to 12 AM.

And every day like that I remind myself of Murakami, the Jazz bar owner who had a dream to write a novel and sat at his kitchen counter every night fulfilling that dream page by page. And I force myself to write something, anything.

Page by page, word by word. I know I’ll get there as well.