So You Want to Be a Writer?

Transcending Thought, Read, Writing Out Loud, An Enigma, Deep Breaths

I.

Transcending Thought

The best advice I could give is to write every day. Why? Because we think every day. And if we want to understand what our thoughts are telling us, we must bring them forth to the physical world through the act of writing.

A few years ago, when I was in a mental/emotional/spiritual rut, I turned to journaling to figure out what was going on inside. How did I feel about my situation? Was I happy with my choices? What should I do? I would ask myself questions like these at the end of a long day and write whatever came to mind.

Bizarre stuff came up. Here’s some old snippets from my notes app:

What am I destined to do?

It’s ironic that when I ask myself what I’m destined to do, I’m compelled to write out some sort of response. Could this possibly be a clue? Of course it is, silly.

What do I need to do right now?

Let’s face it: I need to get uncomfortable. I need to actively seek out change. I need to invest my time and money into something I believe in. I’m already in my late twenties. Then again, I’m only in my late twenties.

Thoughts on fear.

Fear is a scary fucking thing. Yet, I’m living in fear. Fear of not being myself. Of not trying hard enough. Of living a meaningless life. Of not listening to myself. Of actively ignoring myself.

It’s this fear that cripples me nearly every day. When I sit with myself and my thoughts, I feel crippled. I’m in fear of what’s to come.

I must transcend my fear.

It’s widely believed that people experience between 6,000 to 60,000 thoughts each day. No wonder we struggle to remember the important thoughts when they come up. While we often know exactly what we should do deep in our subconscious, we don’t always let this wisdom surface. When we write our thoughts down, we solidify them. Once we solidify them, it becomes much easier to act on them.

II.

Read

Read, read, read. Read everything—trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out the window.

Attributed to William Faulkner

Dear fellow writer,

Please read books¹. As in, place your eyeballs on a physical book. Listening to an audiobook is not reading; it’s listening. (Unless you’re listening to Stephen Fry, whose lulling timbre is more like hypnotherapy.) Books will not only teach you how the world works, they will also inform your writing. I’ve never taken a college English class, but I’ve read 72 books in the past 18 months. Almost everything I know about writing comes from reading.

Through reading, I’ve discovered countless new words (like prattle, raison d'être, and indefatigable), gleaned insight on italicization, picked up on punctuation, and, perhaps most importantly, learned that almost every rule can be intentionally broken. The act of reading ought to be challenging—you’re building new neural pathways, after all. And while writing is manifesting thought onto a page, reading is engaging in the act of telepathy: Downloading another’s thoughts and rendering them into a format your mind can process. Our minds are so adept at navigating their own thoughts that encountering a foreign thought requires significant effort to decipher it. Thus, you must be actively engaged in the act of reading.

Social media, on the other hand, is passive engagement. Just because there are words on your newsfeed doesn’t mean that scrolling is the same thing as reading. “Reading” on social media is no better than skimming 79 different billboards along the highway, all proclaiming variations of FOOD AHEAD, NEXT EXIT! and then insisting that you’ve read stuff. By and large, your newsfeed is no better for your brain than McDonald’s is for your belly.

III.  

Writing Out Loud

So you want to publish your writing, eh? Before you begin, you should know a few things.

1) Writing for others ≠ writing for oneself

It’s important to note that all my snippets from Idea #1 are written in the first person. Publishing personal journal entries such as these is not only weird, it’s unenjoyable for readers. No one wants to read the soliloquies drifting through your mind; they have their own 6,000+ thoughts/day to deal with. To write for others, you must write to them or for them. Therefore, you should address the audience in the second or third person; the audience should not be “I.” However, the irony is that, as a writer, you’re still primarily writing for yourself—you’re just writing to yourself in the second or third person.

2) Expectations are a no-go

Let me tell it to you straight: Us writers ain’t guaranteed nuffin. We aren’t promised visibility, money, fame, connections… nothing. So, if you want to write, if you really want to write, you must be willing to do it for yourself and yourself only. Write because it makes your life better and richer. Write because it helps you make sense of the world and your existential fate. Do not, and I repeat, do not write with grandiose expectations for your work. I make well below minimum wage from this newsletter, all thanks to a few generous readers. Without them, I’d make nothing. While this newsletter thing generates a modest passive income, I would never bet on it replacing a salary from a full-time job.

