{"id":26892,"date":"2014-10-06T06:30:13","date_gmt":"2014-10-05T17:30:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/?p=26892"},"modified":"2014-10-05T17:05:35","modified_gmt":"2014-10-05T04:05:35","slug":"a-writing-quote-for-sunday-from-haruki-murakami","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/2014\/10\/06\/a-writing-quote-for-sunday-from-haruki-murakami\/","title":{"rendered":"Making Space For Readers & The Alchemy Of Possibility: Haruki Murakami Meets AS Byatt"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Possession\"<\/a>I love those moments when two great writing quotes—from different authors—interact, sometimes with a little extra energy thrown in via a reader’s commentary.<\/p>\n

As some of you may know, one of my very favourite quotes is drawn from AS Byatt’s<\/a> Booker Award-winning novel, Possession<\/em><\/strong>:<\/p>\n

‘Think of this \u2013 that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.’<\/em><\/h3>\n

\"Colorless-Tsukuru-Tazaki-and\"<\/a>Recently, I featured a fabulous Guardian interview<\/a> with Haruki Murakami, in which he said (amongst many other wonderful observations) that:<\/p>\n

‘Novels in\u00a0general, he thinks, benefit from a\u00a0certain mystery. “If the very important secret is not solved, then readers will be frustrated. That is not what I want. But if a\u00a0certain kind of secret stays secret, it’s\u00a0a very sound curiosity. I think readers need it.” ‘
\n<\/em><\/h3>\n

My thanks to Ashley Capes<\/a> for highlighting this particular quote in the comments and noting that it fitted Murakami’s writing so well, to which I replied:<\/p>\n

“…And is also, I feel, true of all great art, [which] always retains an element of possibility rather than everything being cut and dried.”<\/em><\/p>\n

Ashley responded:<\/p>\n

“Yeah \u2013 room for the reader, huh? That\u2019s part of what makes a work so memorable, when you can walk away still thinking about it, about what was not resolved perhaps.”<\/em><\/p>\n

Room for the reader indeed—which I feel is exactly what the AS Byatt quote is driving at: that the best\u00a0 storytelling leaves room for the reader to being her or himself to the creative process—and that the intersection of storytelling with reading is essentially a private conversation between the author and the reader. That’s right, not just “readers” as an amorphous group, but every reader individually.<\/p>\n

In that process, the potential for what I call the alchemy of possibility is enhanced if the author leaves Murakami’s “certain mystery” in the story, enabling the reader to satisfy his or her “sound curiosity” through further speculation: Ashley’s “you can walk away still thinking about it<\/em>“—and not just that, but postulate one’s own “what if’s” and “maybe’s” in response. (The engine room of fan fiction, perhaps?)<\/p>\n

I personally feel that is why reading and writing is one of the secret magical bastions of living is this world—secret to all those who are not already readers, that is. \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I love those moments when two great writing quotes—from different authors—interact, sometimes with a little extra energy thrown in via a reader’s commentary. As some of you may know, one of my very favourite quotes is drawn from AS Byatt’s Booker Award-winning novel, Possession: ‘Think of this \u2013 that the writer wrote alone, and the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[50,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26892","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-about-writing","category-other-writers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26892","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26892"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26892\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26914,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26892\/revisions\/26914"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26892"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26892"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26892"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}