The Secret to Writing with Emotion, Without Oversharing — Ava Huang

Often rejections in our own minds. You have to confront and get feedback, look your own work in the face. So when you have writer's block, what do you do? Living life and writing when you can and making time for it, but also not agonizing is super helpful. Mmm, that's cool. It's okay if you put it out there and there's just crickets. Well, there's the crickets of a difference, and then there's hatred, and that's the one I struggle with. How can you get better if you don't practice? And how can you practice if you're embarrassed about writing badly? Every single thing that you write is gonna be critique. Get used to it, baby, because that's the real world. Ha Yeah, exactly! Ava, you have a line where you talk about avoiding clichés in your writing, and you say that you're trying to reach beyond consensus. And I think that's such a beautiful way of describing... The written word. Thank

you. I also do some copywriting on the side and, um, for the start I would do copywriting for there's like this real focus on kind of trying to speak to these like resonant truths of the human experience, but avoiding using this kind of like self help jargon. And so as someone who writes self help, I feel like I find myself thinking a lot about that. Like. There's universality to the kind of things that I'm trying to write about and describe, but I also want to talk about in a way that doesn't feel like already packaged because people have heard that a lot of times before. So how do you get there? Like, how do you get beyond that first, second layer? Because I find so often in my own writing... What comes out at the beginning is striped and it's almost copied and pasted. It's sort of washed out and it has like they've done these brain studies of how readers experience words that they're familiar with phrases that they're familiar with and ones that come alive in

the brain actually lights up differently. And so so much of my own writing is trying to figure out how do I get there? I can't remember the name of the book, but I feel like it's pretty common advice. Just like yeah, Never write anything that you know is a cliche and I feel like I just try to really internalize that where Whenever I feel myself putting down a sentence I know is like kind of wrote, I just try to like find another way to say it.

And so I feel like for me, that's a starting point of like just avoiding the things I know are kind of like jargon or like common phrases. How do you get deeper? Is it time, effort, conversation,

reading, walking? I think reading is a lot of it. Um, I have a friend who's also a writer who says that she always listens to music when she writes and then, She gets kind of inspiration from that, like, whatever is being discussed in the song and just like rephrases it in her own writing, like kind of almost subconsciously. I feel like it's things like that, where like, you're getting influences from other people and just kind of rewording it in your own way, and that's a way of kind of like getting that emotional resonance, but also like, By rephrasing and rewriting, you kind of bring your own essence to it as well.

Emotional resonance. What do you mean by that? I really feel that most of us have like a pretty similar emotional experience. Like obviously there's a lot of variants, but there's a sense that like, you know, to be human, if you're a human and nothing human is

alien to you, right? Like that's a line. And I really believe that where I think a lot of people kind of share the same commonality, like the same threads through emotional experience. So if I write about my experience, it's kind of like the personal is universal, right? Where like, I don't really think there's almost any aspect of my experience,

like at least emotionally speaking, that someone else doesn't feel. How do you feel about the difficult emotions and not running away from them and actually trying to turn up the volume of those and then try to translate them to the page? It's easier to write about difficult emotions than easy emotions, just because, um, I think the woman who writes Grief Bacon, she wrote this in one of her essays, basically like sadness is really easy to analyze, whereas like happiness, it's hard to say something very like novel about happiness, right? And so I actually find like writing about anxiety or like, let's say you're writing about like, I don't know, writer's block, like it's very easy to pick that apart. It's actually like, to me, harder to write about, like. Everything in my life is like going really well. Like you almost have nothing to say Do you feel like a lot of the great writers in the past have had to sabotage themselves? So

that they actually did have something to write about this is actually something I think about a lot Like it's uh, just like the idea whether writers can have happy lives. I'm sure you think about this as well Ready to end this podcast right now no, because uh, yeah, because most writers have a lot of emotional problems like that's kind of Most artists do, right? And I think it comes from the sense of like, if you don't have extreme emotional experience, what do you have to write about? I think that's something that like basically everyone who writes thinks about. And so I actually keep like a running file of people who seem like they're great authors, but also pretty happy. So Anne Patchett is one of them.

And I've read a bunch of her essays and she had She definitely had a very difficult childhood. I'm not saying she's had an easy life, but she also has like, she writes about this like a very happy marriage and like, you know, she's like so productive. She's written all these amazing novels, but she seems to have like a pretty serene life with like meaningful friendships and relationships. And I hope I'm not like misrepresenting her experience, but she seems very happy. What do you think she's doing? Like how is she tapping into the well of creative wonder? I really don't know. I think maybe there's something like.

You obviously can still have a very nuanced appreciation of the human experience and a very nuanced appreciation of your own life without having to live a very extreme life. Like, I think maybe some people are just better at that, where they can kind of write and think about the human experience without having to kind of dip into the extremes in their own kind of like, lived life. I think Haruki Murakami is also kind of like this, right? Like, he talks about how... I don't know, he runs five miles a day and he's been married to the same person for a long time and he doesn't like to, like, he doesn't like to have that many things going on in his life and he thinks that helps him write, but not everyone's like that, I think.

Didn't you go on a huge Murakami binge? Murakami was one of, I remember I first read him when I was a teenager and I read, yeah, the Wind Up Bird Chronicle and just read nothing but Murakami for like the next few months. I was like really entranced. What was it? And I think the dreaminess to his writing, it's, you know, a mix of kind of surreal and realism at the same time. And so there's a sense when you read his work where you're kind of transported to something that's like different from where you are, but also very similar, which I think is very unique.

When you're reading somebody like Murakami, are you reading for like tools and methods that you

can bring into your own writing or is it much more a process of getting lost in their work? And it just so happens that. Something about the residue of their words, Robost, in your, in your craft. I think everyone who reads takes away something from what they're reading. So there's obviously, even subconsciously, this element of like, I'm trying to see what the person does and take something away from that, but when I started trying to write fiction, I definitely started thinking a little bit more about, like, like, how does dialogue work?

Like, I never really thought about that consciously before. I never was like, how does someone write dialogue? And then when I started trying to write dialogue, I was confronted with the realization that I didn't know how dialogue was supposed to work. Like I never thought about it consciously. And then for a while, I started kind of reading novels, almost like thinking more about the process and the craft. How does dialogue work? I think dialogue works differently for different authors. That was very comforting for me to learn, where I think we see this in movies too. Like in some movies, the way characters talk is not realistic at all. It's kind of like, you can tell the author is just like, He's making the characters talk the way he wants to talk. It might not actually be the way he really talks in real life. It's like you're using the dialogue as a way of like getting your style or your point across. Um, I think Yeah, I mean, Woody Allen movies are a

very famous example of that. Also, uh, you know, The Lobster, if you've seen that, like, no one in The Lobster or his other movie, Killing the Sacred Deer, like, talks like real people do.

