Creative Writing: Language Analysis of What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

In this post, I will do a research on one of Haruki Murakami's books to learn more about his writing. Although Murakami is very much known for his fiction novels that breaks through philosophical and psychological conventions, I will be talking about his memoir, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. This is because I believe that his style of writing, and how he describes his life in this book fits with the approach of writing for my chapbook.

Source: Penguin Random House

To begin with, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running is his memoir, focusing on his interest and participation in long-distance running. He connects his love for running with his writing philosophy and routines, as well as the other aspects of his life. The book was published in 2007 in Japan, and gives the audience a perspective on Murakami as the man and about his work. That said, the book doesn't feel like an autobiography, instead it feels like an honest self-reflective diary, an approach that I'm trying to show in my own writing as well.

Here is an excerpt from What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, taken from the first page of the first chapter, "Who’s Going to Laugh at Mick Jagger?"

Firstly, Murakami gives a description for where he is, the time of day, and how he's feeling such as mentioning Kauai, the summer, clear and sunny, and the date. However, I find this interesting to read because he added more detail into his story through his experience by talking about how Hawaii's been called the island of eternal summer, how Hawaii is a paradise in comparison to Cambridge, as well as how happy he is to enjoy the activities there. He also uses a hyperbole and idiom to describe Cambridge in a more clearer way, such as "so muggy and hot with all its bricks and concrete it's like a form of torture," which I found very insightful and funny to read.

Here is another paragraph from the same chapter, a few further lines down below in the middle of the first and second page of the chapter.

In this paragraph, Murakami as usual describes the cooling rain that felt "good", the thick cloud from the ocean, the gentle rain, and other details of the natural. He goes to describe other people he sees, mainly joggers, their numbers, how the energetic runners are fast while the overweight ones were tired. He used hperbole and idioms such as merciless sun, scorching ground, slicing through the air, and describing the overweight runners as running like "this was the last thing in the world they wanted to be doing." He also uses complex words such as abstruse, ambivalent, and metaphoric to describe things in a more specific way.

Then, another paragraph, taken from chapter four about how running influenced his writing, "Most of What I Know About Writing Fiction I Learned by Running Every Day."

Here, Murakami uses different approaches to describe his muscles. At first, he writes using a form of personification by writing as if the muscle is alive and is doing something, "muscles automatically assume they don't have to work that hard anymore, and they lower their limits." Then, he uses simile by describing how muscles are like animals. Then, he goes to even more details on why it's important for a runner to control their muscles during training, and what they tactics he has to do to the muscles to keep it from burning out. 

So far from reading his writing, I've gained a better understanding to describe the place, mood, feeling, as well as other information regarding the subject that readers may find interesting. I also learned that the use of figurative languages can significantly help make story details clearer. Asides from this, I learned more about Murakami as a writer and writing as an artform by reading this book, especially about his opinion on important qualities for a novelist and how he writes his story.