Stephen King doesn’t leave his desk until he’s hit his daily quota. World-renowned choreographer Twyla Tharpe collects ideas for a time before she sits down to plan her next project. Louisa May Alcott disappeared in her loft or writing room for several weeks, emerging with a hand-written draft of her latest novel. So, when I attended an in-person talk with Japanese bestselling author Toshikazu Kawaguchi, I was expecting to hear about a similar creative routine that helped create this bestselling novel.

I was instead surprised and inspired by his story.

What Is Before the Coffee Gets Cold About?

The novel has sold upwards of 6 million copies and been translated into over 40 languages by now.

I don’t think I can even list 40 languages.

Before the Coffee Gets Cold focuses on a small, basement café with an older ambience. Rumour has it that you can travel back in time there. However, line-ups to this café don’t look like Disney World during March Break because of several inconvenient rules. This means not too many make the attempt.

The novel is a collection of four intertwined short stories that pulled at my heart strings. If you like stories that take a light hand to the harder aspects of life, this is such a novel.

Although it can be considered a breakout novel, the creative journey Toshikazu Kawaguchi has been on to get to this point should inspire anyone to pick up the pen wherever they are in life.

This information is taken from his talk at the Japan Foundation in Toronto in September 2024. Any quotes are from the extremely talented interpreter’s translation into English. Toshikazu doesn’t speak English.

Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s Early Years

After three unsuccessful years of attempting to break into the manga scene, Toshikaze Kawaguchi needed a different opportunity. Thankfully, a friend pitched joining his theatre group.

Cue soul-searching scene in a movie, right?

Not for Toshikazu. In a manner that resembles Brittlestar, my favourite Canadian comedian, he told the audience that he shrugged at this friend and said, “Yeah, sure, okay.”

The group’s name is Sonic Snail, and he has since produced, written, and directed for them. After a showing of his play, Before the Coffee Gets Cold, an editor in the audience approached him and asked if he’d be willing to turn what had been created for a small room of maybe 100 people into a novel.

As with the new role in the theatre group, Toshikazu also accepted this new challenge.

His time in theatre set the stage (pun fully intended) for his trajectory into writing novels.

Writing for Stage and Readers

The starkest difference between writing for stage and readers, Toshikazu said, was the collaborative experience of working with actors as he created his plays and the solitary world of the novelist as he wrote.

When he created a piece of theatre with actors, he could ask them for ideas when he couldn’t solve a problem. Or he might get inspired by an emotional reaction an actor had that Toshikazu hadn’t thought of.

However, with writing a novel, his only source for input was his editor, and this changed his creative process to a more solitary one, which he wasn’t used to.

Writing 21^st-Century Style

Too many movies show a writer at a typewriter or at a desk with pen/quill and paper. Although this will have something to do with the time of the movie—you very well can’t have Louisa May Alcott writing at a computer—I believe it also has to do with simply showing the audience what’s happening.

Showing someone sitting at a screen is rarely exciting. Even Colin Firth in Love, Actually writes his novel on a typewriter. (After all, how else could you have all those pages flying away so the woman cleaning for him can strip and jump into freezing cold water?)

For a real-world example, here’s my writing setup, all on my desktop:

1. Scapple for brainstorming
2. Plottr for outlining and more brainstorming
3. Scrapbooks for more brainstorming
4. Scrivener for writing
5. ProWritingAid for deep editing
6. Word for sending it to human editors
7. PerfectIt for proofreading

I also use analog tools: pen and paper, and my 1930s Remington Noiseless (not so noiseless) typewriter, but only for brainstorming. And of course, humans are involved in the full process.

Toshikazu? He wrote Before the Coffee Gets Cold using the Notes app on his iPhone. Given how complex my writing process has become, I almost fell of my chair when I heard that.

But the convenience of having his novel on him in a free app outweighed any desire to develop a more complex process. For him, having his novel on hand when he had an idea during a walk in the park was more important. Many writing apps offer the same convenience, of course, but he knew how to use Note, so the stuck with it.

Writing Advice from Toshikazu Kawaguchi

Toshikazu discussed one of his favourite influences, how he approached writing his novel, and how he edits. I love nothing more than learning how others approach writing.

Read Keeichiro Hirano

Toshikazu said that a current influence of his is Japanese writer Keeichiro Hirano, author of A Man. He was “totally bowled over” and finished the novel “maybe even a little depressed,” because he couldn’t believe that someone had the ability to write like that.

I’ve begun reading A Man and can’t wait to see what Toshikazu was talking about.

Keep Your Story Focused

Theatre has taught Toshikazu that the audience can only focus on one thing at a time. Taking that idea to heart in his own theatre work, he eliminates all excess from his plays. To him, that logic also applies to books: a reader can only read one book in any given minute. So, when he’s drafting a scene in a novel, he looks at things one at a time.

When my editor works on my manuscripts, she often helps me cut considerable amounts of story because I lose focus of the plot. Visualizing myself creating my story while staring through a pin hole will hopefully help me achieve a more focused story before Susan sees it so she can make it even better.

Don’t Edit Until You’ve Finished

Toshikazu Kawaguchi also strongly emphasized finishing your first draft before you consider editing. He said nothing is more important than seeing your novel through to the end.

This is one area I disagree with him on. I find it easier to write about 25%, edit the draft once for plot and consistency, and then write and edit the next 25%. Then I’ll do a deep review of that first half of the novel before writing the next 25%.

Reviewing at set points before I continue helps me ensure continuity and reduces deeper editing after the first draft is done. Nothing like believing your romance couple met on a Wednesday at work in the beginning of your novel and unknowingly changing it to a Friday at a theme park.

Your Life Is Not Boring

I found this portion of the talk especially inspiring. Toshikazu explained that a lot has happened in his life, so his life provides the inspiration for his books.

I remember reading once that if publishers feel your first novel is too autobiographical, they may not take it. After all, the thinking apparently goes, what do you have left to write from for the next book?

Now that I’ve been writing and independently publishing my books since 2017, I see both sides but lean toward Toshikazu’s observation. In my case, I often focus on replicating emotional experiences instead of actual events, although I situate my novels in real places.

Japanese writer Haruki Murakami wrote in his memoir that he, too, believes writing is easier if you pull from your own experiences:

“Writers who do not rely on weighty material but instead reach inside themselves to spin their tale, by contrast, have an easier time of it. That’s because they can draw on their daily lives the events routinely taking place around them, the scenes they witness, the people they encounter–and then freely apply their imaginations to that material to construct their own fiction. In short, they use a form of renewable energy.” Haruki Murakami, Novelist as a Vocation, p. 85

So, if you think your life is too boring, think again.

Toshikazu Kawaguchi’s Goal as a Writer

What Toshikazu is ultimately trying to achieve, he said, is to tell tales that people will connect to 30 years from now. That’s why he focuses on emotions and the human experience: kindness, regret, hope, and more.

That’s the kind of writer I love to read.