Akira Kurosawa and single sitting disease

Advice to novelists and screenwriters

I have a problem as a writer. I either hit out a few thousand words seat of the pants and hit publish, or I spread it over a few days and I never do. It’s either all at once or never. This means that the most I can write in a single piece is about 10,000-15,000 words because that’s where my stamina for the day maxes out.

Anything I write has to be in a single sitting, or it’s abandoned. I call this “single sitting disease.”

This is stupid. Not just because works like novels and screenplays are hundreds of pages long and take time, but because writing has more than one function – one is to capture your state of mind at a really charged moment, but another function is to photograph your mind over many distinct moments and integrate all of them into one coherent story. One day you’re happy, one day you’re sad, one day you’re playful, one day you’re mad. One day you’re pensive, one day you’re reckless, and all of those parts of you are equally true. It’s only when you work on a piece over a long period of time that the page on your desk can show your changing moods like the colors of the sea. That’s if you care about writing being a true representation of all your facets. If it’s just about performance, about lights and colors and smoke and putting on a show, it’s possible to get that down in one sitting, but that’s not what I’m going for.

This piece of writing advice from Akira Kurosawa made things a little easier for me:

The tedious task of writing has to become second nature to you. If you sit down and write quietly the whole day, you'll have written at least two to three pages, even if it's a struggle. And if you keep at it, you'll eventually have a couple hundred pages. I think young people today don't know the trick of it. They start and want to get to the end right away. When you go mountain climbing, the first thing you're told is not to look at the peak but to keep your eyes on the ground as you climb. You just keep climbing patiently one step at a time. If you keep looking at the top, you'll get frustrated.

When Naruse and I were staying at an inn to write, I used to visit him in his room. He'd have writing paper and a pencil on the table. As we talked, he'd write something down every now and then. That writing would turn into one of his wonderful scripts. This is a funny story, but I asked to see what he was writing, and he just chuckled. He'd written that such and such characters were in a room doing something. Just "something!" Nothing specific? For Naruse, that description was enough, because he'd be directing.

I tell my ADs that if they give up once, then that'll be it, because that becomes habit, and they'll give up as soon as it gets hard. I tell to write all the way to the end, no matter what, until they get to some sort of end. I say "Don't ever quit, even if it gets hard midway."

Kurosawa isn’t saying anything extraordinary – the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, keep your eyes on the road not on the summit, all of these are common platitudes. But his attitude is very clear. The two to three pages you write every day are important – even what you write isn’t important, it could literally be garbage like “so and so did so and so thing” – but the act of writing accumulates a traction of its own that should sweep you along, not the other way around.

But I still struggle with “single sitting disease.” I wonder why.

One reason could be that I enjoy the act of writing more than the product of the writing. Writing feels cathartic to me, like playing music or cracking a joke. Because I’ve gotten so used to the high I get from unloading thoughts onto the page, patiently sitting around when I have nothing to say and taking my time, sustaining a single thread of emotion over days or weeks feels underwhelming. Editing feels boring. But that discomfort could be what I need to face to grow as a writer. Otherwise, I’m like a chess player who learns one strategy and tries to maneuver every game towards that.

But another reason could be that I have limited bandwidth for intense relationships, and writing is an intense relationship with myself. Writing a draft in one shot is like having a casual meet-up or a fling. Writing a draft over months is like a long-term relationship. You start enamored with an idea that shines a light on some part of yourself that you love, but as time goes along, the messy parts start showing up. You struggle to find words to encase transient emotions without misrepresenting them. You confront the horror that your dreams fall short of your reality. Familiarity breeds contempt as you run into the same problems, problems that you thought you could control but have to just surrender to and accept in some form.

Yes, long-term relationships are messy but they’re also meaningful in a way that casual ones can never be. Richness in life comes from a larger context window. And the key isn’t to find the perfect dream and make it come true or change some broken aspect of yourself that lets you go from being a flash fiction writer to a novelist overnight – it might just be about the awareness that this is where you are, this is where you need to go, and treat yourself with compassion so you don’t beat yourself up along the way.

The process of becoming a writer happens three pages at a time, like the process of writing.

Source for Kurosawa’s advice: This video (I have transcribed it word by word below because I got tired of searching for it and listening to Kurosawa talk through it slowly for six minutes in Japanese while I scanned the subtitles. So there, future me, say thank you)

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Complete transcript:

Nagisa Oshima: I'd like you to send out a message to Japan's younger generation of directors and aspiring directors who are really quite numerous, to wrap up this interview, if there's any advice you can give them.

Akira Kurosawa: The thing I stress the most to the aspiring directors who often come knocking at my door is this. It costs a great deal of money to make a film these days, and it's hard to become a director. You must learn and experience various things to become a director, and it's not so easily accomplished. But if you genuinely want to make films, then write screenplays.

All you need to write a script is paper and pencil.

It's only through writing scripts that you learn specifics about the structure of film and what cinema is. That's what I tell them, but they still won't write. They find writing too hard. And it is. Writing scripts is a hard job. Still... Balzac said that for writers, including novelists, the most essential and necessary thing is the forbearance to face the dull task of writing one word at a time. That is the first requirement for any writer. When you consider Balzac's body of work with that in mind, it's just staggering, because he produced a volume of written work that we couldn't finish reading in our lifetimes.

Do you know how we wrote? It's very interesting. He'd scribble along and then he'd send it off to the printer right away. One page would be printed on a sheet of paper this big. When he got the printed pages back, he would make revisions in the margin until very little of the original writing remained. Then he'd send those revisions to the printer. That's a good way to work, though it may be hard on the printer. He was able to produce so much because of that method. That may have been one ingredient, but the most essential thing was to have the patience to write one word at a time until you reached the required length. Too many people lack that patience.

Once you get used to it, you'll be able to write with no trouble. You only need paper and pencil to write a screenplay. When Naruse and I were staying at an inn to write, I used to visit him in his room. He'd have writing paper and a pencil on the table. As we talked, he'd write something down every now and then. That writing would turn into one of his wonderful scripts. This is a funny story, but I asked to see what he was writing, and he just chuckled. He'd written that such and such characters were in a room doing something. Just "something!" Nothing specific? For Naruse, that description was enough, because he'd be directing. He didn't need to be specific. But that "something" was funny.

But the tedious task of writing has to become second nature to you. If you sit down and write quietly the whole day, you'll have written at least two to three pages, even if it's a struggle. And if you keep at it, you'll eventually have a couple hundred pages. I think young people today don't know the trick of it. They start and want to get to the end right away. When you go mountain climbing, the first thing you're told is not to look at the peak but to keep your eyes on the ground as you climb. You just keep climbing patiently one step at a time. If you keep looking at the top, you'll get frustrated. I think writing is similar. You need to get used to the task of writing. You must make an effort to learn to regard it not as something painful but as routine. But most people tend to give up halfway.

I tell my ADs that if they give up once, then that'll be it, because that becomes habit, and they'll give up as soon as it gets hard. I tell to write all the way to the end, no matter what, until they get to some sort of end. I say "Don't ever quit, even if it gets hard midway." But when the going gets tough, they just give up.

Also young people today don't read books. I don't think any of them are widely read in Russian literature. It's important that they do at least a certain amount of reading. Unless you have a rich reserve within, you can't create anything. That's why I often say that creating comes from memory. Memory is the source for your creation. You can't create something out of nothing.¹ Whether it's from reading or from your own real-life experience, you can't create unless you have something inside yourself. In that sense, it's important to always read a variety of things. Current novels are fine, but I think people should read the classics too.

1. In Novelist as a vocation, Haruki Murakami also says the exact same thing, quoting James Joyce.