来源：https://escapingflatland.substack.com/p/training-data
本文是系列文章的第二篇。
在卡尔·奥韦·克瑙斯高（Karl Ove Knausgaard）的自传体小说《我的奋斗》（My Struggle）中，第2432页出现了一个关键的情节转折点：挪威出版了一部新的普鲁斯特（Proust）译作。
此时，年仅二十多岁的克瑙斯高已经花了将近十年的时间学习写作，但用最温和的话来说，他并未取得成功。他的挚友托雷·伦贝格（Tore Renberg）在读了他的作品后，在一个场景中来到克瑙斯加的公寓，看起来像是在来之前喝了些酒，鼓起勇气准备面对他。
“但是，卡尔·奥韦”，伦贝格谈到他的写作时说，“那里……什么都没有。”
这并不是我们第一次看到人们对克瑙斯高的散文做出反应。在书的前半部分，当他在挪威北部一个偏远的渔村任教时，克瑙斯高回到家，发现他的同事们一边读着他写的一段性爱场景，一边哈哈大笑。克瑙斯高——当时还是个处男——径直穿过厨房走进书房，一口气喝下一整瓶葡萄酒，然后对着书架吐得一塌糊涂。
然而，伦贝格的批评更加深刻。比克瑙斯高年轻的伦贝格已经是一位颇有成就的作家，他知道自己在说什么。确实，那里什么都没有。
于是，克瑙斯高停止了写作。当新的普鲁斯特《追寻逝去的时光》（In Search of Lost Time）译本出版时，他已经两年没有动笔了。在春日的阳光下，他一口气读完了普鲁斯特的七卷回忆录，就像“喝下一杯水”一样。他曾说，那种感觉就像是“回到了很久以前曾去过的一片树林……当你开始行走时，记忆便逐渐涌现”。
在那次顿悟之后……他又花了两年时间没有写作。这部分占据了他自传中的大约200页篇幅。
然后，出于无法解释的原因，挪威最大出版社旗下子公司泰登（Tiden）的一位编辑——和所有人一样，他对克瑙斯高的写作并不看好——决定，嗯，为什么不给他一份出书合同呢？克瑙斯高放下一切，搬回母亲所在的城镇阿伦达尔（Arendal），开始着手创作他的第一部小说。他不知道该写些什么。他在图书馆无意间听到一段对话，把它记了下来，然后就从那里开始即兴发挥。
这部小说变成了一位26岁教师亨里克·万凯尔（Henrik Vankel）的故事。像许多作家的处女作一样，很难不将其解读为自传性质——而情节的紧张感更因围绕万凯尔与他13岁的学生米丽娅姆（Miriam）在一座小渔村中的性关系展开而加剧，这个渔村与克瑙斯高在挪威北部教书的地方如出一辙。这本书立刻获得了评论界和商业上的成功。
成功的原因之一在于，这部作品充满了普鲁斯特的风格。在《远离世界》（Ude af verden）的每一句话中，都像病毒般流淌着普鲁斯特式的敏感，对时间和记忆的执着，以及丰富而清晰的语言。克瑙斯高声称，当时他并未意识到这种影响——但《追寻逝去的时光》的某些东西已经潜移默化地融入了他的内心，重新塑造了他的感知方式。在那两年没有写作的时间里，他的写作风格发生了转变。
这种现象在作家中相当常见。阅读一些有力量的作品时，那种声音会感染他们。有时这是一种弱点，如果这种影响没有转化为个人的东西。但这也是不可避免的：找到好的影响是写出好作品的前提。
有些作家会非常刻意地这样做。维尔纳·赫尔佐格（Werner Herzog）会在写剧本前花几天时间阅读《诗体埃达》（Poetic Edda），并以最大音量聆听古典音乐，以此将自己带入一种他称之为“语言的狂喜”的状态。正如我们在本系列的上一部分讨论过的，约翰·弗拉西特（John Frusciante）在创作歌曲时也会做类似的事情。
