Made to Fail

I was fortunate enough to get tickets to a talk given in Cambridge tonight by Haruki Murakami. The subject was "Frogs, Earthquakes and the Joys of Short Fiction." I don't know exactly what I was expecting but I was delighted to find Murakami both very funny and very inspirational. (And I was relieved that the advice wasn't limited to: "First train your body. Then, your writing style will follow.") I doubt I can do justice to my epiphanous moment but I'll try. Murakami said that the difference between a novel and a short story is that the story is an experiment. This is an exaggeration, he said, short stories are made to fail. Murakami explained that like Raymond Carver, who would finish the first draft in the evening of whatever story he began that morning, he liked to write his first drafts quickly and rewrite, rewrite, rewrite. And something clicked for me. My favorite films and books are those that are trying so hard that in many ways they end up failing (Orson Welles' The Trial being a perfect example) but I don't really think I push myself that hard in my first drafts. Half the time I don't even finish them. I'm a little self-conscious applying Murakami's talk to my own meager attempts. Inspired today, napping tomorrow is an accidental motto of mine. But I feel that Murakami might have had his own Oblomovism to get over, based solely on the number of slacker twenty-somethings in his novels.