Jason Okundaye On Riding Through The (Writer’s) Block

In his 2007 memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, the novelist Haruki Murakami analogises the process of writing to that of eating a fugu fish, saying “the tastiest part is the portion near the poison.” Similarly, Murakami believes that while surfacing our creative instincts within the process of writing, what also rises within us is “a kind of toxin that lies deep down in all humanity.”

While this toxin is dangerous, it is essential to literary craft, as without it “no creative activity in the real sense can take place”, and so the task of professional writers is to develop “an autoimmune system of our own that can resist the dangerous toxin that resides within.” This is how Murakami developed a relational thesis between writing and running; he began jogging and marathons in 1982 and feels that the energy we need to expend, in order to create this immune system so that we are undestroyed by poison, is best found within our own physical flesh. It’s a palliative technology rather than prophylactic – indeed there is no antidote for the tetrodotoxin toxicity found within fugu fish and that toxin beneath the skin of humanity is something writers must come face to face with each time they pick up the pen.

This analogy is quite dramatic, and Murakami asks that we excuse him, but what he says about the relation between writing and the body speaks to me. I don’t know what exactly he means by “toxin”, but for me it’s this fluttering, nauseous, caustic feeling that sits within me sometimes when I attempt to write. It makes me restless. It makes me feel like retiring to bed. And it also makes me want to put my headphones on and dance or go for a long walk and break into a run where I just don’t stop running. This might be better explained by an attention deficit diagnosis from five years ago, but Murakami is perhaps right to say that writing is “unhealthy” and “antisocial” work. While I am not (or at least not yet) a novelist, I am soon to be an author, part way through writing a non-fiction narrative book which requires some of the same literary and artful instincts of fiction.

The acknowledgements pages of books, as mine will be, are full of thanks to others and platitudes about how books require effort from everyone in your life, but the truth is that book writing, all writing, is necessarily solitary work. Even where you’re interviewing and engaging with others for research, the major activity, the writing, can only be done alone and it can make you feel sick. The “toxin” it surfaces can be paralysing and mean that, at times, you sit at your desk for hours and hours with nothing coming out on to the page because these feelings, these chemicals, are rushing around your body and making you feel woozy. It’s also the quietest kind of chaos – at once you’re thinking about everything and nothing. There are figures and thoughts, but they are all clouded by thick brain fog, and having a cloud expand within your mind every time you try to write something is frustrating and upsetting. There’s no medicine I take which helps me to complete the task so, like Murakami, I look for answers by taking flight.

What writers say about the comparison of their profession to running feels revelatory. The novelist Joyce Carol Oates says, in the New York Times, of her lifelong pursuit of running: “In running, the mind flies with the body; the mysterious efflorescence of language seems to pulse in the brain in rhythm with our feet and the swinging of our arms. Ideally, the runner who’s a writer is running through the land and cityscapes of her fiction, like a ghost in a real setting.” I can’t tell you what running does for me, because I don’t run, but I do cycle. Though I feel like a fraud in saying that because I don’t, yet, have a bike and I rely on public bikes, mostly those Santander cycles dotted around inner and central London. I only started cycling properly as a new year’s resolution, too, after I embarrassed myself on a date with my now-boyfriend last November. He had suggested that, after drinks in Clapham, we could take off on those public ‘Jump’ e-bikes and ride from the Common through to Battersea Park. I’d told him I’d not cycled since I was a child, certainly never on London’s scary roads, and so, not taking his threats of a cycling date seriously, I had turned up wearing Homme Plissé Issey Miyake pleat trousers. If you’ve ever owned a pair or brushed past them at a department store, you’ll know how delicate and intricate they are. The unique craftmanship of Miyake pleats requires 3D-computing technology, and so without proper care those pleats can become undone and can’t simply be woven into the garment again.

Anyway, wearing these pleats, I crashed at least three times: on to the pavement, into the bollard posts (ironically there to protect cyclists by separating them from motorists) and into him. As we cycled down roads, he looked back at me often with an expression which told me I’d never see him again – though I was wrong, and he reassured me later it wasn’t so much that, but genuine fear that my next crash could cause serious injury. Even while I was terrified, whizzing past cement trucks and feeling that I might find myself wrapped around a motorbike with the next wrong turn, I felt a strange sense of peace and clarity when I returned home from the date, and after a week of writer’s block I penned at least 3,000 words of my book in the middle of the night. It seemed that cycling could be more than a clamour of car horns, traffic lights and road rage – it was an opportunity to really focus my mind and body on a singular activity and slowly absorb the brain cloud which had been obfuscating the narrative threads, details and complexities that were presenting in my work.