While you’d really have to squint to find many similarities between the lifestyles of Haruki Murakami and Ernest Hemingway, the two writers did feel identical on one topic…

Stopping.

In Murakami’s delightful book on running and writing, he writes the following in regards to his own writing process…

“

Sometimes I run fast when I feel like it, but if I increase the pace I shorten the amount of time I run, the point being to let the exhilaration I feel at the end of each run carry over to the next day. This is the same sort of tack I find necessary when writing a novel. I stop every day right at the point where I feel I can write more. Do that, and the next day’s work goes surprisingly smoothly.

“

Hemingway wrote something similar in A Moveable Feast where he discusses in-depth his early struggles making it as a writer in Paris and his own writing process…

“

Each day I read the book through from the beginning to the point where I went on writing and each day I stopped when I was still going good and when I knew what would happen next.

”

While I think it’s in poor taste to disagree with legendary writers, I myself would argue that it’s worth getting it all out on the page each day because there are 4,000 lb cars with drivers that run red lights.

But, I digress.

By Cole Schafer.

P.S. For more on Murakami, read this piece.