It's very stylized. And so I think that's one approach where it's like a very stylized approach to dialogue. And then, like, there are authors who manage to make dialogue feel very natural. And I think that's like very impressive to me, um, where. The ability to simulate very natural conversations. I always like when I read Sally Bruni's writing, like, oh, like, the conversations feel like shockingly real. And that's something, I don't know how she does that, it's amazing. And then I think there's just kind of like books that avoid dialogue, like characters talk to each other. When they need to, and it's kind of like more minimal and sparse, but dialogue is not a huge part of a novel. So I think there's a lot of different styles and approaches, which is converting. It's funny how shockingly real is such an achievement. You would think that shockingly real would be what comes out inevitably, but actually

there's something in the natural communication of dialogue that is a distortion of how people actually communicate. Yes. Like, I don't think you would make a very good novel if we started literally transcribing our conversations, right? Sure, yeah. Like. If you and I talked on and off for three days, and then I transcribe everything we said and put it in a book, it probably wouldn't make for very good novel material, and so there's a sense of, like, I think dialogue has to be sort of a recreation, almost, where, like, The essence is different from what's literally being said and authors who are really good at writing dialogue can somehow like well the essence down and also the there's such a power launch in terms of the intensity of dialogue and you know one question is how do you make the mundane interesting and then I also got a pretty big fight with someone I love recently and I'm sure that the dialogue from that and the the raw emotion and

intensity of that moment you Would have been very captivating, you know, especially when you combine dialogue and the twitches of the face and, you know, the, the movement of the arms of closing and opening up and body language, you know, that's another way to think about is, are you trying to communicate just the mundane or are you trying to communicate these more extreme parts of, of life? I know some people say like. Every scene should have a point, and I think about that a lot when I'm reading actually, just kind of how for really minimalistic writing, every kind of piece of dialogue actually does have a point, even when they're saying something pretty mundane, and so like, I think that's maybe when it works for like, The, maybe the dialogue is simple on the surface, but like, you know, yeah, let's say you're having a breakup or a fight.

Like the simplicity of what's being said is kind of contrasted with like the intensity of what's being expressed. Like if someone's like, yeah, like I'm leaving you, like that might be very simple, but it's like a very intense emotional expression. Yeah. There's a line from the Bokovs, you broke my heart, but she merely broke my lice. And I love that turn of phrase. I think that's it. And just this juxtaposition between you broke my heart, the simplicity of that, but that being worse than breaking a life. And I just think there's so much in it. It's like seven words, eight words. There's so much in that. Yeah, I know what you're talking about.

I think it's like a conversation between Humbert and I think Lo now grown up. I think, yeah, she's talking about like kind of the contrast between like, yeah, emotionally devastating breakup and like. Someone literally like ruining your life permanently. It's like very beautiful. I mean, people say like, don't read him when you're writing because it'll make you depressed, which I think is... And he's the exception. Like, I think he's probably my favorite author in some ways. Um, but there's something amazing about the fact that his writing is, it's not minimalistic at all. It's like maximalist writing. Yeah.

But it's so incredibly poignant at the same time. What do you go for in your writing? Like, do you have almost like an Eva style guide, an Eva? Goal thing that you're going for. Where is it? Like, I don't know. It's all invisible to me. A lot of it is subconscious, but one thing I aim for is like, I don't think I'm necessarily a good maximalist. So when I edit or when I read my writing, like my goals kind of reduce it, like simplify.

Um, I think I lean towards like more adjectives, like more complex sentences and. I generally have a sense that I should probably like not do that. Do you want to fight that nature or do you want to surrender to your nature as a writer and sort of work with it? Yeah, you can change your nature, but you want to distill it down to like the best of it. Um, and so I think that's what I try to do when I edit, just like take out everything that's extraneous. How much does that vibe or sort of clash with your tastes? Hmm. It's hard to say. I feel like it's very hard to analyze your own writing the way you analyze other people's. And so I don't really necessarily like compare my, I don't like reread my own writing and like compare it to someone else's. It's more just like I try to look at what I like in other people's writing and like see if like my own offense, any of my principles basically.

We're talking about agony and grief and pain, like. I do find that like when the temperature and the noise of those emotions gets opened up, it's like there is something that's coming out of my body that creates a much more honest prose than when things are just coming from my mind. I feel like there's something really special about, I don't know if this happens often when you write, but kind of like, Just being carried by a mood, you know? I guess that happens to everyone, like, and, like, kind of the writing just comes right out of the mood. Like, you feel a certain, like, emotion, or an almost, like, an emotion that comes along with the idea, and then you sit down and the whole thing just comes out. I feel like that's the best. Versus, like, trying to come at it, like you said, from a very, like, intellectual place. I used to write poetry when I was younger. I don't anymore, but I think poetry comes from this kind of very primal

emotional place. Like, you're not trying to come from a place, like, This is like the intellectual point I'm trying to make, like this is coming from like a very like head forward place, it's more like I have an emotion I'm converting into words and I feel that even for a prose like that works the best for me where when I'm trying to convey a certain feeling and just translating that directly, I feel like the writing is easiest. Why have you stopped writing poetry? When I was growing up, like when I was, I don't know, like a teenager, I always thought I was going to grow up and only write poetry. And so it was very funny to me when around, I don't know, five years or so, I started, stopped writing poetry and started only writing like essays and like things like that.

Do you feel like you're missing something by not writing poetry? Or do you feel like stages in your life, man, you know, you just move on from one thing to another? I think they're just saying that, like, every writer wants to be a poet, and those who fail to become poets become short story writers, and those who can't write short stories write novels. I really, I really believe that. I think poetry is the hardest, and you know what I'm saying? I mean,

obviously this is a bit hyperbolic. It's not like writing novels isn't hard, but it's kind of the sense of, like, being able to write something poignant in, like, that little, like, So a few words is very rare, I think, and most people need more words. One thing I've just been grappling with so much is just how to write in a way that the reader experiences my writing from a place of emotion and feeling and not just raw intellect. And how do you bring that out of yourself? The goal is always to transcribe the emotional experience, honestly, um, where I think the writers, I like them mostly. Yeah, when they were writing about something sad, they can make me cry. Um, and I think it's sort of like what we're seeing with dialogue where it's not necessarily like a literal transcription, it's kind of like somehow putting into words like the essence of the emotional experience. That might mean like recreating in a very different way,

but like somehow I think people I really like to read, they're able to just succinctly capture the emotional experience, um, in a scene or in a story. I think I think of myself as like very serene and I think I'm very like cheery for the most part, which is maybe why like going back to our previous point, why I'm interested in writers who have happy lives. I swing between emotional extremes. I think I'm generally pretty calm, but at the same time, um, I think people write because they ruminate.

And so, yeah, like naturally, If I didn't like to ruminate, I don't think I would write. What's ruminating? Ruminating is kind of like thinking obsessively about particular things, or that's how I think about it, at least, where, yeah, I think the impulse. To write comes from the impulse to deconstruct, and so if you're someone who doesn't want to deconstruct on some level, like, I think it's, it's less common to write if you don't want to deconstruct, because like, it has to come from somewhere, right? And I think for a lot of people, it's this idea of like, I had the lived experience, and now I want to deconstruct it in some way.

