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 this video, 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 here, 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 in this final video, 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.