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 from mak­ing progress on his first nov­el by writ­ing its open­ing chap­ter in Eng­lish, then trans­lat­ing it back into his native Japan­ese.

He also adheres to an edit­ing process con­sist­ing of four spaced-out phas­es, each one focused on a dif­fer­ent ele­ment of the man­u­script. Things work a bit dif­fer­ent­ly for Stephen King, who’s less than two years old­er than Muraka­mi, but has pub­lished 67 nov­els, twelve sto­ry col­lec­tions, and five books of non­fic­tion, among many oth­er projects. Yet, as under­scored in Mari­Writ­ing’s video just above, King, no less than Muraka­mi, writes in a whol­ly rou­tinized way that con­sti­tutes “self-hyp­no­sis.”

Vir­ginia Woolf prob­a­bly got her­self into a sim­i­lar state now and again, but giv­en that she worked on a week­ly dead­line as a book crit­ic for some three decades, she no doubt had many occa­sions when she just had to put pen to paper no mat­ter what the state of her mind. And put pen to paper she lit­er­al­ly did: as Mari­Writ­ing explains, Woolf wrote first in long­hand (some­times in ink of her favorite col­or, pur­ple), then retyped the morn­ing’s work after lunch. In addi­tion to her fic­tion and lit­er­ary jour­nal­ism, she also made a post-tea dai­ly habit of writ­ing more freely in her diary, which let her work out her think­ing about her “real” projects. We might com­pare the impor­tance of Woolf’s diary to that of David Sedaris’ diary, the foun­da­tion of every­thing he’s pub­lished. But whether man or woman, East­ern­er or West­ern­er, nov­el­ist or oth­er­wise, we writ­ers can all take from Woolf’s exam­ple the neces­si­ty of a ded­i­cat­ed space: a room, that is, of one’s own.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Dai­ly Rou­tines of Famous Cre­ative Peo­ple, Pre­sent­ed in an Inter­ac­tive Info­graph­ic

Haru­ki Murakami’s Dai­ly Rou­tine: Up at 4:00 a.m., 5–6 Hours of Writ­ing, Then a 10K Run

Stephen King’s 20 Rules for Writ­ers

David Sedaris Breaks Down His Writ­ing Process: Keep a Diary, Car­ry a Note­book, Read Out Loud, Aban­don Hope

Write Only 500 Words Per Day and Pub­lish 50+ Books: Gra­ham Greene’s Writ­ing Method

The Dai­ly Habits of Famous Writ­ers: Franz Kaf­ka, Haru­ki Muraka­mi, Stephen King & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.