Ava Huang
Essayist and Substack writer
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Ava Huang is an essayist who writes the Substack Ava Huang's Substack and works as a copywriter. The most useful thing to learn from her is to write a set amount every day, accept imperfect drafts, and let the writing come from what you actually pay attention to.
just throw out everything you have and believe there's something better
The Secret to Writing with Emotion, Without Oversharing — Ava Huang
Ava Huang: the story and the lessons
1Ava Huang's path to essay writing
Huang started with poetry and moved to essays about five years ago. As a teenager she thought she would only write poetry. Poetry taught her to convert a feeling straight into words.
She calls poetry the hardest form because it has to land in very few words.
Huang writes because she ruminates and needs words to make experience real. She sees herself as calm and cheery but swings between emotional extremes. She can't leave experience implicit.
Without rumination she doesn't think she would write. Putting a memory on the page lets her choose which parts to expand instead of just replaying it.
Her Substack began as a place to dump thoughts with no readers expected. She treats it as a space for work that isn't embarrassing, where crickets are okay.
It works for her because she writes when an emotion arises, and emotions always arise. She tried keeping a journal about 15 times and couldn't.
A copywriting job feeds her writing and removes the agonizing. She is asked to speak to resonant human truths without self-help jargon. The job also removes the hours she used to spend agonizing over feeling uninspired.
2Ava Huang's daily practice and how she gets unstuck
Huang went from about five sessions a year to 1,000 words a day. In 2020 she committed to a daily word count. She says it transformed her writing.
Her advice to friends who want to write more is to set a word count and write every day. She cites Billy Wilder: the muse has to know where to find you.
She gives herself permission to write badly in private. If you can't write a thousand words you're unhappy with in a Google doc only you see, you can't practice. Without practice you can't improve.
She says anyone with some aptitude who writes a thousand words a day will get a lot better, as long as they adjust course instead of repeating blindly.
She stops each session mid-thought, a habit borrowed from Murakami. Murakami always stops while he still has something to say, so he knows how to continue the next day.
Huang thinks it is a really good strategy.
She treats writer's block as a cue to go live and read. Block happens when nothing in your mind wants to be put down. She reads, talks with people and exposes herself to new things until it passes.
She no longer agonizes over dry spells because past ones always ended.
Huang throws out first ideas and digs deeper, as Louis C.K. did. Louis C.K. could not write good jokes until he heard another comedian say he threw out his material all the time. He then kept discarding and digging deeper.
Her takeaway: others have dug deeper than you and are still finding things, so you are not close to the deepest point.
She enjoys writing more since accepting that difficulty means nothing. On early fiction, with 20,000 words written and 40,000 to go, she couldn't tell if it was going well. Her feeling then was frustration and anxiety.
Difficulty is not proof you are a good or a bad writer. Writing is fun when she gets over herself.
3How Ava Huang turns experience into prose
Huang writes best when carried by a mood and translating it directly. She feels the emotion, sits down, and converts it into words instead of starting from an intellectual point she wants to make.
She learned this from poetry as a teenager.
She writes only about what she actually pays attention to. Someone told her to write from reality and write what she pays attention to, which unlocked her. She can't write convincingly about interiors if she doesn't notice them.
She points to the Cup of Joe lifestyle blog, where a short post about nail polish feels essential because it matters to the author.
She refuses to write any line she knows is a cliche. When she catches herself writing a rote phrase, she finds another way to say it. First drafts come out washed out and almost copied and pasted.
She also rephrases what moves her in other writers, which brings her own essence to the idea.
Huang lets plain words carry intense emotion. In minimalist writing every line has a point. The power comes from the gap between simple words and intense feeling.
A breakup where someone just says they're leaving is her example. She agrees with David Perell's Nabokov example, the line contrasting a broken heart with a broken life.
She writes dialogue as a recreation, not a transcript. Transcribing three days of real conversation would make bad novel material. Good dialogue distills the essence of what was said.
She says there is no single right style. She cites Woody Allen and The Lobster as stylized dialogue, and Sally Rooney as shockingly real.