John Kennedy Toole, Stieg Larsson, and Paul Kalanithi were all published posthumously. While they gave the world A Confederacy of Dunces, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and When Breath Becomes Air, they received nothing from their toilsome labor. If you want to write, you must be willing to accept that you might not ever be read until you’re dead.  You must be willing to accept that you might never be read even after you’re dead. So do it for yourself.

3) Publish slowly

Unless you’ve been publishing elsewhere for a while, your first published article will indubitably suck. With this in mind, it might be wise to keep your first few articles to yourself. Be your only newsletter subscriber for a few weeks and work out the kinks. Figure out your ideal structure and flow. Find your voice. Pick a publication name, design, and header. These things all come with time and practice. I finally landed on 5 Big Ideas in week five when I grew tired of trying so hard to come up with a clever name. Once you feel that your newsletter is starting to come together or eight weeks have passed (whichever comes first), then share it with your family and friends and the broader Substack community. That’s what I did, anyhow.

4) Construct a foolproof forcing function

Once you’ve determined that you’re willing to do the work, even if no one else sees it but you, develop an action-cue-reward system to hold yourself accountable. After ten weeks of consistent publishing, I shared my newsletter with a successful woman I know and admire. Once she subscribed, I was motivated to maintain my consistency because I told myself she would be disappointed if my weekly email didn’t come through. However, after about 21 weeks of publishing consistently, at the suggestion of Jeremy Dela Rosa, I offered my readers the opportunity to support my writing with paid subscriptions. If sharing my newsletter with one successful lady is like a carrot on a stick, accepting paid subscriptions was like a white truffle. Little did I realize then that accepting paid subscriptions would create a foolproof forcing function to write regularly.

I’m immensely grateful for Substack not only because they’ve locked me into writing regularly, but because they’ve done it for countless other creatives, too. But, most importantly, I’m grateful for each and every person reading this, as you help me keep the promises I make to myself. Your support means the world to me.

IV.  

An Enigma

“Trying to write is very much like trying to put a Chinese puzzle together. We have a pattern in mind which we wish to work out in words; but the words will not fit the spaces, or, if they do, they will not match the design.”

Helen Keller, The Story of My Life

As a writer, you’re playing 1,000-piece word puzzles daily. You wait and hope and pray for the next puzzle piece to magically reveal itself, only to wait and hope and pray again with each new piece. You frustrate the hell out of yourself. You’ll be on the brink of giving up on this damn puzzle already, and then the missing piece materializes while you’re trying to take a relaxing shower. Thank Goodness you have your handy-dandy shower notepad, allowing you to jot down that elusive piece before getting back to lathering. Your spouse, who shares that very shower with you, has grown accustomed to your neurotic notetaking habits but loves you despite your oddities. But when it comes to other people, well, let’s face it: You’re a weirdo. You carry books and notepads with you wherever you go. You say things like heinous when you could’ve gotten by just fine with horrible. You tell strangers at a cocktail party that you’re a writer, and they give you a vacant smile before swiftly exiting the conversation that had yet to begin. You ask your friends to repeat the clever gems they say so you can jot them down, sparking a silent suspicion. You find yourself regretfully declining invites to social gatherings, opting to spend your Saturdays working on 5,000-piece word puzzles to avoid making more empty promises to yourself. Your friends nod in understanding, but you know they’ll never truly understand. Eventually, your former friends stop inviting you to things altogether, leaving you alone with your damn puzzles. Yet, this is what you signed up for when you said you wanted to be a writer.

I hope you get exactly what you want.

From so you want to be a writer? by Charles Bukowski

V.  

Deep Breaths

There’s a trend in online writing I find perplexing:

People have abandoned paragraphs. Instead, they write only one sentence (or two).

I’ve tried to make sense of this stylistic choice, but it continues to baffle me.

Each new paragraph should signify a new train of thought.

Have our thoughts fragmented?

Is this a sign of epistemic decline?

While I don’t consider myself attention-deficient, reading consecutive sentences in isolation makes me feel as though I am.

That’s because the mind pauses in between subsequent paragraphs, just as the breath pauses in between each inhale and exhale.

But incomplete breaths, sentence-long thoughts, are asphyxiating.

We must stop this madness and breathe deeply.

Resurrect paragraphs.²

Here’s a Twitter thread brainstorming names for this literary phenomenon. Contenders include broetry and brose.

1. And, of course, articles like this one

2. Unless you’re writing legitimate poetry, in which case, do whatever you want