Writing as self-flagellation

I want my writing to make me bleed.

Dear friend,

Please forgive me if everything I write sounds like vacuous, wordy swagger. Nothing from my heart is philosophically sound.

I used to write because it brought me joy; now I write because it hurts not to. Is the absence of pain the same as pleasure? I try not to dwell on this question because I’m scared of the answer. I’ve wanted to be a writer for so long—or so I’ve told myself—that I do not know who I’d be if I no longer desired it.

I cannot call myself a writer for the same reason I shy away from the label of “intellectual”—it feels like a title that must be earned, not one to claim for oneself. I don’t feel deserving of it now. My writing is still too guarded, too inelegant, not raw enough. I want my writing to make me bleed.

Do I love writing? I don’t know. It’s what I do every chance I get—before class, after class, during class, when I can’t sleep, when I should sleep but my fingers continue to type, type, type away. But it feels more like a panicked regurgitation than a practiced art form. I read my own work and am always dissatisfied. I worry that I’ve been writing in the same manner for the last five years; I don’t know whether that’s a sign of stagnation or just the cultivation of my “voice.”

It’s easy to craft a façade of excellence when you tie your work to an institution. I’m comfortable writing for school assignments and publications when I can grok what my audience wants and there’s an editor who helps make my writing more palatable. Writing online is a different beast. It feels like clumsily stripping in front of a partner for the first time, except your partner is an internet mob that will lacerate you without hesitation if they don’t like what they see.

So here I am—creases, scars, pimples, and all. I’m forcing myself to post these publicly and share them with people whose opinions I care far too much about because living in the space between my mind and a Google Doc is sad, lonely, and unproductive. Not unproductive in the neoliberal optimization sense, but in the sense that if I continue to speak only with myself and rewrite the same sentences over and over, I might go insane.

But enough of this self-flagellation. I know that many of my insecurities about writing are near-universal. The challenge is to accept that I will never have an original idea and still have the audacity to share my thoughts anyway. From Mark Twain:

“There is no such thing as a new idea. It is impossible. We simply take a lot of old ideas and put them into a sort of mental kaleidoscope. We give them a turn and they make new and curious combinations. We keep on turning and making new combinations indefinitely; but they are the same old pieces of colored glass that have been in use through all the ages.”

A sweet Twitter friend recently asked me for writing advice, and the only thing I felt qualified to tell her was to read more and widely. I’m trying to do the same. Half the writing process, I think, is scavenging for colored glass within texts far greater than those we could ever write. The other half is polishing and repurposing them into our own pebbles of truth.

Other things I try to remind myself:

• Don’t overdo the parallelism and polysyndeton.

• Vary and shorten your sentences. The reader needs to breathe.

• Edit ruthlessly. You can probably cut each piece down by half.

• Forceful verbs > adverbs.

• Stop trying to sound impressive. People can tell.

• Just write, write, write and get it out into the world.

Twitter is nice because I am constrained by a character limit, and because it’s utterly meaningless. Nobody expects anything from a Tweet. I don’t want anyone to expect anything from my writing, and I want to approach everything I read the same way. I’d like everything to be non-transactional: to love unconditionally, to write without regard, to give without seeking anything in return. I’d like to just be.

With love,

Ash

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(P.S. I’d love to hear from you! Tell me what you enjoyed, what you disagreed with, what you want to know more about. My DMs are always open on Twitter (@ashleydzhang), or you can comment on the Substack post. Thank you for reading. ❤️)