After writing three articles during the New Year’s Day holiday, my mind became enlightened.

At this time, leaving aside other topics, just talking about writing is enough for me to write many articles.

Continuing from the previous chapter, this article still talks about my experiences.

The theme of the previous article is "The essence of culture is precious, but not expensive." In order to demonstrate this theme, I thought of many short articles in my mind, such as Wang Wei's "Envoy to the Fortress".

In fact, when I wrote the last article, I originally wanted to quote Wang Wei's two lines of poem "The solitary smoke is straight in the desert, and the sun is setting in the long river", and borrow the words of Xiang Ling in "A Dream of Red Mansions" to argue that "Wengui Fine, not expensive."

Xiang Ling said: "'The lonely smoke in the desert is straight, and the sun is round in the long river'. How can the smoke be straight? The sun is naturally round. The word 'straight' seems unreasonable, and the word 'round' seems too vulgar." When I closed the book and thought about it, I seemed to have seen this scene. If I were to search for two more words to replace these two, I couldn't find two more words. This is the advantage of poetry, which cannot be expressed in words. The meaning of "Want to Go" is realistic; it seems irrational, but "Want to Go" is actually reasonable and sentimental."

In "Xiang Ling's Poetry", Cao Xueqin completely integrated his own theory of poetry creation. The story, based on Xiangling's process of learning poetry, vividly shows the process of poetry creation from entry to continuous exploration. This obviously does not match the theme of the article I discussed, not to mention that the correlation is not strong. After making choices, I chose Su Dongpo's "A Night Journey to Chengtian Temple" and Zhang Ailing's "Love".

With so many works, why did I single out "Night Tour at Chengtian Temple" by Su Dongpo and "Love" by Zhang Ailing?

Because I once learned writing from a friend, who gave me an essay titled "From Confucius' Teaching without Discrimination to Modern Teaching's Personalized Education." After getting this proposition, I didn’t know how to write it, so I searched for information on the Internet.

I saw something said by the German philosopher Jaspers: "The essence of education means: one tree shakes another tree, one cloud pushes another cloud, one soul awakens "Another soul." This sentence is very beautiful and poetic, so I put it at the beginning of the article. My friend saw it and said that I copied it mechanically and could not quote it into the article just because the sentence is beautiful and poetic.

Since then, I have remembered this sentence said by my friend. Whenever I encounter a good sentence and want to quote it in an article, I will consider how relevant this sentence is to the article. Not big. Sometimes, I clearly like a paragraph, but in the end it has little relevance to the article, I will convince myself to reluctantly part with it. After all, an article must be divided into priorities, with a general argument and sub-arguments. The sub-arguments serve the general argument. If the sub-arguments outweigh the general argument, wouldn’t it be putting the cart before the horse?

For example, when writing a narrative, there are characters and scenery. The scenery exists to set off the characters. If there are too many words about the scenery, the characters will be covered up by the scenery. Wouldn’t this be taking over the spotlight? As far as a story is concerned, the development of the plot has a main line and a sub-line, and the priority should be clear. If the sub-line is too prominent and interrupts the main line, wouldn't it be a misalignment of primary and secondary, causing confusion?

Therefore, to write a good article, you must learn to cut out the complex and simplify it, and select the best quotes from the vast number of works.