There's obviously lots of people in the world who have amazing lives, like, whether they're, like, athletes or, like, actresses or, like, you know, there's lots of people in the world who have amazing experiences, like, their lives are very exciting, but not all of those people want to write about their lives at all. And so I feel like there's some impulse to deconstruct that has to be within the person. I literally don't understand people who have experiences and they don't try to make sense of them through, through words and structure. They're just like, yeah, I had the experience. I'm good to go. Like, I literally think those people are clinically insane. But like, I'm probably the one who's clinically insane of like... I need to make sense of my experiences to like actually make them explicit or something. I'm not comfortable with the implicit. It's as if I can't put it into, into words. It's not real or something. Yeah. Um, amongst all my friends who write, they all say

that like, Writing is thinking basically, of course it wouldn't work for everyone, but I definitely feel that I'm able to think better on the page than I am in real time. What I would say is think deeper. And the reason I would say that is because you see this in meditation, right? The mind wanders, it skips, right? And it's almost like a game of hot potato from one topic to the next. And writing almost places a pillar in your mind that you're attached to and so the only place you can go is down and that for me is what writing does, is it forces me to stay in the same place. It's like renting a house instead of skipping between Airbnbs or something. Yeah, and You can hold more on the page than in your mind, obviously, where I think anyone who wants to make a particular argument or advance like a point,

like, I don't know, maybe some people can, but most people can't hold a very, very complex, like, you know, you can't write a whole dissertation in your head usually. So, you need to be able to, like, Concretize it and see it on the page and that like I'm active externalizing your memory allows you like you said to go deeper I like some of the stuff that you've written about writing as an expansion of experience It's a really beautiful idea that you have an experience and as you try to make sense of it You're almost choosing what moments what feelings You want to zoom in on and magnify there's something about like having agency over how you Narrativize memory and that's very interesting to me where you can choose What direction you want to ruminate basically like what where you want to expand it and how you want to think about it? that to me is very important because I think we actually have an active choice and like Obviously how we create our narratives

and like what part of the narratives we focus on And for me, like, writing is about, like, I'm making decisions about what's important to me and what parts of the emotional, you know, experience I'm trying to, like, keep down versus, like, which ones I'm gonna let just fade away. What do you think you're trying to narrativize towards? Happiness? Depth? Richness? Vitality? I think for me, maybe it's, like, capturing, like, the emotional range of my everyday life. Um...

Where I think it goes back to like that sense of wanting to really zoom in, hold on to like the resonance, um, where there are all these small moments that are like deeply meaningful, but like, they're not necessarily like these grand narrative arcs or like good stories. They're just kind of like small moments that happen in your life that are like really important. Like, you know, having a conversation with someone you love or like having a relationship or... The How I Write podcast. Yeah, exactly. I think there are things that don't necessarily make for these kind of very dramatic stories, but are, like, deeply meaningful, and to me, there's almost, like, no other way to explain them.

I like this juxtaposition that you're pointing at between the internal experience of something being meaningful and the external experience. Yeah. Like, I once was on a train,

it was an Amtrak from New York to D. C., I sat down next to an 82 year old woman who was getting back in the dating game. And we just talked the entire time, just total stranger, had a beautiful conversation about life and everything. That sounds so trite to an outsider, and my experience of it was deeply meaningful. And I think that a lot of the writing that I really like is when somebody can take something that does feel routinized and show the emotional range and texture and richness of that experience. I think writers who don't really need plots.

Yeah, it's like always really amazing. And like, I think you're totally right where, yeah, you can have like two different books about like, I don't know, like a female friendship and it's just about the friendship itself. And, you know, maybe it's not like a very dramatic friendship really is just about like the dynamic between two people. And when these books obviously can be like deeply meaningful and poignant and the other can feel very banal and it's like really about, I think like the author's ability to kind of capture that sense of like meaning and emotional importance. Yeah, I mean, you see this when people talk about novels all the time, right? The famous question, what's it about? Sometimes, that's captivating. Other times, the answer to that is not compelling at all. It's just like, you have to read this. Um, I just read a great novel called, I think it's called Pineapple Street. I'm just about to finish it. But it's basically just about like, it's about a family.

It's about a family that lives in like Brooklyn Heights and it's like, Very good. It's kind of like clever. It's funny, but if I told someone about it, I would just be like, Hey, like you should read it. I would say these things about like how it's clever and funny and poignant. But I would not really say anything about the plot because it's not like a book. There's no way I can explain how it's good by describing any of the events in the actual novel basically. So you're reading a book. What sort of notes are you taking? Are you writing down direct quotes, observations, feelings? Quotes a lot of time. Um, I'm a big like highlighter. So I really like to highlight specific passages and I usually just go back to those passages to kind of recreate, like, the thought I had at the moment. Um, and so for me, like, my notes are usually not very good. They're very brief, but they're more just like to remind me, like, To look at

specific things and then when I look at the things themselves, like I can kind of recreate the memory of what I wanted to capture. How about notes from experiences? I would say I kind of turn my notes from my experiences into like longer writing. So it's sort of similar. I just take down enough to recall whatever I was trying to get at. And then like later I'll just expand it into like, subsect post or essay or something. Walk me through how that actually works and experience that you had the notes that you wrote how that became a post oh, I think um, yeah, we talked about this, but I wrote like a short post on taste and Taste is something it's like I think Susan Sontag was the one who said like sensibility It's the hardest thing to write about and so it's very interesting to me But I didn't really know what I want to say about it and so I just had like um, basically like a notes page where I just like I wrote

down kind of like quotes, conversations I had with friends, like things I noticed my own experience. It's just kind of like bullet point. And then like at some point I sat down and just kind of tried to flush out all of those bullet points and that ended up being the post. And where were those bullet points coming from? Walks around the city, visits to museums, conversations, reading? A lot of conversations and reading. My friend said to me recently that she thinks, like, conversations, like writing, are also a way to think, and I definitely find that where talking to friends, like, most of where I get any kind of inspiration to write, like, it's usually, like, I'm saying some sort of like half form thought to the, as I am to you, you know, I'm just saying something that I think but hadn't fully worked out and then they usually add to it and then I'm able to refine it or they say something totally new and I incorporate that

and so I find conversations really helpful. And obviously, like, reading is very helpful. I grew up in San Francisco, and there's this place called the Tactile Dome. This is what I think of with conversation. It's sort of your eyes are closed, and you're just sort of using your hands to feel your way around the world. And as you're doing it, you're sort of expanding. And sort of creating this map, but you're just like feeling the outer limits of where you can

and can't go. And so basically it was this, this maze that you would go through in this pitch black area. And so you'd have to go, there's a slide, there's, you know, these, these, these chains and stuff like that. And I think that's a lot of what Conversation is. It has this random quality to it. It's very half baked. You don't have a very high resolution map, but you're always. Expanding the frontiers of your own consciousness. Yeah. Have you read the book Impro? No, I wanted to read that for so many years. I'm sure like 70 people have recommended it to you. I basically read it because so many people kept mentioning it to me. Yeah. I think, I mean, it's obviously about improvisation and I think good conversation is like basically good Impro, right? Where it's finding a partner who can kind of like really riff on and continue what you're saying. In a way that feels like very natural and good

for both of you guys, natural and good. Yeah, I think it's very hard to describe conversational chemistry. I don't know if you have a better framework for it. I would say aliveness is a big thing that I go for, but I suspect that your conversations probably have a slower and more contemplative. Deeper texture to them than mine. Mine for me are very exploratory. There's often a utility to them too. Trying to figure something out together. I really like conversations where we're both just going very deep on one particular obsession. That's really fun. Um, but I think it's true for everyone where, yeah, I think maybe like one way of talking about conversational chemistry is that you guys both want to kind of expand on the same thing and you can sort of expand constructively, which is Often a personality thing, um, where I think two people can be interested in the same thing, but they can't talk well about it.

