[Repost] Why do people write books?

Haha, this is just a casu­al chat in the let­ter. The top­ic is not that big. It’s just a casu­al chat about why I wrote the book “Dear Genius­es”. It is an aux­il­iary ref­er­ence book to help ordi­nary read­ers read the book “Dear Genius­es”.Orig­i­nal address:Why do peo­ple write books?author:-Mud life-

 [Mud Life] Spe­cial Issue (Issue 50)

arts
/ Argen­tine Primera División 

【Mud Words】A few of us at Hong­ni­ba have col­lab­o­rat­ed on a trans­la­tion of a col­lec­tion of let­ters, “Dear Genius.” This col­lec­tion is a col­lec­tion of cor­re­spon­dence between a great edi­tor and numer­ous tal­ent­ed writ­ers and painters. After trans­lat­ing this book, we felt it was time to delve deep­er into the sto­ries behind these tal­ent­ed writ­ers and painters. These writ­ers and painters are incred­i­bly famous, but for those of us with lots of pas­sion but lit­tle writ­ing expe­ri­ence, what can we do? Let’s hear what Hong­ni­ba Ajia has to say.

Before we begin writ­ing, it’s help­ful to plan. For exam­ple, with a char­ac­ter like E.B. White, the prob­lem isn’t a lack of infor­ma­tion, but an abun­dance of it. Plan­ning is cru­cial when orga­niz­ing your mate­r­i­al. Not sure where to begin? Con­sid­er com­pil­ing a biog­ra­phy of the cou­ple and writ­ing an intro­duc­tion (approx­i­mate­ly 800‑1000 words) about their rela­tion­ship with Ursu­la. This will pro­vide essen­tial con­text for read­ers of “Dear Genius” to engage with the book.

As you can see, there’s not much space left. For a writer like White, some­one every­one can relate to, you still need to con­sid­er leav­ing over 1,000 words for every­one to dis­cuss and explorato­ry. This leaves only 2,000–3,000 words for the actu­al main text. Note that it’s best to add a sub­head­ing after around 600–800 words—in oth­er words, about five sub­head­ings.

Of course, there should­n’t be too many restric­tions when writ­ing arti­cles, but most good arti­cles are com­plet­ed under cer­tain con­straints. For exam­ple, ancient poet­ry, espe­cial­ly reg­u­lat­ed verse, has extreme­ly strong con­straints, but it still does not hin­der the birth of great poets and the best poems.

By the way, the con­straints on trans­la­tion are sim­i­lar to this, but trans­la­tion can also pro­duce excel­lent arti­cles.

Think­ing about it anoth­er way, per­haps writ­ing is inher­ent­ly born under con­straints. We could call these con­straints “dis­ci­pline,” the first of the three ele­ments of the art of love. The great­est con­straint for the ancients was the mate­r­i­al of writ­ing. In Con­fu­cius’ time, writ­ing had to be done on bam­boo slips, which was extreme­ly cum­ber­some and resource-lim­it­ed. There­fore, writ­ing then was nec­es­sar­i­ly char­ac­ter­ized by con­cise­ness and expres­sive­ness. The advent of paper made writ­ing much more con­ve­nient, allow­ing for the emer­gence of elo­quent par­al­lel prose and extrav­a­gant, ornate descrip­tions. How­ev­er, this also led to the phe­nom­e­non of “paper prices in Luoyang.” There­fore, even mod­ern schol­ars have earnest­ly advo­cat­ed the impor­tance of respect­ing paper, mean­ing not to waste it by sim­ply writ­ing some­thing and pub­lish­ing it. From the per­spec­tive of envi­ron­men­tal pro­tec­tion, this advo­ca­cy still makes sense.

How­ev­er, as elec­tron­ic read­ing (includ­ing every­thing on com­put­ers and phones) has become a dom­i­nant part of dai­ly life, peo­ple seem to be becom­ing increas­ing­ly casu­al about “writ­ing some­thing,” since dig­i­tal stor­age vir­tu­al­ly takes up no space. This is inher­ent­ly a good thing, but it also some­times makes one lament the increas­ing dif­fi­cul­ty of find­ing good writ­ing. With­out con­straints, the ques­tion of how to write well becomes a new one.

So, after going around in cir­cles, what I want to say is very sim­ple: you might as well try to impose some con­straints on your­self before you start.

Nor­mal­ly, why would peo­ple write books? Or, what moti­vates peo­ple to write books?

In fact, our pre­de­ces­sors have said it very clear­ly: when you want to find a book to read but can’t find it, then you can con­sid­er writ­ing one.

The first book I edit­ed was a guide to prepar­ing for the bar exam. At the time, I was a teacher and want­ed to help my stu­dents pass this exam, often con­sid­ered Chi­na’s most dif­fi­cult. I searched through numer­ous bar exam ref­er­ence books, but none seemed rel­e­vant, so I end­ed up com­pil­ing my own. It’s actu­al­ly that sim­ple.

It’s like when the inspec­tor and I first entered the chil­dren’s book indus­try, prob­a­bly between 2001 and 2002. We also want­ed to find suit­able books intro­duc­ing chil­dren’s books. We searched a lot, but in the end we still could­n’t find any, so the two of us decid­ed to com­pile a book our­selves, “101 Books That Will Fas­ci­nate Chil­dren”, and it was just that sim­ple.

We spent over a year trans­lat­ing “Dear Genius,” gath­er­ing count­less resources. Although the trans­la­tion is com­plete, let’s be hon­est: if the aver­age read­er were to just read this book, they’d be com­plete­ly lost. They would­n’t have done the exten­sive back­ground research we did before read­ing (or trans­lat­ing) the book. So, we need­ed to pro­vide them with some tools or a step­ping stone. We know from our own painful expe­ri­ence that such ref­er­ence books are vir­tu­al­ly nonex­is­tent in the Chi­nese lan­guage. If they were, our trans­la­tion would­n’t have been so dif­fi­cult, right? So, since we could­n’t find such an acces­si­ble ref­er­ence, we had to write one. It’s still incred­i­bly sim­ple.

So, when we ask our­selves: What should we write about? The answer is sim­ple: write about what I want to read but can’t find (in the Chi­nese world, of course).

At this point, we can go back to the start­ing point and imag­ine that we are just ordi­nary read­ers. In the con­text of igno­rance, we are full of desire to read some­thing from “Dear Genius”. What are the things we want to know most?

To put it blunt­ly, to write this book well, don’t try to “move for­ward” or “dig deep­er”, but try to “go back” and return to the same per­spec­tive as the entry-lev­el read­ers.

Return­ing to a nor­mal per­spec­tive also requires depth and per­spec­tive, though it may appear ordi­nary. It’s like Con­fu­cius’s say­ing, “Trans­mit, do not cre­ate.” It sounds sim­ple, but it’s incred­i­bly dif­fi­cult to put into prac­tice. We don’t have to set our­selves such high stan­dards, but this is a good start­ing point for ref­er­ence. :)