On Writing
Prologue
I have been writing essays for over three years, yet I never once considered systematically improving my writing ability. I am a firm believer in learning by practicing and learning by teaching, and I have benefited a great deal from both approaches — take writing, for instance: writing week after week has brought me to the point where, the moment I open atom, thought flows naturally to my fingertips and I can smoothly express whatever it is I want to say.
Yet even the best method eventually hits a bottleneck. When old Mr. Liu Chuanzhi talks about management, he often says: spread a layer of soil, tamp it down; then spread another layer. For the past three years I have diligently kept spreading soil, but I have rarely done any tamping — once writing became a habit, I lacked the necessary reflection, and the necessary theoretical grounding. I was like an electron coasting along on inertia, urgently in need of absorbing the energy required to make a state transition.
The first dose of that energy came from a course I recently took at Stanford: developing a sustainable and rewarding writing practice (WSP 27).
Writing Is a Creative Process
Writing, like most artistic endeavors, is creative work. For the sake of creativity, we need a quiet and free environment in which we can focus and listen to our own voice and our own stories. It is as if we shut the world outside the door and step into a painting ourselves, searching for the answer to some riddle.
Creative work tends to have nothing to do with efficiency. Grasp a single thread of thought and follow it as you explore, letting that one thread spawn many others, letting a single sapling “split” into an entire forest. True, in the end we still have to walk out of that forest, but the divergent process keeps our field of vision wide open.
The instructor said: writing is the edge of our knowing (my learning is too shallow to know how to render this in Chinese), and I could not agree more. Writing is like mining — digging out the questions or answers buried deep in our hearts and shaping them into essays.