And so there's something about like, not only do you both share this interest in like talking about it, you can say something useful for each other. So in Rite of Passage, we teach really three main ideas. Write from abundance, write from conversation, and write in public. And I think that one of the core ideas that we're teaching is that conversation is the first draft of writing. Conversations are the Algorithm for randomness that take you out of the myopic cycles in your mind and sort of show you new horizons and what you lack in sort of a high resolution clarity. You gain in an originality of thought and your brain just finding new land and it's intellectual map or something.

Yeah. I've been thinking about this a lot just because I've known for some number of years that to me, like whether in romantic or platonic or work relationships, like having good conversations is the most important thing, but it's like so hard to really pin down. What makes for a good conversation? And I don't know if you've had relationships like this in your life, but I've had like, just like friendships where we didn't have that conversational chemistry, like we had other things, you know, like a shared hobby or whatever.

And it's always been very confusing to me because like, it's not about intellect, really, like, it's more about compatibility, You can be with someone who's really smart and both of you guys can have, like, they can have nothing to say to you, basically, and you can't really talk to them, but, like, why is it that with someone else, you're able to kind of actually have a conversation? I don't know. Tell me about psychedelics and how those have influenced your, your writing. Before psychedelics, I was really afraid of rejection. I think a lot of people are. The main way in which psychedelics helped me was just being like, having the realization that I need to put work out there, and it's actually totally fine if my work is rejected.

And often rejection is in our own minds, right? And so I think for a lot of people who don't want to write in public, it's not because they actually think someone's going to like, I don't know, comment, I hate your writing on all of their posts. It's more like, just the possibility that something like that could happen, someone could dislike their writing is so paralyzing. And so, for me, I'm definitely kind of a perfectionist, and I think before psychedelics, like, being able to live with the imperfection of my own writing was, like, really hard. What was the story that changed in your head? I think just this realization that even if things weren't perfect, I could accept them. As they were, and that acceptance actually can make my work better. I don't think I understood that before, where like, um, you have to kind of be able to really look your work in the face and see it for what it is,

and let other people see it for what it is, before you can improve it. And so, yeah, I think this idea of like, you can just labor by yourself until it's completely perfect works for some people, but not for a lot of people. And for everyone else, like you have to kind of be able to confront and get feedback and like look your own work in the face. He's talking to a very dear friend, brilliant guy. I was like, dude. What's the hang up you got you you you speak in such brilliant ideas and you can't write what's going on We got down to love we were just like I Won't I'm where they won't feel loved if I don't write good stuff and I had this

notion that Everything needs to be so perfect. And I was like, I'll make you a deal. It's like, I'm not going to allow you to publish something that's not good. Me and one of our other friends, we're going to look at everything. We're going to make sure it's totally exceptional. We're going to look you in the face or say, this is good. But to your point about acceptance, we got to get you to a place where it can flop out there and it has no impact on your self worth.

I'm telling you, it's going to be good, but you also need to know that you might not write a banger viral article. And once you actually accept that, you'll go from this crippling resistance to a liberation. And I think it's so hard to change these stories that we have in our head. Yeah, I think there's something very important about having low expectations and high expectations at the same time, if that makes sense, where I often say that when I started writing my sub stack, one thing that really helped was that I did not, like, I didn't expect anything from it.

Like it was really a, a space for me to dump my thoughts and I didn't expect anyone to read it. And so I think there was a sense of like, wherever I write, like, I obviously don't want it to be terrible. So there's a sense of pride where like, Okay, like you want to make something that's good, so it's not embarrassing, but there's also the sense of like, it's okay if you put it out there and there's just crickets, right?

Where I think that's really important, where I think for a lot of people, um,

it takes them so long to just like, be okay putting something out there. And then like, they don't realize that like, I guess, like half the time, like, What you think other people will be excited about is not what they're excited about. And so you might like labor on something and then, you know, you put it out there and like, I don't know, you get like a little bit of a response, but really not anything. And that's like totally normal for everyone. But I think if you've like built putting it out there as big thing in your head and you put it out there and there's nothing, yeah, you just like, are like, Oh my God, everyone hates my work.

I think the psychology of writers is hilarious. So I'll talk to students and these are more the newer, younger writers. And they're like, David, we need to talk. Okay, what's going on? And so many of them come to me with two things that have They can't both be true. It's like their first post. They're like, Everybody is gonna judge me. My whole identity. I'm staking on this. Everybody.

Strangers. People I know. They're gonna look at what I publish. And they're gonna make a A judgment about who I am as a person and then at the same time, they're like, I'm frustrated because no one's reading my stuff. I'm like, how can both of those things be true? Either people are reading your stuff and then they're going to judge you or vice versa. But what I think is so funny about the creative mind and around these blocks is people twist themselves into all kinds of crazy pretzels. That to them makes sense, but once you look at them from the outside, you're like, this stuff is not adding up there.

And I think that's what's funny about creative emotions. Yeah, um, I don't know if you've read Dolly Alderton. She's like a, she's a novelist and essayist. She's mostly in the UK. Um, Or she's like more popular there. But she's really awesome. And in her book of essays, I think it's called Everything I Know About Love. Basically, at one point, she and her therapist have this exact conversation. And it's funny because she's like a very well known writer already, right? But her therapist was like, it's so narcissistic for you to imagine. Like she was describing how she imagines this like galley of her peers and mentors just like reading everything she writes and telling, like discussing amongst each other, like how bad it is, you know?

She's like, that's my fear. And her therapist was like, It's so narcissistic to, like, imagine that people are, like, sitting around talking about you. Actually, if your writing is bad, no one cares if it's bad, and that's something that's really helped me, this idea of, like, well, actually, like, if I write something that's, like, not as good as it should be, like, probably, I don't know, people will just be like, it's not that good and not read it, you know?