She edits toward simplicity by cutting what is extraneous. She leans toward more adjectives and more complex sentences, so her editing goal is to reduce and simplify.
She doesn't fight her nature. She distills it to the best of itself, and names Nabokov as a favorite maximalist while saying she isn't one.
She collects notes as bullets, then expands them into a post. Her post on taste began as a page of bullets: quotes, conversations with friends, things she noticed.
She treats notes from experiences the same way, jotting just enough to recall the moment.
She thinks by talking to friends and by writing. Most of her inspiration comes from saying a half-formed thought to a friend, who adds to it. She says she thinks better on the page than in real time.
Perell calls conversation the first draft of writing, and compares the page to renting a house instead of hopping between Airbnbs.
4How Ava Huang handles rejection, readers and taste
Huang overcame perfectionism by showing imperfect work. She was a perfectionist afraid of rejection. Accepting her work as imperfect made it better, because you have to look at it for what it is and let others see it.
She says psychedelics helped her see that much of the rejection existed only in her own mind.
She holds low expectations for reception and high standards for the work. Half the time, what she expects people to like is not what they respond to.
Treating publishing as a huge event makes silence feel like everyone hates the work.
She finds comfort in the idea that nobody is gossiping about her weak posts. Dolly Alderton's therapist called it narcissistic to imagine peers discussing how bad her writing was. Weak work is more likely just unread.
If someone attacks her for an opinion, Huang treats that as on them, not on her.
She lets readers guide her but teaches them to like her work. What resonates shapes what she writes, but she also makes clear which work is hers even when it isn't the most popular.
If you only follow the audience, you end up making things other people like and you don't. Her ideal reader is someone where she was five years ago.
She asks readers what hits and what doesn't, not for line edits. That feedback matters more to her than sentence-level edits. Readers can often find what you are trying to say.
Getting better means learning to see what is essential and what is extraneous. She envies friends in MFA workshops for the two years of critiquing and being critiqued.
Huang built her own taste by borrowing other people's. She had no taste when young and read reviews of every movie she watched. After enough time she could trust her own verdict.
She calls her taste a work in progress.
The Secret to Writing with Emotion, Without Oversharing — Ava Huang
Ava Huang explains how to write with emotional honesty by turning ordinary experience into prose, and why practice and public feedback matter more than talent or inspiration. Her most useful habit is a daily word count that lets the muse find her at her desk, paired with the willingness to throw out first ideas and dig deeper.
Huang started with poetry and moved to essays about five years ago. As a teenager she thought she would only write poetry. Poetry taught her to convert a feeling straight into words.
She calls poetry the hardest form because it has to land in very few words.
Huang writes because she ruminates and needs words to make experience real. She sees herself as calm and cheery but swings between emotional extremes. She can't leave experience implicit.
Without rumination she doesn't think she would write. Putting a memory on the page lets her choose which parts to expand instead of just replaying it.
Her Substack began as a place to dump thoughts with no readers expected. She treats it as a space for work that isn't embarrassing, where crickets are okay.
It works for her because she writes when an emotion arises, and emotions always arise. She tried keeping a journal about 15 times and couldn't.
A copywriting job feeds her writing and removes the agonizing. She is asked to speak to resonant human truths without self-help jargon. The job also removes the hours she used to spend agonizing over feeling uninspired.
Huang went from about five sessions a year to 1,000 words a day. In 2020 she committed to a daily word count. She says it transformed her writing.
Her advice to friends who want to write more is to set a word count and write every day. She cites Billy Wilder: the muse has to know where to find you.
She gives herself permission to write badly in private. If you can't write a thousand words you're unhappy with in a Google doc only you see, you can't practice. Without practice you can't improve.
She says anyone with some aptitude who writes a thousand words a day will get a lot better, as long as they adjust course instead of repeating blindly.
She stops each session mid-thought, a habit borrowed from Murakami. Murakami always stops while he still has something to say, so he knows how to continue the next day.
Huang thinks it is a really good strategy.
