Writing Rehab — Part III
I started blogging a couple of years ago, quietly hoping that people will actually give a shit about what I’ve got to say. Initially, I wasn’t even sure what to write about. What could I possibly say that hasn’t already been said before?
So I read books about writing. I tried Googling “what to blog about.” Pinterest quotes on writing told me that yes, everything has been said, but it hasn’t been said by me. Be you! Write what you know! Tell your story!
Clichés persist for good reasons. I imagine there are a few bilingual, 30-something Taiwanese women who have lived in Asia, America, and Scandinavia. But I’m betting not one of them has worked in translation, modeling, theater, design, in both startups and multinational corporations… Right?
At one point, I even started thinking of using the blog for self-promotion (yep, guilty). I would read these LinkedIn posts and wonder, “is that what I should be writing?” I wanted to write posts that would make me seem cool and professional.
That only led to months of not writing lol
Eventually I decided to write about the things I had the most conversations about. You know, those recurrent conversations you have when introducing yourself. For me, that meant talking about my English fluency and my former career in modeling.
Once I convinced myself that my voice had a place in the world, something funny happened. I wrote and published the posts about learning English and surviving modeling, and stopped having the same conversations.
Or rather, the way I talked about the same issues had to evolve. I’m not self-involved enough to think my friends have read every single one of my blog posts (although if you have, love ya!). But there’s something about pushing something out there and then… Moving on.
Now I get to go find something new to talk about.
Keeping a journal consistently has also helped me sort myself out. Surprise! Writing and journaling work well together. I have journal entries dating back a decade or more, and 20-year-old Vickie was a terrible, terrible writer. She mostly just shouted feelings at her notebook/laptop. Who are you mad at? What’s his name? What the hell happened!? She told me nothing. ZERO context. She was the worst.
Reading these old entries made me realize what a mess of a writer/person I was. I can’t go back and rewrite my own emotional journey. In those unguarded, inarticulate moments, I told my future self exactly how I felt. Along with whatever bullshit story I was making up in my head to justify my behavior at the time. And boy, did 20-year-old Vickie have some explaining to do… My future self inevitably comes back and sees a deeper, less palatable motive. But the entries, while terrible, provided points of reference. That’s something.
With a blog, these internal blurbs went from feelings to words to conversations. People responded to different aspects of my externalized self. An old schoolmate asked if he could translate one of my posts into Chinese. Another friend said he forwarded the post about modeling to another aspiring model. And the post about losing my dad… Well, let’s call it free group therapy.
That’s a great thing we have these days, anybody can share his or her story with the world. If you’re lucky, somebody pays attention and engages with you. It’s a happy, and in retrospect sort of obvious, discovery.
The Process
So here’s how it usually goes: I get an idea, usually in conversation, something I’m getting super worked up about. I throw that idea up on Quip as a new document and proceed to drop nuggets into it. This can take anywhere from weeks to months.
I love this about writing. I can wrangle my ADD brain farts into a coherent story by abusing time. My writing can be the product of my own brainpower tripled or quadrupled. I don’t know if people realize this, but writing and editing means you get to sound much smarter than you actually are. It’s a wonder people voluntarily choose to sound dumb on the interwebs.
The nugget-dropping is easy. The real work is sitting down and pulling the bits and pieces of momentary genius into a sensible narrative. It’s a very self-indulgent editing process. I get to sit there and enjoy my many moments of insight. For a moment, I can almost believe that my accumulated self is not the same idiot who thought her midnight flight was at noon the next day.
I feel like I’ve come a long way in rehabilitating my relationship with writing. I enjoy reading even more now, thanks to my newfound appreciation for the craft. It’s motivated me to take advantage of all the lectures and events in Shanghai. I’ve even joined a writers’ group chat, though I mostly lurk and rarely submit.
I can now comfortably tell people I write, and even refer to myself as a writer, sometimes. I still don’t believe it when people compliment my writing, but hey, keep ’em coming.
For 2018, I have a few writing aspirations:
Finish my damn drafts
I currently have about 35 drafts sitting in Medium, with topics ranging from “Google Translate is Not the Enemy” to “In Praise of Copying.” Some of these drafts are over 1,000 words long. But there’s this lovely little mental barrier called procrastination that keeps me from wrestling them into finished products. But it’s just a blog, and I really need to get over myself.
Must battle.
Submit to literary magazines and publications
With the blog, I get to post whenever and whatever. But it would be really awesome to have a byline. I still suffer from serious impostor syndrome in this area because I’ve only written professionally from inside a big company. You’d think that would make me more confident. My words have been printed, after all. But they don’t bear my name. And they shouldn’t, because a piece of corporate content is much much more than just one writer’s work.
It’ll be good to get used to rejection in a different arena, and to learn to work with themes and limitations.
Try my hand at fiction
Watching Black Panther got me dreaming about when we’ll ever see a film like that celebrating Chinese culture and our diaspora. And before that film gets made, I’m going to be dreaming up stories.
Until next time.