And so there's a sense of, like, The indifference is actually very comforting, I think. Well, there's the indifference, the crickets of indifference, and then there's hatred. And then there's like, you are a bad person because you wrote this, and that's the one I struggle with. You know, when people are coming at you, that's just like, get away from me. And that's when I want to run away from my writing. And I've had Things that i've written where that whatever that piece is upset people like i wrote a piece about austin that was just like a raw. Raw analysis of what the city is seven out of ten and everything it's a mediocre city but a great place to live and. I mean, they wanted to have witch trials for me. Wait, you said Austin is a 10 for everything? That's what Austin is. New York is 10 out of 10 in certain things, and like 2 out of 10 in other things. Austin is 7 weather, 7 food, 7 out of 10

in so many things. It's the 7 city. And it was really funny because there was even this Rorsoc test, half the people are mad at me for basically writing this super praise piece about Austin. The other half of people are saying, why would you ever live somewhere that you hate so much? And I think that that's then what creates hatred is like you're clearly striking a chord in some place. And I think that is one of the things I've had to change in my own mind about hatred. Hatred doesn't exist with something that doesn't resonate. People only hate you if you're saying something that is hitting something. Yeah. I think it's so interesting how a lot of people can't cope with someone just like expressing an opinion that's like different from theirs, it doesn't affect them. Like, yeah, it's like, let's say I think Austin's like a 10 out of 10 city, like.

Why does it matter to me if you're like, Austin is a 7 out of 10 city, you know, like, I might be like, oh, like, I don't, I disagree with this guy, but it's actually very strange if you think about it to be like, not only do I think Austin's a 10 city, I need to get really mad at everyone who disagrees. Like, I think it's a very like thin skin, kind of like, almost like externalizing your own doubt kind of reaction. I think at least for me, it's very helpful to be like, it's sort of strange if anyone reacts like that. It's like on them, not on you, you know? And I see this on Twitter a lot where, you know, there are all these people who always get like, dumped for writing, like. My marriage is like X, you know, just like some individual account of their marriage or their opinion and then people are always like, this person is the worst person alive. It's like, well, you're not in their marriage. And, you know, she's not even saying, or he's not even saying that this

is how every marriage should be. Like they're just offering an opinion piece, but obviously like no one can resist being like, you are the worst person alive for writing this. And I think that's just such an interesting reaction. Like, I don't think it's healthy to do that. Right. And so like, If someone is dunking on you for just expressing your own opinion, like, I think to some extent you have to be like, that's on them and not, not on me and be very good about keeping that boundary clear. Yeah. How does Twitter inform your creative process?

Hmm. I definitely love reading my Twitter feed and like just seeing articles, opinions. I think there's some like really good creative feats out there actually. Like I have um, ongoing, I don't know if you have this, I definitely have like a, a note file where I just like. Uh, keep links to all these tweets that I want to use for like writing or humor later, basically. And I, I do go and look at them. Um, it's funny because Twitter is so deranged, you know, and you, sometimes you really need that for inspiration. Like there's not really like when you read books, there's not really usually like 140 character, like deranged half sentences. Deranged. That's such a funny word to describe Twitter. Yeah. Or at least type of takes I really like are just, it's like. They're on Twitter because no one would necessarily like put them,

they're not kind of like these refined thoughts that are backed up with an argument, they're people like posting, like just like posting whatever comes to their mind in the moment, I think you see things that are like really true and indicative of a certain moment in culture that you would not get if people were like trying to put these in like book format or something. There's a difference between truth and resonance, and I think comedians understand this very well.

Seinfeld says start with, start with what's funny. And humor runs the show. And I think that often we're so focused on what's true that we forget about what resonates. And I wonder what kind of creative expression we're missing because of that. I think it's really hard because online the risk is like optimized too much for resonance and not enough for what's true. And I think sometimes for artists and creatives. When you're, like, away from that, you optimize too much for truth and, like, you don't optimize at all for resonance. And so, like, I feel like trying to find whatever is your individual healthiest balance for both is very important.

How can you set up audience capture in your favor? I think it's a balance between... Uh, the audience training you and you training the audience. And so, like, obviously what I write is informed partially by what resonates. If someone's like, this essay is amazing, like, I will keep that in mind. But at the same time, I think it's also really important as, like, any kind of creator to be, like, I'm going to teach you to like this, or like, I'm going to make it clear that this is part of my work, even if it's not the most popular thing.

And if you don't do that, you end up like ending up in these situations where you make things that other people like, but you don't like. What kind of audience are you going for? I feel very gratified when someone reaches out to me and they're like, Oh, like I really resonate with you. And I feel like I'm in the same place in my life that you were in like five years ago. And your writing helps me see like. You know, a model for what I could do differently or something I could change or like, maybe it does not help me at all, but like, I just feel understood. Um, I really like that. So I guess to some extent I'm writing to people who I believe are similar to me. How has your process changed since you've started taking writing so seriously?

Um, well, before I just didn't write very much. So for me, it really started when I started like writing every day and being very explicit about that. That's kind of, that kind of changed my life, basically. How does that work? In 2020, I made the decision that I'd write, like, at least a thousand words a day. That was how I started. And before, I was writing probably, like, I mean, I was always taking notes. That was the thing my whole life and reading a lot, but I probably only wrote like five times a year. And so it was a huge change for me to just like write every day. And now whenever a friend is like, Oh, I want to write more, I'm just like set a word count, write every day. Cause that really changed everything for me. Why

does quantity lead to quality? I think it's just practice. Like how can you get better if you don't practice? And how can you practice if you're embarrassed about writing badly in like a Google doc that only you see? Right? Where? Um, sometimes people will be like, Oh, I want to write more. I'm like, okay, just write a thousand words every day. And they'll be like, but I have nothing to write about. Or it's like really bad. But, like, I think that's the problem, right, where if you're not willing to, like, get a thousand words out that you're not happy with,

you can't really practice. I think it's very rare for someone to, like, not be writing every day, and then all of a sudden, like, this fully fleshed idea for something great comes to them, and every word they write is amazing. I actually think probably this happens to some people, but, like, not most of us, right? Um, so I think there's something very important about, like, I think it's like a Billy Wilder quote, like, the muse has to know where to find you. It's Earth like. You're not writing. And it always finds me at my desk at nine in the morning every day. But let's follow the muse idea. Then what are muses? Like, like, what is that pointing to? Because it's pointing to some deep truths in the, in the creative experience. I was arguing with a friend about this because I was saying that, like, I think a lot of people who are creative describe it, whether they're like, Musicians or artists or

writers or like, it feels like something beyond me coming through me and I'm just a vessel. I definitely agree with that, like that's my lived experience. But my friend was like, the muse is just what you pay attention to. It's kinda like the, the patterns that your mind creates where like often what you're experiencing as coming beyond you. It's just like something that your mind is obsessed with and that that's what creates conditions for like, what feels like inspiration.

I don't know if he's right about that. Um, I guess we can't really prove it either way, but I do think there's something interesting there about like, Maybe the reason the muse finds you when you're like writing every day is like writing creates the ability for your brain to kind of pay attention to certain things and that leads to other insights. So writing changes what you pay attention to. Yeah, I think it's kind of like you're almost creating space in your brain for you to have like certain insights or like emotions to write about.

How about writing enhances your perception of the world? I think it definitely does. Yeah, I agree with that. How do you cultivate taste? I think also a lot of practice. Um, the reason why I think about taste is because I definitely don't think I had it. And, and still now it's like a work in progress, but like, I definitely didn't feel like I had taste when I was younger. I felt like I was just mimicking other people's tastes for the longest time.

