The power of writing

The last week of the summer, before the fall term began, turned out to be the most productive and surprisingly enjoyable week for me, in a strange way. Throughout the week, I dedicated myself to the final writing of my prospectus draft, a goal I set up for myself at the beginning of the summer. That sounds barely exciting, doesn’t it? We all have the painstaking experiences of writing research papers in their various forms. Especially for a non-native speaker, this exercise is all the more daunting. I agree entirely. Writing is never easy, even for a native-speaker. And I have plenty of memories of finishing up term papers in a short period of time, memories of squeezing out the right words, being stuck by one sentence, or creating a prose that was both articulate and elegent. Indeed early in that week, that feeling did occur to me, perhaps due to the pressure I gave to myself, a feeling that was immediately familiar and unsettling.

But as I proceeded with my writing, something started to change. If I can take the liberty of anthropomorphizing my writing, during the early stage I was pulling her with great force to move forward. Yet as the time went on, the power relation inverted: I felt being pulled with great force by her. This sense of losing control of oneself was quite marvellous and indeed intellectually rewarding. My mind was occupied with the writing all the time, to the degree that I even could not sleep very well. New ideas popped up constantly and all I did was to keep the rhythm going. I can only remember two cases in Ann Arbor, both on a much smaller project, that brought me the similar experience. Yes, the writing could be enjoyable.

That is why I found writing a mysterious enterprise. We all know that we write in order to express our ideas. Plato emphasizes the paramount importance of the precise definitions of words and the proper use of them to articulate thoughts in our minds, or to be more exact, the intangible yet illuminating soul inside each of us. That is why writing is a fundamental communication tool for humans. But my experiences, as many other writers, tell me that there is another creative dimention of writing, that is, writing seems to have her own agency to initiate and propagate ideas of her own. Put it in another way, writing sppears to have this peculiar power of reorganizing our minds and surfacing our subconcious thoughts to a tangible form. How strange!

Writing could be powerful and enjoyable because it mediates our conversation with our inner self. “Mediation” is the key word here. For Plato, the ideal of writing, or speech or any form of language maneuver is to make it like a mirror, a crystal clear mirror so that it can perfectly reflect our soul, a stable, unchanging entity within us. But other philosophers, especially those in the continental vein, would argue that neither writing, or language in general, is a passive exercise nor our soul can be degraded into something concrete and stagnant. There is no mirror, just as there is nothing to be reflected onto it. Instead everything is mediated; everything undergoes constant flux and metamorphosis. Our world, just as our selves, is forever chaotic, forever unstable, forever transforming.

This is not a place to contemplate continental philosophers’ thoughts on writing and language, but I do appreciate the unpredictable aspect of writing as they point out. This unpredictability, the peculiar process of indentifying our inner selves in the most unlikely corners, is perhaps the most fulfilling part of writing for me. Eventually the power of writing resides in the power of our minds, with their manifold manifestations in our world. It offers a window through which we can peek into a space that is at the same time puzzling and galvanizing. Of course most of the time we don’t find writing so edifying especially when we do it under external restrains. But occasionally when it happened, as what happened to me during that week, it was a surprisingly wonderful experience.

When I was in Michigan, one friend of mine gave me this quote: “When you write, always follow your pen.” I resonate with that. People might say that it is more of a technique for novelists and creative writing, but how can you draw the clear boundary here? Of course as historicans, we are confined by historical sources and cannot write down things based on our sheer imagination. But I think that if we properly make use of this creative aspect of writing, certainly involving lots of skills and experiences, we can make unexpected connections and bring illuminating discoveries to our audience, and also to ourselves.