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Essay

The Creator

Jul 30, 2022·10 min read

Image Photo by Ningjinghai

I asked myself a question:

What is it that you create for?

The first layer of the answer is "for myself."

As Hannah Arendt put it:

For me, the most important thing is to understand things, and writing is an indispensable part of the process of understanding them.

The pen and the keyboard are how I talk to my own mind. I gather every flicker of inspiration as it passes, I write down the thoughts that seem worth keeping, and slowly a web takes shape, my own private map of how ideas connect to one another.

Writing is the part of this that cannot be skipped. A thought, while it lives in your head, is blurry and sensory and metaphorical. The moment you have to set it down for someone else to read, you have no choice but to commit it to words, to symbols on a page.

Natural language is a system with rules of its own. The same idea felt and turned over in the mind is simply not the same thing once it lands on paper as a particular arrangement of words.

Only by fixing a thought into language can you truly take it apart, sort it strand by strand, and make it clear. Those refined thoughts and the words that hold them are a person's real wealth. They are yours alone, and at the same time they carry a lasting value that outlives any single moment or place.

The second layer is "for the reader."

A follow, a subscription: these are not just numbers ticking upward on a creator's account. They are better understood as so many threads of connection between one person and another. The reader extends trust to the creator. The creator makes a promise back.

I remember a WeChat account I used to follow, one that wrote about mathematics. I loved how they wrote: witty, easy to understand, and yet meaningful and deep. Every time they posted, I would drop everything to read it. But over time the flavor began to change. First came the ads at the bottom of each piece. Then the quality grew uneven. In the end it was indistinguishable from any of the assembly-line marketing accounts you find everywhere.

If there is one thing I would actually demand of a creator, I think it is this: write what you and your friends would want to read. If you do not even like what you have written, how could it possibly answer the trust someone has placed in you?

The third layer is "for the work."

I had wanted to say "for the truth."

But truth is a big word. If I claimed I write "for the truth," it would sound as though I took my own little notions for something grand, with far too much phony conceit and self-regard mixed in.

Let me just call it "the work," then. A point of view, a review, a story, even a single stand-up bit: each of these is a work.

High or low, long or short, every work has a soul of its own. At the very start they are seeds of inspiration, newly born into the world of ideas, not yet given a body forged out of words, brimming with a potential that waits to be realized.

The creator's job, the creator's vocation, is to catch hold of that seed, let it ripen, and through language or images or video bring it down into the material world so that as much of its potential as possible gets fulfilled.

In the act of creation, the creator reaches through the medium toward something higher than themselves. That something higher is the soul of the work, what I would call its sense of being real.

Real creation comes from a feeling close to being hurried along. It is the soul of the work pressing the creator to bring it into being, until the creator is caught in a situation of having no choice but to write.

Those immortal works that get handed down through the ages, the ones we crown with the word "great," were all born of a creator writing for the work and nothing else. The creator happened to stumble into the soul of a great work, and the will of that unrealized thing was so fierce that it would not accept a careless body.

If the creator writes it badly, the work forces them to revise it again and again until it is satisfied. And if the creator cannot find the right vessel and the right way to present it, the work would sooner stay waiting in the world of ideas.

So what happens when these three purposes collide?

"For myself" is, of course, the first thing you can give up. The meaning of a thought lies in carrying understanding out into the crowd, in helping people make better sense of their own lives and the world around them, and through that, in nudging us toward the good society we hope for.

And anyway, "for myself" is not a notion you could fully discard even if you tried. As Heidegger said, Dasein is always my own. My observation and my feeling for the world around me are, in the end, my feeling. The soul of the work has to pass through me to be shown at all, so the process is bound to leave a mark that belongs to no one but me.

Writing that is wholly objective is just information. It is not a work.

The hardest knot of all is the conflict between "for the reader" and "for the work."

There is a scene I return to again and again in my mind. It comes from a story I once heard. I have searched and searched and never found a workable source for it, so I cannot tell you whether it is true, but the picture has stayed with me all the same.

It is the day a new Agatha Christie novel comes out. Outside the bookshop, on an English street, people are lined up in a long queue to buy the book and read it. Back then the most popular and ordinary form of entertainment was reading, and books were woven into the daily life of ordinary people.

