Writers and Writing as a Profession

While driving today, I kept thinking about a question. I have never quite understood why “writer” has become a profession. I think that a writer in the real sense should first be a thinker, and should then write down his or her thoughts as a natural consequence. What matters is the thought, not the act of writing itself. So I have always found it slightly strange that writing should be the primary description of a profession. By writer here, I do not mean a literary writer in the narrow, conventionalised sense. I call it conventionalised for the moment. Many literary works, for example, deliberately arrange conflicts, coincidences, climaxes, and reversals in order to produce dramatic effect. Of course, such things have their underlying logic in life, but their concrete form is often amplified, dramatised, and artistically shaped. To fit a certain literary form, a work contains many deliberately constructed elements, much as regulated verse must observe tonal patterns and rhyme. It necessarily involves a great deal of human shaping.

That is not the kind of writer I am discussing. I mean a creator in a more essential sense. I think a person should first have thoughts, experiences, personal observations, and understanding, and only then express them. The form of expression may be poetry, prose, fiction, reportage, a factual record, or a record given an appropriate degree of literary shaping. Different subjects and forms are, in essence, simply different ways of expressing something. What really matters is whether one has one’s own thoughts and insights, and then gives them literary or artistic expression. Therefore, in my view, literature itself should not be a profession. From this, a second question follows naturally.

The emergence of thought is not like the production of an industrial product. When I write software, for instance, I can generally estimate the workload. By following a certain method and process, I can most likely complete a software system. Thought is not like that at all. Sometimes a person may go for decades without producing a genuinely important thought. At other times, someone may enter a period in which new ideas suddenly arrive in an unstoppable stream. Thought is more often the result of long accumulation, followed by a sudden eruption at a particular moment.

It is not something that can be produced according to a plan. So treating this process of producing thought directly as a profession has always seemed somewhat forced to me. For the same reason, I have always remained somewhat sceptical about writing courses of every kind. Of course, I am not wholly opposed to writing training. If a person already has many thoughts, much experience, and a strong urge to express something, then some training in writing and expression can be valuable. It can make expression more precise, more accessible to readers, and more complete and adequate as a way of conveying one’s thoughts.

But the premise cannot be reversed. We cannot assume that someone who has no thoughts and no content can become a writer in the real sense merely by learning a range of writing techniques. I think that is entirely to put the cart before the horse. More seriously, such training can easily turn into formula. It may even suppress or destroy the initially precious creative impulse, inspiration, and original thought that a person possesses.

Very often, the earlier someone begins applying templates, model answers, and fixed methods of writing, the more likely they are to smooth away what is genuinely alive. This is also why I have never fully understood a practice common in past literary creation. Many writers, for example, would go to the countryside for observation, or immerse themselves in factories, mines, schools, and government offices in order to experience life and seek inspiration. I have always thought that, unless a person has already lived in such an environment for a long time and has accumulated the relevant experience, returning to it may at most be an adaptive adjustment that helps make one’s expression more faithful to reality. That is understandable. But if a person has had no real contact with that kind of life and merely stays there for a few days, then claims to have acquired genuine experience, I think that experience remains very superficial.

That kind of work is more like acting. An actor needs to enter a role quickly and experience the character. But a writer is not like that. A writer must have an inward, organically generated impulse, rather than remain at the level of surface imitation. Short-term experience, without long attention, without genuinely becoming part of one’s life experience, and without long reflection and digestion, can only become material in the end. It cannot become thought.

I was also led to think about an important, perhaps essential, difference between literature and the arts on the one hand, and engineering and technology on the other. Engineering and technology certainly require creativity, but they begin with logic. In software development, for example, I first analyse requirements, then design the system, and then move into implementation and coding. The whole process can basically advance through logic. Literature and the arts also have logic.

But their logic is not the same as engineering logic. The true starting point of literature and art is not requirements analysis, but inspiration. Inspiration usually comes first. Only then does one ask whether that inspiration accords with the logic of life, whether it has universality, and whether it has typical significance. In other words, creation comes first and logic takes shape afterwards.

It is not a matter of first establishing a standard process and then producing inspiration step by step by following it. Inspiration itself cannot be manufactured by a process. If someone believes that designing a standard process and following it step by step will necessarily produce literary works, I think that reflects a misunderstanding of the essential nature of literature and art. In fact, we can still see a great many works of this kind today, especially articles with a very obvious characteristic. I call this phenomenon “the Chinese-class syndrome”.

What do I mean by that? It means that a student, after long training in Chinese composition, has already mastered a whole range of writing techniques. The student knows how to structure an essay, choose words and build sentences, design openings and endings, create climaxes, and use rhetorical devices. In an examination, the student may even write in a very standardised and precise way. But the student’s mind is actually empty.

The student does not know what is truly worth writing. There is no life experience, no genuine thought, no first-hand experience, and too little indirect experience formed through extensive reading. As a result, the student cannot write content that truly belongs to them. So all they can do is pile up ornate language. They keep applying familiar forms of expression.

They may even mechanically repeat language patterns they know by heart. The mouth keeps moving, as though many sentences have been written. But in fact, nothing has really been expressed. This is why middle-school students almost all share a common experience when writing compositions. Many say that writing an essay is like squeezing toothpaste from a tube.

But I do not think that metaphor is quite accurate. The problem is not that the toothpaste will not come out. The real problem is that the tube is empty to begin with. There is no toothpaste inside at all. There is nothing to squeeze out.

So it is not that one cannot squeeze it out. It is that one cannot create something out of nothing. If the thought itself does not exist, even the most accomplished writing techniques can only create the illusion of expression. They cannot genuinely create a work with life in it.

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This Is What Chinese Class Really Was

I was fortunate that, in my secondary-school Chinese classes, the teacher’s emphasis was not on Chinese itself.

I often remember a particular scene. The teacher would walk into the classroom and, without a word, draw an enormous map on the blackboard. He would use two pieces of chalk at the same time, producing an outline almost identical to one on a printed map. Then, starting from that map, he would lead us into the country’s great landscapes and tell us all kinds of stories about its people and culture.

Near the end of the lesson, he would finally open the textbook and say that we were studying a particular work that day, perhaps Meditations on the Past at Red Cliffs or The Song of the Pipa.

At the time, we did not understand why a Chinese class had become a geography class, or a history class. Only later did I gradually understand that this was what Chinese class really was.

Language is the material outer form of thought. We cannot have the outer form without the thought itself.

Looking back now, this kind of Chinese class cultivated in us a feeling for landscape and human culture, as well as an immediate sense of time and space. Such feeling could then find expression naturally in words. The words and the feeling emerged together, as one whole.