Keeping it brief – Pietro Polsinelli’s blog

Haruki Murakami in What I Talk About When I Talk About Running:

“…Writing novels, to me, is basically a kind of manual labor. Writing itself is mental labor, but finishing an entire book is closer to manual labor. It doesn’t involve heavy lifting, running fast or leaping high. Most people, though, only see the surface reality of writing and think of writers as involved in quiet, intellectual work done in their study…But once you try your hand at it, you soon find that it isn’t as peaceful a job as it seems. The whole process – sitting at your desk, focusing your mind like a laser beam, imagining something out of a blank horizon, creating a story, selecting the right words, one by one, keeping the whole flow of the story on track – requires far more energy, over a long period, than most people ever imagine. You might not move your body around, but there’s grueling, dynamic labor going on inside you.”