2018.11.05
Looking back now, what the stall selling hairy tofu left me with was this kind of simple human warmth.
A university teacher once pointed to a sentence like that and said it was the weak spot of the piece. The scenes described earlier had already gone beyond anything that could be reduced to “simple human warmth.” That closing phrase flattened the atmosphere the writing had been building.
I still think that criticism was right.
Any elevation in writing has to grow out of what is actually on the page. If the feeling you draw out stays within the emotional range of the thing being described, it can strengthen the writing. But when the conclusion leaps far beyond the meaning the scene can bear, it stops being insight and turns into empty posing. It becomes nonsense dressed up as depth.
There are really two ways of writing: writing that speaks like a person, and writing that speaks like a ghost.
One of my high school Chinese teachers put it bluntly:
There are two kinds of composition: ghost talk and human talk. In ordinary writing, I encourage you to write like a human being, because ghost talk is disgusting. But in the exam room, for the sake of your score, I suggest you write ghost talk—because I am a language teacher.
That line shaped almost my entire approach to writing in high school.
Once you hear it, you start seeing the pattern everywhere. A few sunset photos are shown, and somehow the conclusion becomes:
The longer the silence and waiting, the more unexpected the brilliance of what follows. If even the sky before a typhoon can be this beautiful, what excuse do you have not to fight with all your strength before the storm arrives?
Or someone observes a small butterfly and then writes:
Even a tiny purple-gray butterfly can spread pollen in its own way. It made me realize that every small creature has its own value, and we cannot judge that value by size.
So it is with life: every person has a reason to exist, and no one’s worth can be measured by position, power, or money.
This method of writing is painfully familiar: first describe an ordinary natural scene, then suddenly force a grand life lesson onto it with no warning. A plain object is treated as a launching pad for a declaration that has not been earned. The writer wants the piece to sound elevated, so “meaning” gets pasted on afterward.
That should never be the standard for good writing.
If what you describe has real depth, readers will reach that depth on their own. If you want stronger prose, then yes, you need a stronger point of view. But most people never actually change their angle of observation. The thing they describe remains lifeless, and instead of discovering meaning inside it, they attach “theme” from the outside.
A lot of supposedly original writing works this way. In the name of innovation, it becomes obscure for the sake of seeming profound. Yet it never escapes a basic limitation: expression is still bound by the writer’s shallow understanding of the subject. No amount of decorative insight can hide that.
And the formatting of this kind of writing is often another disaster altogether.
Don’t try to stand out of the crowd
avoid the crowd altogether.