In this video clip, Han Kang, the 2024 Nobel Prize Winner, talks about using the senses as she writes. This is a powerful perspective, and a deep key to writing that affects readers.
When you make someone feel something in their body, your craft has gone to the next level. But first, we have to feel what we are writing about. So, does your writing make you feel?
Below are some further thoughts from Han Kang’s acceptance speech. We can always go deeper, and this video and these words inspired me. I hope it does the same for you!
I remember a day when I was eight years old. Right after finishing the afternoon class at the abacus academy, a sudden downpour began. It was so fierce that about twenty children gathered under the eaves of the entrance, waiting for the rain to stop. Across the street, there was a similar building, and under its eaves, dozens of people were also standing, unable to come out, as if looking into a mirror. Watching the pouring rain, feeling the moisture soaking my arms and calves, I suddenly realized something. The people standing shoulder to shoulder with me and all those people across the street were living as ‘I’. Just as I was seeing the rain, each of those people was seeing the rain. They were sensing the moisture on their faces just as I was. It was a moment of wonder experiencing countless first-person perspectives.
Looking back, I think I have been repeatedly experiencing this moment of wonder throughout all the time I have been reading and writing literature. The experience of flowing through the thread of language into the depths of others and meeting their inner selves. The experience of taking out my important and urgent questions, threading them onto that thread, and sending them out toward others like an electric current.
Since I was young, I have been curious. Why were we born? Why do pain and love exist? These are questions that literature has posed for thousands of years and continues to pose today. What is the meaning of our brief stay in this world? How difficult is it for us to ultimately remain human in this world? Literature, which persistently imagines the first-person perspectives of people and living beings inhabiting this planet, questioning our nature on the darkest nights, and handling the language that ultimately connects us, inevitably carries warmth. Inevitably, reading and writing literature stand on the opposite side of acts that destroy life. Together with all of you standing here on this side opposite violence, I want to share the meaning of this prize for literature. Thank you.