让我们称之为“为你的思维获取优质的训练数据”。这是一种重要的技能，却常常被忽视。在学习一门新技艺时，人们往往倾向于直接追求需要掌握的任务。你想知道如何组织句子，于是你去读《风格的要素》（Strunk and White）。你想学会如何更高效地使用谷歌学术搜索，于是你背诵布尔运算符。这些固然重要。但要真正精通某件事——无论是为人父母、编写代码，还是做研究——你还需要内化该领域中的优秀范例。知道如何找到这些范例，是掌握所需任务的前置条件。
正如伊拉斯谟（Erasmus）在《论学习方法》（On the Method of Study）中所说：
我们并非通过学习规则来获得说一种语言的能力，而是通过与那些习惯于精确而优雅表达的人进行日常交流，并通过大量阅读最优秀的作家作品。
在之前的文章《首先你塑造你的社交网络，然后它塑造你》中，我们将人类视为在社交网络中传递信息的节点。（伊拉斯谟在1511年将上面的引言传递给了我，而我现在将它传递给你。）在这个模型中，你的输出质量可以被视为是你上游节点的函数。在克瑙斯高将普鲁斯特纳入他的“信息网络”之前，他无法产出有价值的文学作品。
换句话说：对卓越的追求可以被重新定义为一个搜索问题。在一个信息丰富的世界里，你如何找到好的影响？
寻找伟大花园的艺术
最近，随着孩子的成长，我的妻子约翰娜（Johanna）开始专注于一个我们家花园的问题。她对花园知之甚少。由于她在学习方式上比我更审慎，我一直在记录她如何处理这个问题。
首先，像普通人一样，约翰娜在图书馆翻阅了园艺书籍。她在村里偷瞄过邻居的篱笆，谷歌搜索花卉搭配，还在Instagram上寻找灵感。如果是我，可能就停在这里了。（或者更糟，我可能会走上一位诗人朋友的老路——他曾走过图书馆时嗤之以鼻地说：“书？我不需要书！我有我的诗！”结果证明，这是写糟糕诗歌的绝佳方法。）
“没错，”约翰娜说，“你可以通过谷歌找到美丽的花园。但如果你对这个领域没有很好的感知，你无法判断这些花园是否真的达到了它们应有的水准。”
为了更好地进入园艺文化，约翰娜将注意力从花园本身转移开。她采取了一种“元策略”，转而寻找那些擅长观察和评价花园的人。她研究了奖项。通过梳理英国园林设计师协会终身成就奖的获奖者名单，她发现了皮特·奥多夫（Piet Oudolf）和贝丝·查托（Beth Chatto）。相比于她通过简单的、对象层面的搜索找到的内容，这些人显然是更好的影响来源。她还发现了2013年获得该奖项的摄影师安德鲁·劳森（Andrew Lawson）——通过他的摄影作品，她找到了更加精致的花园。现在，他们的文字、图像以及花园的设计蓝图正在滋养着她的思维。
这一原则——寻找能够引导你走向领域巅峰的人——非常通用。它不仅可以通过查看奖项来实现。阅读科学领域的综述文章是另一种方法。研究经典文献。观察你能发现的最有才华的人，并弄清楚他们在学习什么。你可以通过阅读采访找到答案，或者看看聪明的人都引用了哪些内容，等等。如果你反复几次，从一个好的来源沿着引用树爬到更好的来源，你很快就能列出一份处于你所在领域顶峰的人物（或书籍、文章、花园、绘画等）清单。研究这些。
但有人可能会问，模仿那些只比你领先一步的人不是更好吗？这样你可以保持在你的“最近发展区”内。为什么要一开始就关注一个领域的最高成就呢？因为这能让你培养出与之匹配的品味。正如迈克尔·尼尔森（Michael Nielsen）在谈到进入一个新的科学领域时所指出的：
你可能会认为，基础应该是粗略地阅读大量论文。事实上，要真正理解一个陌生的领域，你需要深入研究关键论文——比如AlphaGo论文那样的论文。通过深度接触重要论文，你获得的东西比任何单一的事实或技术都更重要：你会对这个领域的强大成果是什么样子有一个直观的认识。它帮助你吸收该领域最健康的规范和标准。它帮助你内化如何提出好问题，以及如何将技术结合起来。你开始理解像AlphaGo这样的突破为何重要——同时也理解它的局限性，以及它在多大程度上其实是该领域自然演进的结果。
