Writing Forward When the Page Still Trembles
Created at: August 29, 2025
Write the next line of your life even if the page trembles. — Haruki Murakami
Authorship Amid Uncertainty
Murakami’s exhortation invites us to claim authorship even as our hands shake. Life rarely offers a steady desk; the desk is a raft, the ink is rain, and yet the task remains to lay down the next line. This framing turns agency into a verb rather than a possession: you do not own courage, you practice it sentence by sentence. As soon as we accept that uncertainty is baked into the act, the trembling becomes less a verdict and more a setting. From that recognition, a path opens to how we might work with the tremor rather than wait for it to disappear.
The Tremor as Honest Companion
Fear often registers first in the body: a quickened pulse, a tightness across the chest, the faint hum of doubt. Instead of treating these signals as stop signs, we can read them as honest companions pointing to something that matters. In this light, writing the next line is not denial; it is coexisting with the tremor and moving anyway. Moreover, naming the sensation helps—saying this is fear, not fate—so that emotion becomes information, not instruction. With the body acknowledged rather than silenced, the mind can choose a single deliberate stroke, and then another.
Murakami’s Quiet Marathon of Persistence
Consider Murakami’s own origin story: at Jingu Stadium in 1978, watching the Yakult Swallows, he felt he could write a novel. He went home after shifts at his jazz club and wrote at the kitchen table, producing Hear the Wind Sing. Later, he cultivated endurance through long-distance running, described in his memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running (2007), and reflected on craft in Novelist as a Vocation (2015; 2022 translation). The through-line is steady practice amid noise. Like a runner measuring breath across miles, he advances by rhythm, not by spectacle. Thus the trembling page becomes a training ground for stamina, where consistency outlasts uncertainty.
Tiny Lines, Not Grand Gestures
Grand reinventions make headlines, but small lines finish chapters. Borrowing from kaizen, the art of continual, incremental improvement, we can aim for a five-minute draft, a single phone call, one honest sentence. Behavioral activation in psychology similarly suggests action precedes motivation: start small to grow momentum. The key is to shrink the next step until it feels almost effortless, then honor it as progress. Once the pen touches paper, inertia flips sides; each completed line makes the next more likely. In this way, modest beginnings accumulate into surprising change.
Editing the Past Without Erasing It
Writing forward does not require negating what came before. Narrative therapy (White and Epston, 1990) invites us to re-author our stories by choosing which threads to emphasize. Likewise, James Pennebaker’s research on expressive writing suggests that shaping difficult experiences into coherent narratives can reduce distress and improve health (Pennebaker, 1997). The past remains, but its grammar changes: pain shifts from subject to context, from dictator to detail. By revising meaning rather than facts, we create room for a new chapter to begin—continuity intact, trajectory altered.
When Pages Rip: Beginning Again
Sometimes the page does not just tremble; it tears. Failure, loss, or rupture can feel like the end of the book. Yet Japanese aesthetics offer another angle: kintsugi repairs a broken bowl with lacquer and gold, making the fracture the feature. In that spirit, starting again does not hide the seam; it highlights the learning. The new line acknowledges the rip and writes beside it, not over it. Through this gentle audacity, breakage becomes a source of texture, and resilience gains a visible shine.
Leaving Margin for Mystery
Finally, not every question begs an answer before we proceed. Murakami’s novels often move through dreamlike corridors where meaning arrives obliquely—think Kafka on the Shore (2002) or The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1994–95). Likewise, your next line need not resolve the whole plot; it need only advance it. By leaving a margin for mystery, we make space for serendipity to collaborate with intention. The page may still tremble, but the story moves, and with it, so do we.