But then I felt like eventually I started having my own opinions and some of them I was actually pretty happy with. And so for me, because I kind of had this experience of like not having a sensibility and then having a sensibility emerge, I really believe it's practice where like, I just like pay attention to what other people's taste was for a long time before I developed my own. How did you develop your own? For a long time, like if I watched a movie, I needed to kind of like read reviews of it. Like I really like seeing how other people thought about it. After enough time, I suddenly felt that if I watched the movie, I could just trust my own taste. Like, I could just be like, I watch this movie and I think this is good and this is bad and I trust that and that's my experience. And so for me, it was like kind of using other people's tastes as a bridge to kind of build confidence. How would you think about

the similarities and the differences between taste and discernment? If you know what's good or bad in other people's work. you must have some sense of like what you like and then taste to me is kind of like or like creation is about like taking that and then putting something into the world so like Let's say I know exactly why I like and don't like about movies, then I take that and let's say I make my own movie and put it out in the world and it follows the principles of that taste.

How do you think about taste in terms of, can you watch movies and consume art and go to the theater? And have that inform your writing, or is your taste for quality writing going to be informed by reading other people's writing? It's very domain specific. I don't think it's domain specific, though I think seeing things in your own domain helps a lot for just like kind of thinking about craft and thinking about I don't know, kind of thinking about how like certain paragraphs are structured, um, or how someone like, uh, let's say you're trying to write a chapter and you're like, how should this chapter feel? Like, I think seeing maybe like another novel is the most useful way for that, but like even dialogue, like dialogue is in movies, dialogue is in TV shows, like there's no reason as far as I can tell why, like. You would only be able to read novels to get dialogue from those. Let's talk about the relationship between writing and love.

You write, the funny thing is that writing kind of reminds me of love. Dating is also a process of doing and redoing. Trying to find the right person in the right relationship. Even if you stay with the same person, you have to revise the relationship over and over. So there's this current New Yorker article about this philosopher, Agnes Callard, who is a professor at UChicago.

She's also a philosopher, and it's about her divorce from her first husband and her current marriage. So basically, she and a student, a grad student, fell in love, and she left her husband. And... Married him and the reason why she did that was because when she fell in love with this second guy She realized that like she's idealistic about love And she kind of felt like, once she fell in love, she realized that her first love, her first marriage wasn't true, and there was no way she could stay in a marriage that she now knew kind of didn't feel real to her, because like, to her, it was very important that love was aspirational. Um, obviously people are very conflicted about this and differing views, but I think there's something very interesting about this idea that like, love is aspirational and writing also is, and so like, in a relationship, at least how I think of it, you're striving towards some kind of true

knowledge or some kind of ideal of perfection. And I think in writing you also are. And so maybe it's more just like in everything that you care about in your life, you're striving towards some sort of perfection that you can't actually achieve. How does hard work show up in your life? Yeah, I'm very interested in repetition, basically. So I think that I really believe on some level that. You can attain perfection through extreme repetition. I think there's more to it than repetition. Like there needs to also be some sort of like high level meta. Like I just can't, I can't just repeat blindly. I have

to go towards certain course of action and like make adjustments based on how my work is going. But I think there's this idea to me, at least at like. Yeah, if you repeat something in the right way, you can get good. I really believe that. And by that, do you mean habits? I think maybe consistency is how I think about it, um, where I feel like if you, going back to like writing a thousand words a day. If you're someone who has, like, any level of aptitude for writing, it's hard for me to imagine how you couldn't get a lot better.

I think it was a memoir I read where some guy was saying that, like, he was in an MFA program and the people who wrote really good novels or became successful authors from the MFA program were not all the people who seemed the most talented, like, There were these people who, like, in the program, like, wrote these short stories and everyone was just like, eh, very mid, you know, but then later on in life, they became really good, and I don't think we see enough of that.

narrative, you know, of like, you can at some point in your life be perceived as being of like middling talent or being very average. Obviously, you know, since this person was in the MFA program, they had some amount of innate ability. So I'm not saying that like anyone can become like an amazing novelist, but I think there's a sense of like, a lot of people believe that you have to be perceived as the most talented person all your life to make something really good. I could see someone being in like a Some sort of program and being like, I don't know. I'm in the workshop and I'm clearly not the best person in the workshop Therefore I will never be like a good author and I just don't think that's true Yeah I mean one of the big things I've taken from you is Yo fall in love with your writing process and find that thing that helps you fall in love with it If you fall in love with it sort of downhill skiing the rest of the way. Yeah. Do you love her writing process? Yeah,

I think I've grown to like it a lot more. Um, when I first started writing regularly, I perceived it as very difficult and it was hard for me to make peace with that difficulty, especially when trying to write fiction. It was really hard for me if I felt like it wasn't going well. So like, let's say you're like, I don't know, you've written like 20, 000 words and you need to write like 40, 000 more words. I think it can be very painful to be like, I don't necessarily think I know what I'm doing. I don't know how well this is going and maybe it's going very badly, like kind of. I think it's like really important to actually be okay with that.

Um, and very hard to make peace with it. And so as I've made peace with that feeling, I've enjoyed my process more. When you're struggling, what is the sound and the content of your inner voice? I don't really have a internal monologue. What? Yeah. Whoa, crazy. Yeah, um, but I think the, the feeling I feel is definitely like frustration and anxiety, basically. Yeah, I feel like the internal monologue thing is funny because, um, my friends who do have one, they're always like, you can't think without words. Like you obviously can think without words. Like, there are obviously people who kind of have very... Visual or emotional thoughts, and I don't think they're actually any different. I think they're just like the same thoughts, but not with words , but I think there's like, I don't know. I guess like if you think exclusively in words, you're like, that's weird. You can't just think in images. There's a lot of debate

about the Ludwig Vichtenstein quote. The limits of your language are the limits of your world. And I think that the reason that there's debate here is some people think, yeah, if you don't have a word for something, you can't think that. And other people say, what are you talking about? You're going to constrain your reality by words? There's stuff beyond that. I do really like the one Wittgenstein line that's like, everything that can be thought can be thought clearly.

That definitely really resonates with me. It does. Yeah. Would you say everything that can be sensed can be expressed clearly? I think probably. Yeah, I think I'm a... I'm necessarily a big believer that experiences can be converted into something legible. Ava, the verbal maximalist. Definitely, yeah. Um, I think a lot of people describe certain experiences, we were talking about psychedelics, like spiritual experiences are often ineffable, but I think you can still convey them in some sense, you definitely can. Oh, this question kills me. I just, I don't think you can. I don't think you can. And the problem is I just, something about an experience that I haven't communicated doesn't feel real. And so it haunts me. But what does it mean to you to be able to clearly convey the experience? If it's like, I can make the person feel the exact same thing, I agree with you. Like I, yeah, like it's kind of like, you know,

if you describe falling in love, like, Yeah, you can't make the other person literally feel it, right? I mean, that's impossible. You can only kind of bring it out, evoke it out of them if they felt it themselves. But like, another way of saying like, I write about it clearly is just that you really do justice to that experience in your writing. And I think that's very different. So I'm more talking about the latter where I'm like, for most experiences, there's probably a way of like clearly describing them. Whether that's going to be received in the way you want, I don't know if you can control that. Oh, there's just so much lossiness, you know, it's like, I just feel like I experienced things at like a 10, 000 out of a hundred. And then I sometimes just feel like,