你可以像尼尔森那样非常主动地去做这件事，利用间隔重复法深入阅读关键论文。或者，你也可以简单地让这些论文（或花园，或其他输入）停留在你的视野中，并相信它们会在你身上留下印记。何塞·林孔（José Rincón，和尼尔森一样，他以快速进入新领域并总结其内容的能力而闻名）使用了一种更被动、类似机器学习的方法：他沉浸在数百篇论文中，即使有些内容一时无法理解，他也不过于担心。他相信，只要给大脑提供足够的输入，它就会开始从数据中提取模式。约翰娜也是这么做的。她浏览了几十本园艺书籍，逐渐培养起识别和命名多年生植物、丛生植物、边界设计和种植带的能力；还有狐尾草、麝香葡萄、刺叶甘蓝、黄金菊等等。
偏向未经筛选的输入
在进行这种学习时，你希望观察到的输入尽可能与实际操作紧密相连。你需要看到过程，而不仅仅是结果。结果往往具有误导性。如果你是一个音乐人，只看那些成功的乐队，你可能会觉得要成功就必须制作音乐视频，但实际上，音乐视频只有在你达到一定程度的成功之后才有意义——因此模仿这一点只会让你浪费时间。
如果你依赖于那些与实际操作无关的建议和解释，同样会被引入歧途。专家们通常很难清楚地表达出让他们能够高水平表现的行为。这些知识是隐性的。他们的解释往往是事后的合理化；这些解释并不能产生实际的结果。
但如果你直接观察表现本身，靠近它，一切都会显现出来。
塞德里克·陈（Cedric Chin）写了一系列关于这个问题的精彩文章。在第四部分中，他描述了人们如何开始利用YouTube从那些无法直接接触的人身上提取隐性知识。陈指出，诀窍在于观看原始录像，而不仅仅是教程。他引用了对马来西亚柔道教练翁耀（Oon Yeoh）的一次采访内容：
假设你想学习某个运动员是如何完成某项技术动作的。以下是一些最佳实践：
a) 不要只看该运动员完成该技术的一两个例子。多看一些例子，并尝试找出趋势或该运动员在设置投掷时惯用的动作。[…]
c) 有时技术会失败。也要观看这些失败的例子，并尝试理解哪里出了问题。这次尝试与以往有何不同，导致它失败？这样做可以帮助你分离出关键的成功因素。
d) 注意观察变化。有时这些差异非常细微，但它们却很重要。理解这些变化（何时使用它们以及为什么需要这些变化）会让你对这项技术有更深入的掌握。
e) 通常情况下，慢动作观看技术动作会很有帮助。如果没有现成的慢动作回放，你可以下载视频并使用简单的视频编辑软件自行放慢播放速度。当我还是学生的时候，还没有数字视频，只有VHS录像带，我不得不使用两台录像机来制作古贺（Koga）投掷动作的慢动作循环，以便能够好好研究它们！
观看安迪·马图沙克（Andy Matuschak）做笔记的直播流，可以让你捕捉到他无法清晰表达的思维模式。观察一百个花园设计师重新布置花园布局的例子，会让你获得比园艺书中描述丰富得多的心理表征。
内省
真的有这么简单吗？
我们是否可以通过告诉克瑙斯高去研究经典作品并近距离观察有才华的作家，来加速他通向伟大的道路？
不。事实上，这正是克瑙斯高所做的——但失败了。在努力成为一名作家的过程中，他在卑尔根大学学习文学。他还参加了乔恩·福瑟（Jon Fosse）的写作工作坊。福瑟曾是欧洲上演次数最多的在世剧作家。为什么拥有这样一位导师并没有激发克瑙斯高的潜力？
为什么阅读经典作品反而导致他写出“那里……什么都没有”的故事？
在接受采访时，克瑙斯高指出，在1990年代卑尔根的文学圈中，所谓的好作品是非常偏向智性化的。福柯的《事物的秩序》（The Order of Things）就是当时的圣经。这是克瑙斯高内化了的标准。而问题就出在这里：克瑙斯高的独特天赋并不是智性的，而是情感性的。正如他的朋友吉尔（Gier）所说，他可以描述一个人上厕所的场景，却让你泪流满面。（当然，普鲁斯特也可以做到这一点。）但由于他的同侪们对此嗤之以鼻，他并未意识到这才是他应该做的事情。