She treats writer's block as a cue to go live and read. Block happens when nothing in your mind wants to be put down. She reads, talks with people and exposes herself to new things until it passes.
She no longer agonizes over dry spells because past ones always ended.
Huang throws out first ideas and digs deeper, as Louis C.K. did. Louis C.K. could not write good jokes until he heard another comedian say he threw out his material all the time. He then kept discarding and digging deeper.
Her takeaway: others have dug deeper than you and are still finding things, so you are not close to the deepest point.
She enjoys writing more since accepting that difficulty means nothing. On early fiction, with 20,000 words written and 40,000 to go, she couldn't tell if it was going well. Her feeling then was frustration and anxiety.
Difficulty is not proof you are a good or a bad writer. Writing is fun when she gets over herself.
Huang writes best when carried by a mood and translating it directly. She feels the emotion, sits down, and converts it into words instead of starting from an intellectual point she wants to make.
She learned this from poetry as a teenager.
She writes only about what she actually pays attention to. Someone told her to write from reality and write what she pays attention to, which unlocked her. She can't write convincingly about interiors if she doesn't notice them.
She points to the Cup of Joe lifestyle blog, where a short post about nail polish feels essential because it matters to the author.
She refuses to write any line she knows is a cliche. When she catches herself writing a rote phrase, she finds another way to say it. First drafts come out washed out and almost copied and pasted.
She also rephrases what moves her in other writers, which brings her own essence to the idea.
Huang lets plain words carry intense emotion. In minimalist writing every line has a point. The power comes from the gap between simple words and intense feeling.
A breakup where someone just says they're leaving is her example. She agrees with David Perell's Nabokov example, the line contrasting a broken heart with a broken life.
She writes dialogue as a recreation, not a transcript. Transcribing three days of real conversation would make bad novel material. Good dialogue distills the essence of what was said.
She says there is no single right style. She cites Woody Allen and The Lobster as stylized dialogue, and Sally Rooney as shockingly real.
She edits toward simplicity by cutting what is extraneous. She leans toward more adjectives and more complex sentences, so her editing goal is to reduce and simplify.
She doesn't fight her nature. She distills it to the best of itself, and names Nabokov as a favorite maximalist while saying she isn't one.
She collects notes as bullets, then expands them into a post. Her post on taste began as a page of bullets: quotes, conversations with friends, things she noticed.
She treats notes from experiences the same way, jotting just enough to recall the moment.
She thinks by talking to friends and by writing. Most of her inspiration comes from saying a half-formed thought to a friend, who adds to it. She says she thinks better on the page than in real time.
Perell calls conversation the first draft of writing, and compares the page to renting a house instead of hopping between Airbnbs.
Huang overcame perfectionism by showing imperfect work. She was a perfectionist afraid of rejection. Accepting her work as imperfect made it better, because you have to look at it for what it is and let others see it.
She says psychedelics helped her see that much of the rejection existed only in her own mind.
She holds low expectations for reception and high standards for the work. Half the time, what she expects people to like is not what they respond to.
Treating publishing as a huge event makes silence feel like everyone hates the work.
She finds comfort in the idea that nobody is gossiping about her weak posts. Dolly Alderton's therapist called it narcissistic to imagine peers discussing how bad her writing was. Weak work is more likely just unread.
If someone attacks her for an opinion, Huang treats that as on them, not on her.
She lets readers guide her but teaches them to like her work. What resonates shapes what she writes, but she also makes clear which work is hers even when it isn't the most popular.
If you only follow the audience, you end up making things other people like and you don't. Her ideal reader is someone where she was five years ago.
She asks readers what hits and what doesn't, not for line edits. That feedback matters more to her than sentence-level edits. Readers can often find what you are trying to say.
Getting better means learning to see what is essential and what is extraneous. She envies friends in MFA workshops for the two years of critiquing and being critiqued.
Huang built her own taste by borrowing other people's. She had no taste when young and read reviews of every movie she watched. After enough time she could trust her own verdict.
She calls her taste a work in progress.