then my ability to write it down is like a 30. And I'm like, can I please just get that to 40 or 50? And then, like, the reader has to translate that into their own mind, and it ends up being a 7. And I just, it makes me sad and there's something that's lost in that, right? It's sort of like energy, right? Energy, there's always energy that's lost when you're trying to convert it from one form to another. And I think that there's different ways that you can approach this, right? I think of someone like David Foster Wallace. He experienced reality at 8 million out of a hundred, right? But then not only did he experience, like, what, one thing I think a lot about is, did he? Just experience reality more vividly than than most people or was he way better at? Translating what he experienced in two words. I don't know the answer. Maybe it's both though Maybe he had clearly like more sensitivity to the world his

emotions Maybe better thoughts than most people and then he was also able to like translate it better than most of us I sort of think you need both like you need the sensitivity and you need the ability to kind of translate it. I think there are probably lots of people out there who are like extremely Sensitive, but can't convey their experience. Would you rather magnify every emotion that you have by two or cut every emotion that you have in half? I think probably anyone who is creative would say like more sensitivity is better, but I'm also very into mindfulness. But I think mindfulness is more like as being at total peace with your emotional experience. And so maybe, yeah, maybe I would choose like. Having more sensitivity, I think ultimately the important thing is not like really like the intensity of the emotion But how like reconciled you are with it. I wonder if writing about difficult things

is actually enhancing There's novel I read where the woman says Um, I don't want to write about you like to to a guy because to write about you is to exercise you I don't want to exercise you yet. She actually thought that like Writing about it meant that she could move through the experience. And so I think that's the opposite perspective almost, where like, instead of being like, writing preserves this and means I have to hold onto it, writing it as a way of like, letting things go. So like, once I've totally like, written about you, then I can move on from you and let you out of my life. And like, I think that's actually why a lot of people write memoirs. Like it's not, part of it is like, you know. keeping hold of the memory. But I think the other part of it is like, maybe if I write fully about this traumatic experience, I can finally move past it. And that's very interesting to me. Yeah.

Cause a lot of my writing is, I need to grapple with something. And then once I publish it, goodbye to the idea. It's gone. It's actually no longer part of me. I really like that way of thinking about writing that like, instead of forcing you to hold on and can help you let go. The reason why I can let go is because now like it's safe. I don't journal. Um, the only way I journal is through my sub stack, basically. So I guess I, I blog, therefore I don't journal. So, it's, I journal for a living, dude. And also, I don't journal at all. I've tried to keep a journal about like 15 separate times in my life, and I can't. Um, I think the thing that writing the sub stack taught me was like, I should write when I feel like I have an emotion I want to share. And emotions always arise, so that's actually very sustainable. But for me, like, being like, I have a friend who's journaled every day for the

past 13 years, and he has a very like, fact based account of the day. So like, he'd be like, Today I recorded a podcast with David, then I went to get lunch at this place, then I met up with my friend. I can't do that, but like it really works for him. Yeah. I mean, whatever I, you know, we'll talk about writing about experiences and write a passage. And I say, it's like a trip to Paris. There's the Wikipedia experience. And then there's the talking to your friends at a bar experience. So you don't talk to friends at a bar and go, and someone says, Hey, how was Paris?

Oh, you know, there's. 6, 264, 834 people. The, the Eiffel tower is the main tourist attraction. No, you're like this with the field, the streets is this the vibe of the people, this, the texture of the croissants that you have, Oh, you got to get the espresso in the morning with the croissant. Then this would, it's like to walk around Paris. The Wikipedia fact based explanation of what Paris is, is so different from your experiential one. And I think that a lot of struggling writers don't actually realize how different those two things are. It was really helpful when someone said to me to just write from reality, like, write what you pay attention to. And that made, that was a big unlock for me because I'm like, oh, like. I can just write about whatever I do pay attention to, and I think that's why you see so much variation where like, like we talked about, like, some novels are purely dialogue. Some are just about like this person's internal emotional experience.

And some are like, you know, these beautiful descriptions of landscape and of nature. And it's like, of course I can't be someone who like doesn't write about like the interior. Like if I don't think about it, how could I be someone who can write about it? That just doesn't make any sense. Um, and once I realized that, I'm like, oh, like, duh, it's like very silly for me to expect that I can write like that when I don't pay attention to that.

And what's the shape of a thought for you, a sentence? An opening line or a sentence or just one thing you want to say, um, is the thing that Leads me to it. I think Murakami actually said that, um, when he writes novels, he always stops when he still has something to say and that's how he continues every day. Like, cause I ended today in the middle of this conversation and tomorrow I know I'm going to continue it. And that seems like a really good strategy to me. What's writer's block? Why does it happen? I think that it happens when you are not generating anything like in your mind that you want to put down.

Um, and I think it stops when you start. experiencing life in a way that makes you want to write it down again. So when you have writer's block, what do you do? I think I just try to live life basically. Like I try to read a lot, have conversations, all the stuff we talked about. I just try to expose myself to things. Um, it's interesting. I used to have a lot of anxiety about writer's block and now I have much less. I think it's because I've just experienced periods of like not being able to write and then like, It restarting again. Um, and like, now that I know that's how things work. I feel much more at peace with it.

I also feel like, um, Yeah, one thing that's interesting, I didn't think of this until you said it just now, but um, I started, I think I said it in the beginning, like I also work a job where I do kind of like copywriting type stuff. And when I started, um, a lot of people were like, Oh, like, aren't you worried it'll take away time from writing? But I just thought now that like, I think this thing I've been feeling is that it actually helps me a lot. Because it takes away the time I would spend thinking about like, today I don't feel inspired. Let me sit around for two hours like agonizing about how I don't feel inspired. Like now when I have something to write, I just write. And when I don't, I'm just like busy. So maybe I will say that for me, that's really helpful. I think, um, just living life and writing when you can and making time for it. But also not agonizing is super helpful because I am remembering now

that I used to have just these periods where I would agonize over not being able to write and that was really hard and I don't do that anymore. I was just trying to work through something a few weeks ago and I went to this place in Texas called Enchanted Rock and I climbed to the top and I did like a 30 minute meditation. I had so many ideas. I just stopped for 30 minutes and I was just like, I wrote notes the length of a bible. And it's just cause I stopped and yet, in my day to day, I'm like, must be consuming, must be productive, must keep going.

