No matter how mundane some action might appear, keep at it long enough and it becomes a contemplative, even meditative act. As a writer, then, and as a runner, I don’t find that writing and publishing a book of my own personal thoughts about running makes me stray too far off my usual path. Perhaps I’m just too painstaking a type of person, but I can’t grasp much of anything without putting down my thoughts in writing, so I had to actually get my hands working and write these words. Otherwise, I’d never know what running means to me.

When I finished the novel I had a good feeling that I’d created my own writing style. My whole body thrilled at the thought of how wonderful—and how difficult—it is to be able to sit at my desk, not worrying about time, and concentrate on writing. There were untouched veins still dormant within me, I felt, and now I could actually picture myself making a living as a novelist. So in the end the fallback idea of opening a small bar again never materialized. Sometimes, though, even now, I think how nice it would be to run a little bar somewhere.

I went on writing the kind of things I wanted to write, exactly the way I wanted to write them, and if that allowed me to make a normal living, then I couldn’t ask for more. When Norwegian Wood sold way more than anticipated, the comfortable position I had was forced to change a bit, but this was quite a bit later.

As I suspect is true of many who write for a living, as I write I think about all sorts of things. I don’t necessarily write down what I’m thinking; it’s just that as I write I think about things. As I write, I arrange my thoughts. And rewriting and revising takes my thinking down even deeper paths. No matter how much I write, though, I never reach a conclusion. And no matter how much I rewrite, I never reach the destination. Even after decades of writing, the same still holds true. All I do is present a few hypotheses or paraphrase the issue. Or find an analogy between the structure of the problem and something else.

Each time I wrote more I’d ask myself, So— what’s on my mind right now?