The Difference Between the Exceptional and the Ordinary. How to Catch Up [Reporting, Writing, Polishing by Fumitake Koga]
Continuing from last time
Finally, we enter Chapter 1 [Reporting]. Having read the text
[Reporting, Writing, Polishing by Fumitake Koga] so far, several foundations for [Reporting] have been observed.
[Regarding the scarcity of information, a writer must know what everyone [knows] and what they [do not know].]
[A writer is 'empty.' Therefore, they listen, which means they conduct reporting.]
A writer is an existence dependent on a subject, and therefore, reporting is absolutely essential. The scope of that [Reporting] is broad.
The reporting covered in this book is not limited to interviews. Listening to someone's story, of course, but also reading books, watching movies, walking through town, listening to train announcements, and looking at hanging advertisements—everything is reporting.
Everything that involves "trying to know" something is reporting.
Everything is a subject for reporting, and everything is a subject for writing.
If one were to distinguish between what is reporting and what is not, the teacher says it is "trying to know."
It is, so to speak, a posture and an attitude. How much interest and respect you can hold for the person you are reporting on determines your writing.
Perhaps what is not reporting is the absence of questions.
For a reporter, the "world" is an open book.
A reporter must read "people" as one reads a book, and must read their words.
A reporter must read "things" as one reads a book, and must read to their very depths.
A reporter must read "society" as one reads a book, and must read its currents.
They [read].
When we say "read," "books" come to mind, but how do we read those books?
We might read the cover, read the table of contents, or start from the afterword.
We might follow each character one by one with our eyes from the first page, reading while grasping the meaning of the words. If an unknown word appears, we might look it up or guess from the surrounding context. We draw out the meaning of those words, and read the meaning of the book itself, which is a collection of those words.
[Reading] inherently includes "trying to know."
We read books because we want to know.
We want to know what is written in that book, what meaning it has, and what kind of interesting stories are inside.
Exceptional writers are, without a single exception, exceptional reporters.
They are all reading.
Exceptional reporters read deep into their subject, to the point of the subject's intentions, and even to the point that the subject themselves could not have imagined.
Their "eyes" are exceptional.
Akira Kurosawa, Hayao Miyazaki, Takeshi Kitano, and (the authors of the books cited in the text) all possess an 'eye' for reading that is on a completely different dimension from ours.
Because we do not see what top-tier artists see and only view the subject at a shallow level, we finish drawing too quickly.
Exceptional interviewers and we ourselves have fundamentally different 'eyes' to begin with.
It is easier to imagine if you replace this with 20/20 vision versus 20/2000 vision.
If asked which is easier to draw, a world seen clearly or a world seen vaguely, the answer is obviously the one seen clearly.
No matter how much you train your physical eyesight, it won't improve, but the 'eye' for reading a work is different.
To improve your reading vision, you have no choice but to 'read.' To cultivate your eye, you must read.
And when your vision improves from 0.2 to 0.8, you will find yourself unable to stop writing. What you need to write becomes clear.
It is difficult to write about something vague, but it is easy to write about something seen clearly. And I believe that when you can see something but cannot write it, you understand the difficulty and importance of 'writing'.
First, let's train 'yourself as a reader.' Be a person who is always reading books, movies, people, and the world. If your manuscript is boring, it is not because 'you as a writer' are bad, but because 'you as a reader' are naive.
To be continued in the next installment
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すごい勇気をありがとうございます。