Hong Kong Young Writers Anthologies Foreward and Contents 2020 | Page 4

Hong Kong Young Writers Awards 2020
TOO MUCH EXCITEMENT
During dramatic times, society needs writers
The past year has been a time of high drama in this part of the world—perhaps too
much excitement.
We’ve had everything from street fighting over politics to panics over virus-borne dangers.
Reporters give us the basic details, and then their “first rough draft of history” is revised
by academics for history books.
But all these people deal with facts, statistics, dates, and the speeches of leaders.
Who will capture the much more interesting stories of the lives of ordinary people
involved, telling us how they felt, what motivated them, and how they were changed by the
historical events in which they found themselves?
That’s where writers come in.
We inhabit other people’s heads and look at events from multiple points of view. We are
holistic, too – that means that we consider all aspects of an issue.
Furthermore, writers use a range of literary tools to magically re-create the “feel” of a
moment in history: or to anticipate how people will feel during a moment in the future.
Writers are perhaps more important than we think.
Almost 200 years ago, in 1821, a writer named Percy Shelley argued that the most
important people in society were the poets and writers.
Authors spend their lives examining how people think and feel and make decisions about
what’s right and what’s wrong. These discussions create the moral basis of societies. They give
rise to laws, which results in the growth of structured, organized communities, and everything
else follows: business people can run companies, scientists can invent things, farmers can grow
food and so on.
Another reason to mention Percy Shelley is the fact that he was a young writer. People
died much younger in those days, and Shelley wrote all his books during his 20s. His wife
Mary came up with the Frankenstein story while she was a teenager.
So it’s never too early to start!
The theme for this particular contest was challenging. We asked you to envision the future,
when Hong Kong will be part of a group of places which operates almost like a new country.
The secret of good writing, of course, is to use your mind and your heart. You mind helps
you do some really good research so that you have a great many facts and figures in front of you.
And then your heart helps you to go deeper into the subject to find the emotional center of
the topic, locating what is exciting and interesting about it.
It was a difficult challenge, but many of you rose to the challenge and produced
excellent work.
You had to be almost like a wizard to do this task, blending invisible elements to create a
world that doesn’t yet exist in reality.
“The true alchemists don’t change lead into gold. They change the world into words,” said
the American novelist William H. Gass.
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