因此，仅仅识别好的影响来源是不够的。你还需要为自己创造一个深入内省的空间，在那里你可以探索自己与世界如何相互契合。
相互契合？我指的是什么？首先，在每个领域中，总有一些方法可以让作品在客观上更加精良。这是你应该努力追求的。你应该研究那些精心打磨的作品。但其次，你所专注的方向也应该符合你的优势和好奇心的倾向。否则，你会感到痛苦，并与自己作对。
找到既优质又适合你的输入——仅有其一而缺乏另一者是不够的。
最终我们得到的是一个类似于这样的过程：你尽可能深入地反思自己正在尝试做什么。然后，你试图找到这个领域的顶尖成就，并以尽可能高的分辨率观察它们，带着所有从活生生的背景中学习而来的复杂细节。（你不必一开始就找到全局最优解，只要你能弄清楚方向在哪里即可。通过从你当前的视角追逐高峰，你可以沿着“你的高峰”所指向的方向逐步向上攀登，而这很可能带你更接近山顶。克瑙斯高背后是普鲁斯特；普鲁斯特背后是夏多布里昂和波德莱尔；波德莱尔背后是戈蒂耶……）偶尔，你会停下来反思，随着你沿着这个梯度上升，你对世界的理解发生了怎样的变化。这座山是否值得攀登？或者你是否看到了另一座更适合你的山？如果是这样，你就调整方向。
你还可以在一定程度上自动化这个过程。这可以通过公开工作来实现。通过在线写作或进行其他类型的公开创作，你的作品可以在互联网上传播，并为你吸引到有趣的人。然后，这些被吸引来的人开始向你传递有趣的内容，推动你向更高的地方攀登。
如何在实践中做到这一点，将是本系列下一部分的主题。
此致亲切问候，
亨里克（Henrik）
全文总结：为思维获取优质训练数据的艺术
总述
本文探讨了如何通过寻找优质的影响来源和深入内省，来提升个人在某一领域的技能与创造力。作者以克瑙斯高的写作经历为例，阐述了识别优秀范例、观察实际过程以及结合自身特点的重要性，同时强调了自我反思在探索适合自己的发展路径中的关键作用。
分述
寻找优质影响来源：为了掌握一门技艺或进入一个领域，找到高质量的输入至关重要。这包括研究经典作品、观察顶尖人物的实际操作，以及从原始素材中提取隐性知识。例如，克瑙斯高通过阅读普鲁斯特的作品，逐渐内化了文学创作的精髓。此外，利用未经筛选的输入（如原始录像或现场记录）能够更真实地了解高手的操作过程，避免被表面结果误导。
结合自身特点：单纯模仿他人并不足以成功，还需要找到与自己天赋和兴趣契合的方向。克瑙斯高早期虽然学习了文学经典并接受了导师指导，但由于当时的文学圈推崇智性化风格，他未能意识到自己的情感表达才是独特优势。因此，在选择学习对象时，必须考虑自身的特点，确保输入既优质又适合自己。
持续内省与调整：在攀登“领域高峰”的过程中，需要不断反思自己的进步方向是否正确。如果发现当前路径不适合自己，应及时调整目标。此外，通过公开工作（如在线写作），可以吸引志同道合的人，从而获得更多有价值的反馈和支持，进一步优化成长轨迹。
总结
文章的核心在于“如何为思维获取优质的训练数据”。这一过程不仅涉及对外部资源的筛选和学习，还包括对自身特点的深刻理解与适应。只有将外部影响与内在特质相结合，并通过持续的内省调整方向，才能真正实现个人能力的突破与成长。
原文
Scraping training data for your mind
2432 pages into Karl Ove Knausgaard’s autobiographical novel My Struggle comes a pivotal plot point: the publication of a new Proust translation in Norwegian.
