Subtitle: To Keep Moving at the Same Pace
The first word always has impact. To the reader it may be nothing special, like a trail marker at the beginning of a mountain path, but to the writer it is like the sound of the starting gun at the line of a track race. Before the first word, one stands tense as stone, and in the next moment one sprints at full speed. It is the symbol of an important moment at the boundary between those two states. People say that whatever one does, one should relax. Writing is the same. If too much force enters from the starting stage, one cannot withstand that tension, and while squeezing out the sentences that are supposed to follow, one may suddenly have no choice but to bring the piece to an end at a moment one had never expected. That is exactly what happens when one receives the impact of the first word as impact. It is the starting point, yes, but it should be thought of this way: there is a downhill rail laid so that a marble can roll quickly, and beginning a piece of writing is nothing more than removing the board that had been stopping the marble from rolling down. I am not the one who has to run forward. Just as a marble begins to roll by gravity, I should let the sentences flow by themselves. Then I only have to follow the path the marble takes. If I put force into it there, the marble rolls on alone, while I fall over and can no longer catch up with the marble as it keeps accelerating under gravity. And when the marble reaches its destination, the writing ends, regardless of whether I managed to put it into words.
Still, even if I relax and follow it, putting it into writing is another matter. Thought can flow in any direction, and it can return and join the original stream again in an instant. The act of taking dictation blindly may instead cut across and block the flow of thought, or the writing may run ahead and turn the direction of the thought. If I have begun without treating the pressure of the first letter as pressure, then from there to the end I must also relax and follow it naturally. But here the word naturally becomes another obstacle. How does one follow naturally? If it were dictation, writing down what one hears would be natural. But if what we must take down is an image or a video, how should we write it? If it is an imagined conversation, one can simply write it down as it is. But when writing an image in the mind, that cannot be done. One has no choice but to make sentences. This is where the problem begins.
Think of studying English. Suppose that in English conversation, the important thing were to hear what the other person says, analyze the grammar, determine the part of speech of each word, interpret it, connect it together, understand it in Korean, then make an answer to it, and then compose that answer again by matching it against English grammar. Now that I have written it out, it sounds like something that would appear in a book called A Hundred Reasons You Do Not Need to Study English. To some degree, one must react automatically and receive it as an image in order to understand during conversation. And if at least half of one’s answer does not come out reflexively and naturally, it is hard to say one is truly conversing. That is why, unlike solving English questions, conversation requires practice.
I think dealing with mental images while writing is the same. If I think of it as a conversation with myself, and if the mind gives me images and videos, then I must be able to write down more than half of it reflexively. Otherwise, the thought stops while I hesitate. Strictly speaking, writing may not be a battle against time, but in writing as thoughts come, it is a battle against time, and more precisely, a battle of timing. So in order to minimize those moments of hesitation, I need to take down such thoughts as often as possible and have a certain set of standardized expressions. I use standardized here in a slightly different sense. Usually it means producing identical things as if stamping them out, but here it is closer to having a pool of candidates, as in, “For this kind of image, choose from these kinds of words.” When typing Chinese characters on a computer, one writes the Korean sound and presses the Hanja key, and a list of characters with that pronunciation appears. We choose the one we originally intended and enter it. In the same way, just as several Chinese characters are connected to one sound, we connect several expressions to one image, and as we take down the thought, we only choose among them. When sentences flow together with time, we must minimize the moments when only the sentence stops because we are asking, “What expression should I use?”
I am still practicing this. In truth, I think that if one has written enough, one cannot have no style. My writing speed was slow, and once a piece ended, I was in a state where I had no regret about it, so that probably did not help. If someone says they are practicing English conversation and then only talks to themselves furiously, would that become conversation? I think the practice of finding a style began only after I started challenging myself to go as far as possible without breaking the flow of the writing.
The basic assumption that personal writing is something I alone will see must have been the biggest obstacle to developing a style. It is true that thoughts are inside my head and are therefore known only to me. But expressing them in writing is something that goes beyond the personal dimension, even if I destroy it immediately afterward. It is because I have made something outside my body, like a tool such as a knife or a lighter. If I am going to make something anyway, then not making trash is basic courtesy toward what we make.
So I write a lot. No. In truth, even aside from that, I like writing. It is a mysterious and beautiful thing for thoughts that had been floating in empty air to take form. If one is someone who writes, then helping that beautiful thing exist, each time, in the length in which it had to exist, should be a goal one reaches through one’s own effort.
Korean original: 문체를 찾아야 하는 이유