Young-ha Kim is one of my favorite writers in Korean literature (If I ever have a chance to choose between dating with BTS and dating with Young-ha Kim, I would choose Kim). He is gentle; he is wise; he is humorous and knows what fun is; he tries to understand others; he has a personal story; and most of all, he values Franz Kafka and his writings.
In his lecture, Kim talks about the tragedy of little artists confined in our heart and how to free them.
“Unfortunately, the little artists within us are choked to death before we get to fight against the oppressors of art. They get locked in. That’s our tragedy.”
“…We have little artists pent up inside us… Right now, we need to start our own art.”
He also talks about the experience as a lecturer in his writing class: “In my writing class, I give students a special assignment. I have students like you in the class–many who don’t major in writing. Some major in art or music and think they can’t write. So I give them blank sheets of paper and a theme. It can be a simple theme: Write about the most unfortunate experience in your childhood. There’s one condition: You must write like crazy. Like crazy! I walk around and encourage them, “Come on, come on!” They have to write like crazy for an hour or two. They only get to think for the first five minutes.
The reason I make them write like crazy is because when you write slowly and lots of thoughts cross your mind, the artistic devil creeps in. This devil will tell you hundreds of reasons why you can’t write: “People will laugh at you. This is not good writing! What kind of sentence is this? Look at your handwriting!” It will say a lot of things. You have to run fast so the devil can’t catch up. The really good writing I’ve seen in my class was not from the assignments with a long deadline, but from the 40- to 60-minute crazy writing students did in front of me with a pencil. The students go into a kind of trance. After 30 or 40 minutes, they write without knowing what they’re writing. And in this moment, the nagging devil disappears.”
This part of the lecture reminded me of the WRIT 340 class I took in Summer 2018. I actually wrote on a diary about the first day of my writing class in Korean, and below is the translated version.
Today was the first day of WRIT 340. Frankly speaking, I was fairly scared. The writing class I took in my second semester of freshman year (WRIT 150) was “extremely brutal” in some sense–no matter how hard I tried, I got a bad score and the lecturer did not recognize my effort on creativity. And after that class, I lost interest in any form of writing–I even lost interest in writing a diary for a while. Thus, I was afraid of how brutal the 300-level writing class would be. When I entered classroom, however, things were totally different from what I expected. Although the title of the subject was “Writing for Social Science”, professor Payne asked us to write about ourselves; students had to write not about their public image but about real selves, and think about who they really are. I gave up writing anything for a while back then (due to my personal situation), so it took few minutes for me to actually have courage to hold up a pen and start writing. But as soon as I hold up my pen, I felt a tickle on my fingertip.
Watching students hesitating to start writing, professor allowed us listening music while writing; and I immediately pulled up my earphone from my backpack. The song I chose was Chopin’s Nocturne Op.9 No.1, and as soon as the song started I crazily started writing down about myself. Not even recognizing what I was writing about, I was literally crazy in writing. AFter 30 minutes, I filled out the entire paper with my writing (usually I never perform this kind of crazy productivity while doing my homework). I wrote about parts of myself that I have been contemplating for the past few days, but have not clearly showed to anyone. After the process of writing, I felt unburdened as if I had a stomach relief tablet. Writing as a liberation. She was right. The act of writing is noble because one expresses his or her thoughts confined in self, and thus liberating one from agony and leading one to true freedom.
I never knew that writing class would be this much fun. The class was seminar-style, so basically there were less than 15 students and we got to know each other better because we introduced ourselves on a personal level, including the meanings of our names; I never felt this kind of intimacy with my peers in most of my classes I have taken so far in college.
The 2.5 hours of writing class liberated me indeed.
So, it seems like Kim is right–as usual! Be an artist now, and let’s liberate our little artists.
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