Stories like this are not rare.

When Zuo Si of the Jin dynasty wrote his Rhapsody on the Three Capitals, everyone rushed to copy it out by hand, and for a while the price of paper in Luoyang soared.

The generation before us read Jin Yong and Gu Long, secretly, at the desk or under the covers, and back then it was looked on as a waste of time. Now if some kid pulled out a copy of The Smiling, Proud Wanderer at school, that would surely count as a serious, studious child.

I just came across a post on the Tianya forum1 about the book-buying frenzy of the 1980s. It said:

Sometimes a long line would suddenly form outside the Xinhua Bookstore. Don't bother asking what book it was, just join the queue. Even if you ended up with a duplicate, you could trade it with someone for one you didn't have. Some people even queued to buy books for profit. Back then a freshly printed set of the "Three Words" could be flipped for double the price.

Where do you find anything like that now? The Xinhua Bookstore sits cold and quiet, half of it given over to stationery and little toys, the other half to the test-prep books laid out on tables. Only a handful of bestselling literary classics by the entrance hold their ground, stubbornly keeping a small patch of soil for the idea of a "bookstore."

In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman wrote a line like this:

The form of a medium favors certain kinds of content and so can end up governing a culture.

From the book, to the image, to video, to short video, you can watch a dangerous tendency unfold across these shifts in medium. Our attention is being broken into pieces rather than focused and lifted.

The design of information media, the design of recommendation algorithms included, keeps ratcheting up its "flattery" of the primitive rules by which humans allocate attention and of the human reward circuit.

That future cyber-world assembled out of virtual reality, will it be even more crowded with fawning and pandering toward us?

I don't know. I just think we should do everything we can to keep that worst future from coming true.

To be fair, the kind of work that does nothing but pander and please does not fit my definition of "for the reader" above. Content that flatters too much has lost its core, and that is a betrayal of the reader's trust.

But even the work we generally agree is good in the information age still tends to obey a fixed set of patterns and molds.

In a video or a WeChat article, for instance, I am supposed to write sentences as short as possible, never letting the chain of logic stretch too long. I am supposed to hook the reader's attention with one vivid question and then walk them through the thing step by step, starting from zero and making it perfectly clear.

In the paragraph you are reading right now, so far I have used no bold, no blockquotes, none of the special formatting. I have simply laid the words out in front of you with no styling at all, and you may already be feeling a little impatient, a little unsure of where the point is.

But if I were to take that earlier sentence, "write sentences as short as possible, never letting the chain of logic stretch too long," and set it in bold, your reading experience would improve a great deal, because the "weight" of the piece would be more evenly balanced.

Is that a good thing? Of course it is.

Form is part of content too. Good layout lowers the bar and the burden for the reader, and it conveys a meaningful piece of knowledge or a story with real clarity.

Writing well is not easy either. Behind every long essay with a hundred thousand reads and every explainer video with a million plays lies the creator's labor and care.

I would describe them as carefully made desserts that melt the moment they touch your tongue. You can swallow them with no strain at all and still come away with a pleasant experience and a bit of understanding.

But among these melt-in-your-mouth desserts, are there any that could be called a "great work," or a "serious work"?

I would not rule out the possibility, but it is hard. By the standard of this kind of good work, those immortal masterpieces of history would all be fitted with the cap of being unfriendly to the reader. Their long-winded phrasing, their obscure content, their tangled cores: these were the very forms that gave the works a lasting value worth reading and feeling through again and again. Today they have become thresholds taller than the people standing before them, which really is something to sigh over.

I will end here. My view:

Dear as the self may be,

the reader is worth more.

Yet for the sake of the work,

let both be cast aside.

That is all. Be well.

References

[1] Memories of the early 1980s: buying books and reading books

[2] Creation in the internet age, part one: are we doomed never to have great works again? (Dune Research Institute)

I am Ningjinghai, and thank you for reading my writing.

You are welcome to reach me by any means. My email is lunar_mare_official@outlook.com. Write to me and let's talk, and I will reply to every message.

  1. A post on the Tianya forum, recounting the book-buying frenzy of the 1980s. ↩

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