Knausgaard, at this point in his mid-twenties, has spent nearly ten years learning to write. Without success, to put it mildly. His best friend, Tore Renberg, having read the results, in one scene comes over to Knausgaard’s flat, looking a little as if he has been drinking before he arrived to work up his nerve.
“But Karl Ove”, Renberg says about his writing, “there is… nothing there”.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen how people react to Knausgaard’s prose. Earlier in the book, when he is working as a teacher in a remote fishing village in northern Norway, Knausgaard comes home to find his colleagues laughing while reading a sex scene he’s written. Knausgaard—still a virgin—walks straight through the kitchen into his study, where he downs a full bottle of wine in one go and proceeds to throw up all over the bookcase.
But Renberg’s criticism cuts deeper. Renberg, who is younger than Knausgaard, has already become an accomplished writer and knows what he’s talking about. There really is nothing there.
So Knausgaard stops writing. When the new translation of Prouts’s In Search of Lost Time is published he has not written for two years. In the spring light, he reads Proust’s memoirs, all seven of them, in one big gulp like “drinking a glass of water”. He has said it was like “visiting a wood you have been in before, a long time ago . . . and when you start walking, the memories start coming back”.
After that epiphany . . . he spends another two years not writing. That is about 200 pages of his autobiography.
Then, for inexplicable reasons, an editor at Tiden, a subsidiary of Norway’s biggest publishing house, an editor who, like everyone else, is unconvinced by Knausgaard’s writing, decides that, well, why not give him a book deal anyway. Knausgaard abandons everything, moves back to his mother’s town, Arendal, and sets out to write a debut novel. He doesn’t know what to write about. He overhears a conversation in the library, writes it down, and then wings it from there.
The novel turns into a story about a 26-year-old teacher, Henrik Vankel. Like many debuts, it is hard to not read as autobiographical—which becomes all the tenser as the plot centers on the sexual relationship Vankel has with his 13-year-old pupil Miriam in a small fishing village identical to the one where Knausgaard taught in northern Norway. The book was an immediate critical and financial success.
One reason for the success was that the writing is pure Proust. Coursing through every sentence of Ude af verden, like a virus, is the Proustian sensibility, the obsession with time and memory, the rich and clear language. Knausgaard claims he wasn’t aware of the influence at the time—but something about The Search for Lost Time had worked itself into him, rearranging his sensibilities. Over the two years when he did not write, his writing had transformed.
This is quite common for writers. Reading something powerful, the voice infects them. Sometimes this is a weakness, if the influence has not been transformed into something personal. But there is also no way around it: finding good influences is a prerequisite for writing well.
Some writers do this very deliberately. Werner Herzog will spend days reading the Poetic Edda and listening to classical music at full volume to get himself into what he calls an “ecstasy of language” before writing a script. John Frusciante, as we discussed in the last part of this series, does something similar when writing songs.
Let’s call this scraping good training data for your mind. It is an important skill. Too often neglected. When learning a new craft, it is tempting to first go after the tasks you need to master. You want to know how to structure your sentences, so you read Strunk and White. You want to figure out how to get better at searching Google Scholar, so you memorize boolean operators. This is important. But to get good at something—parenting, writing code, doing research—you also need to internalize examples of prime achievements in that field. Knowing how to find these examples is upstream of the tasks you need to master.
As Erasmus puts it in On the method of study:
it is not by learning rules that we acquire the power of speaking a language, but by daily intercourse with those accustomed to express themselves with exactness and refinement, and by the copious reading of the best authors.
