I remember going to a local library with my childhood friend when I was around 10. I followed my friend down the aisles, along the bookshelves, as he exclaimed, “I’ve read this! I’ve read this! I’ve read this!” He seemed to have read most of the books in the library. Meanwhile, I could count on two hands the number of books I had read.
You’d think I’d have been embarrassed into picking up more books. I did the opposite. I stopped reading entirely.
It took me a long time—a decade—to start reading books again. But eventually I fell in love with reading. I just didn’t have the interest back then, and I am glad my parents were too busy to push me to read. A love of reading can’t be forced.
One of my favorite authors is Haruki Murakami. I had the naive impression that because he writes so well, he must have started at a young age. Stephen King started writing around six, Anne Lamott at seven or eight, and Terry Pratchett published his first short story in his school magazine at 13.
I was wrong. Murakami was 29 when he first started writing. He was running a jazz bar and had never written fiction. While watching the Yakult Swallows play against the Hiroshima Carp at Jingu Stadium, he suddenly had a thought: You know what? I could try writing a novel.
As he recalled that day in What I Talk About When I Talk About Running:
I never had any ambitions to be a novelist. I just had this strong desire to write a novel. No concrete image of what I wanted to write about, just the conviction that if I wrote it now I could come up with something that I’d find convincing. When I thought about sitting down at my desk at home and setting out to write I realized I didn’t even own a decent fountain pen. So I went to the Kinokuniya store in Shinjuku and bought a sheaf of manuscript paper and a five-dollar Sailor fountain pen.
I sometimes wonder how much better I’d be now if I had started writing earlier. Or whether I’d be able to play the piano now if my parents had sent me to piano classes as a kid. But I’ve realized it isn’t about how early my parents started me but how early I became interested myself.
Whenever I feel like I should send my children to some extracurricular activities so that they can become good at something, I remind myself of this.
P.S. Want to come back to this later? Keep it in your commonplace book.