Every book is born in the echo of another book. In order to write a book, you cannot avoid the process of first reading the works related to the subject, organizing them well, and refining your thoughts by writing sentences. This is also almost an absolute criterion for identifying good books and sincere authors.

The worse the book, the more the author talks to himself, and it is described as if no one had similar thoughts before. If you don't want to read a bad book, you can start with books with no citations, no stock, or references. Even if it is a new field such as artificial intelligence (AI), it is the same. Didn't Isaac Newton say. "If I looked further, it was because it stood on the shoulders of giants."

Literary works such as poetry and novels are no exception. A good piece of literature must contain a homage to the works of seniors. There are no works that pop out. Words, sentences, metaphors, or symbols used by a writer all reflect the historical context accumulated in the work he read or studied. "My mother died on Monday, April 7. It was about ten o'clock." The 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature Author Ani Erno writes the first sentence of her work "One Woman" in honor of her mother. This dry sentence automatically reminds me of a masterpiece that begins with "Mom died today." Albert Camus's Stranger. An arrogant writer boasts his originality, but a wise writer twists it slightly while accepting works from the past. After paying tribute to his senior's contemporary sentence about his mother's death, Erno takes a different path from the dryness. If Camus depicts a man's insensitivity and alienation in the face of an absurd world, Erno writes a social report on his mother's life, who was born the daughter of a worker and struggled to raise her status all her life.

What is interesting is that, along with her daughter's writing, the mother's life, her words, and her actions gradually change to the pronouns of French working-class women in the late 20th century. It is the life of one woman and the life of all women. By doing so, Erno shows that true mourning is beyond sentimentalism marked with the sadness of excessive emotion and plain comfort, that is, to rewrite the mother's life as a universal narrative without confining it to the individual's life.

Good writing exists when you inherit the traditions of your ancestors and rewrite them to suit your present life. German writer Michael Schmidt-Salomon said in Evolution of Thought. "There is no work anywhere that has only one creator." This is why if you want to write a good article, you have to read it diligently first.

[Jang Eunsoo, CEO of the editing and culture laboratory]