In the First you shape your social graph; then it shapes you, we modeled human beings as nodes routing information in a social graph. (Erasmus just routed me the above quote from the Lord’s year 1511, and I routed it to you.) The quality of your output in this model can be thought of as a function of the nodes upstream of you. Before Knausgaard connected Proust to his graph, he was incapable of producing valuable literary output.
In other words: the quest for greatness can be reframed as a search problem. In a world of information abundance, how do you find good influences?
On the art of locating great gardens
Lately, with the baby growing up, my wife Johanna has settled her mind on the problem that is our garden. She knows little about gardens. Her being more deliberate about how she learns than I am, I’ve been keeping notes about how she approaches it.
First, like a mortal, Johanna leafed through garden books in the library. She peeked over fences in the village, googled flower combinations, and searched Instagram for inspiration. I would have stopped there. (Or worse, I might have gone the way of a poet I once knew, who, when walking past a library scoffed, “Books! I don’t need books! I have my poems!” Which turned out to be a fabulous way to write bad poetry.)
Yes, Johanna says, you can find beautiful gardens by googling. But not having a good sense of the domain, you cannot judge if the gardens are anything near as good as they can be.
To get a better entry point into the culture of gardening, Johanna shifted her focus away from gardens in themselves. Going meta, she instead looked for people who are talented at looking at gardens. She looked at awards. Going through the recipients of the Society of Garden Designer’s Lifetime Achievement Award, she found Piet Oudulf and Beth Chatto. They are a markedly better set of influences than what she found using a naive, object-level search. She also found Andrew Lawson, a photographer who received the award in 2013—and through his images, she found even more refined gardens. Now their words and images, the blueprints of their gardens, are feeding into her.
This principle—looking for people who can guide you to the peaks of the domain—is very general. It can be done not only by looking at awards. Reading review articles for scientific fields is another way. Studying the canon. Looking at the most talented person you can spot and figure out whom they are studying. You can read interviews to find those answers, or look at what smart people cite, and so on. If you iterate a few times, climbing the citation tree from a good source to a better one, you quickly assemble a list of people (or books or articles or gardens or paintings, etc) that sit at the pinnacle of your domain. Study those.
But isn't it better to imitate people who are only one step ahead of you, so you can stay in your zone of proximal development? Why start by looking at the highest achievements in a field? Because it allows you to shape your taste to match them. As Michael Nielsen notes about entering a new scientific field:
You might suppose the foundation would be a shallow read of a large number of papers. In fact, to really grok an unfamiliar field, you need to engage deeply with key papers – papers like the AlphaGo paper. What you get from deep engagement with important papers is more significant than any single fact or technique: you get a sense for what a powerful result in the field looks like. It helps you imbibe the healthiest norms and standards of the field. It helps you internalize how to ask good questions in the field, and how to put techniques together. You begin to understand what made something like AlphaGo a breakthrough – and also its limitations, and the sense in which it was really a natural evolution of the field.
You can either do it very actively, as Nielsen does, using spaced repetition to deeply read key papers. Or, you can simply allow the papers (or the gardens, or whatever the input is) to linger in your presence and trust that they will imprint themselves on you. José Rincón (who, like Nielsen, is known for his capacity to wade into new fields and summarize them) uses this more passive, machine learning-like method: he douses himself in hundreds of papers, not worrying too much if he fails to understand something. He trusts his brain to start extracting patterns out of the data if he feeds it enough input. This is what Johanna does too. She skims a few dozen garden books, gradually building up her capacity to pattern recognize and name the perennials and the mound-forming plants; the borders and the planting drifts; foxtail, muscadine, spine-cabbage, goldenrod.
Bias toward unfiltered input
When doing this, you want the input you observe to be as closely connected to a practice as possible. You want to see the process, not just the results. The results are often misleading. If you are a musician looking at successful bands, you might get the impression that you need to make music videos to succeed, whereas, in fact, a video only makes sense after you have achieved a certain level of success—so imitating that will lead you to misallocate your time.
You will also be led astray if you rely on advice and explanations unconnected to an ongoing process. Experts can rarely articulate the behaviors that allow them to perform at a high level. The knowledge is tacit. The explanations are post-hoc rationalizations; they do not produce the results.
But if you look at the performance, if you get close to it, it is all there.
Cedric Chin has a great series of posts about this problem. In the fourth part, he describes how people have started to use YouTube to extract tacit knowledge from people they cannot access. The trick, Chin observes, is to look at raw footage, not just instructionals. He quotes from an interview he’s done with Malaysian Judo coach Oon Yeoh:
Let's say you want to learn how a particular player does a particular technique. Here are some best practices:
a) Don't just watch just one or two examples of that player doing that technique. Watch multiple examples and try to identify trends or things that that player does in setting up the throw. […]
c) There will be times when the technique fails. Watch those as well and try to understand what went wrong. What was different about this attempt that caused it to fail? Doing this will allow you to isolate the key success factors.
d) Try to look out for variations. Sometimes those differences are very subtle but they are significant. Understanding the variations (when they are used and why the variation are necessary) will give you a better grasp of the technique.
e) It is usually helpful to watch the technique in slow motion. If there is no slow motion replay of the clip available, you may have to download the clip and slow-mo it yourself using a simple video editing program. When I was a student there was no digital videos yet, only VHS cassettes, and I had to use two VCR machines to make slow motion loops of Koga's throws just so I could study them properly!
Looking at live streams of Andy Matuschak taking notes allows you to pick up patterns of thought that he is unable to articulate. Looking at a hundred examples of garden designers redoing the layout of a garden gives you a mental representation much richer than the descriptions in the garden books.
Introspection
Is it this simple?
Could we have accelerated Knausgaard’s path to greatness by telling him to study the canon and observe talented writers up close?
No. In fact, this is exactly what Knausgaard did—and it failed. Struggling to become a writer, he studied literature at the University of Bergen. He participated in the writing workshop of Jon Fosse. Fosse was at one point the most played living dramatist in Europe. Why didn’t having such a mentor unleash Knausgaard?
Why did reading the canon result in him writing stories where “there is… nothing there”?
In interviews, Knausgaard has observed that what constituted good writing in the literary milieu of 1990s Bergen was highly cerebral. Foucault’s The Order of Things was the Bible. This was the measuring stick Knausgaard internalized. And herein lay the problem: Knausgaard’s particular genius wasn’t cerebral, but emotional. He could, as his friend Gier says, describe someone taking a dump and make you cry. (Proust, of course, could have done this too.) But since his peers looked down on this, he didn’t realize this was what he was meant to do.
So identifying good influences is not enough. You also need to create space for deep introspection, a space where you can figure out how you and the world can fit each other.
Fit each other? What do I mean by this? First, in every domain, there are ways for work to be objectively more well-crafted. And this you should strive toward. You should study well-crafted work. But second, what you focus on should fit your strengths too, and the bent of your curiosity. Otherwise, you’ll suffer and work against yourself.
Find input that is both good and fits you—one without the other is less.
What we end up with is a process something like this. You reflect, as best you can, on what you are trying to do. Then you try to locate the prime achievements in this field, and you observe them in as high a resolution as possible, with all the messy details that come from studying something in its living context. (You don’t have to find the global maximum at your first go, as long as you can figure out where the gradient is. By going after the peak from your current vantage point, you can travel up toward the top by looking at what your “peak” is looking at, which is likely further up the hill. Behind Knausgaard is Proust; behind Proust is Chateaubriand and Baudelaire; behind Baudelaire is Gautier...) Occasionally, you stop and reflect on how your understanding of the world has changed by you moving up this gradient. Is this a fitting hill to climb? Or can you see another hill that is more aligned with you? If so, you course correct.
You can also automate this process to an extent. This you do by working in public. By writing online, or doing other types of public work, what you produce can travel out on the internet and find interesting people for you. Then the people the work attracts start routing interesting stuff your way, pulling you up the hill.
How to do this in practice will be the topic of the next part of this series.
Sincerly, Henrik