And I don't know why, but I sometimes struggle to just trust the stillness. I was talking about this with a friend. It's so easy to somehow believe that serendipity will never happen to you again. We were talking about love and she was just saying that, you know, she knows that she's going to meet her next partner, like through serendipity, a friend of a friend, a random party encounter. That's always how her relationships have happened. She was like. Somehow, I'm always convinced that this time is a time it will never happen again. And I think that you can get anxiety, or you can become very neurotic about that, where you're like, yeah, like, it's true that every other time I just kind of hung out and I started writing again, but maybe this is the one time I just hang out and then nothing ever happens. And that's just not a very good thought, I think. I've had the thought of. I might be out of good ideas go through my head so many times,

like a true existential crisis of I've had all the good ideas in my life and it's over. And I just, I'm saying that now, I'm like, why do you think like that? Yeah. Um, I know that Louis C. K. is now culturally out of favor, but I will say that I really like this talk he gave about how he started doing comedy, like for real. Like it really. Yeah, it's something that's always helped me, where he talked about how for years he wanted to be a comedian, but he couldn't write anything good, and he just had this, like, set of jokes that he knew weren't very good.

But he couldn't really, like, yeah, like, he could not actually write anything better. And basically he listened to this other comedian talk about, like, his process. And basically the comedian said, I just threw out what I write, like, all the time. And when he started, like, throwing out everything he had, digging deeper, throwing out that and digging deeper, like, that's when he was, you know, able to become a successful comedian. Uh, I think there's something about that. It's like very. Compelling to me. It's like always throw out basically, like just throw out everything you have and believe there's something better. One of the big messages of your work is that there's more inside if you keep digging. Yeah. And I think it's like, there are people who've dug deeper than you and they're still finding things.

So like, why is it that, why would I think that I've somehow like dug to the deepest point? I know I'm not even close. Right. And so there's kind of a sense of humility, I think, in knowing that like, even if you feel like you've like. Excavated the depths of like your psyche or whatever you have not. And like, you have gone way deeper and they're still digging. Is that funny how societally everybody's like, Oh, liberal arts degrees are worthless. And now everyone's like writing such a valuable skill with what's going on there. I don't know. Do you think that that's like a general cultural sentiment or is it just like in our circles? I think a little bit of both, but writing is such a valuable skill. I mean, think of the people that you're able to reach and the opportunities that you're able to have. I mean, I obviously believe this with my heart and soul. My whole life is devoted to this idea.

I definitely believe in this idea of like the life of the mind, the education of the mind, and like having an education that's dedicated to that. But at the same time, um... I have a lot of conversations with friends where like they're like, they don't necessarily believe that kind of like going through an establishment path is like what produces good writers. And obviously like there are both amazing writers who go through that path and lots who don't.

Um, and so maybe there's something like writing is like a universal thing. It's like being good at talking, you know, like we, it's obviously true that being good at talking is something that's very useful in life. Like it's critical. But we don't have, like, we don't necessarily believe that you get a degree and become good at talking. My dad sent me to public speaking sleep away camp. Wow, so you actually did go through that. And did it help? Of course it did. Mmm, okay. That's so interesting. Yeah, but then there's a lot of people who become good at talking through these incredibly, like, unconventional routes, right? And so. I think maybe like writing is like that, where like, it's universally agreed upon, that's incredibly useful, but like, how to get there, and like, what makes someone good at it, and like, what's the optimal path, I guess you probably think about this a lot, since you know, this is kind of like, Your business in your life,

but yeah, I think I definitely don't have I had to reach like a conclusion on like what actually helps people other than reading if I just threw you in front of a classroom and hey, you got to teach people to write. What would you teach them? I think some combination of like. Um, reading work that is very good and resonates with them and just like lots of practice writing about different themes. So, um, one thing I wanted to do is like take more writing workshops. Like I think the workshop model was like very interesting and I am very jealous of my friends who are like, Getting MFAs or have gone MFAs.

Cause like there is something really special. I think about just being like, I'm going to spend two years writing, critiquing other people's writing and getting critiqued. Yeah. I mean, that's something we are hardcore about in Write a Passage. Every single thing that you write is going to be critiqued, both by other students and by people on our team and get used to it, baby, because that's the real world, you know, and also critique makes you better.

But I think there's also something very powerful and this is why I like about Substack. But about this idea that like. You can just like write in real time and that's a learning experience too and that's something I never Thought about when I was growing up and it's funny because I love vlogs like I grew up as a teenager Consuming tons of vlogs like I'm like a 90s child. So it was kind of WordPress live journal era. Tumblr. Yeah yeah, and You know, actually, like a lot of people, a lot of writers, like, who become kind of like, you know, they, like, publish novels or they write for, like, these big magazines. Like, they had their, like, Tumblr phase or their WordPress. Like, a lot of people, like, learn from, like, logging and writing in real time, but that's not something we talk about very much, right?

Like, that's not, like, a way that a lot of people think about writing or at least when I grew up, I didn't think about it that way. So I think it's been really. Like an epiphany for me to realize like, Oh, I can just write in this space and like, that's a way of practicing and getting better too. And like, I can get feedback in real time. We think, I mean, I think about this all the time as we design the experience, what makes good feedback, the properly critical, properly useful, properly nurturing, but also. Discerning. Have you guys reached any conclusions about that? Oh my I could do a four hour podcast about this Yeah, I definitely feel like for me like the most helpful feedback is kind of like what hits and what doesn't hit Yeah, like that is cold.

Yes. No Yeah, yeah, uh, even more than, I think being edited on a sentence level is amazing, but like, I think the most helpful feedback I've gotten is just someone being like, this works, this doesn't, this part of it works. Like when someone can articulate that, that's the most helpful thing. I read a lot of writing and that'll be my feedback. So with Threat of Passage, we write a daily email and I review every single one. And so many of them are like, these three words expand on that. And if you zoom into that, then the other things can sort of fall away. And now you have a focal point that you can just live in there.

And I think that often when you're writing, you actually don't know what you're trying to say. And the reader can often discover what that is for you. Yeah. And maybe. Getting better as a writer is kind of being able to discover that in your own work, like being able to figure out what's extraneous and what's essential, which I guess you can get with practice. How do you know when something's worth writing about? I think anything that I pay a lot of attention to is worth writing about. Like, I really feel that Cup of Joe is a very popular lifestyle blog. Um, and I was reading someone, like someone was writing about the blog and it's appeal and she links to this like post about nail polish and she's like, Only Joanna can like, write about like, nail polish, like this kind of like, very brief thing, and make it feel like, somehow like, essential and emotionally necessary, and I was like, whoa, like,

yeah, that is a good way of describing what good writing is, like, it's really not Like, it's meaningful if it's meaningful to her, or I think something I write about is meaningful if it matters to me, like, it could be anything really, and so the most important thing is that, like, you yourself as the writer pay attention to it. Do you have any mantras that you use when you write, that you have stirring in your mind? I think, uh, what we're talking about, like, the muse has to know where to find you, is like, a big one. Um, I think also I really like Paris Review, like interviews with writers. What are your favorites? The one that I'm thinking about is with Rachel Kusk. Um, I think about that a lot. Uh, she wrote her first novel in her twenties and she talked about it as this experience of like turning, turning internally away from the world. Like, just like, Choosing to make, I think writing

is choosing to make like your internal world in some ways, your entire world and like turning your back on like what other people are paying attention to and like just the difficulty of that. Um, I think for some reason it's like really helpful for me to know that other people find writing really difficult. Your pain, my gain. I can sometimes fall into this trap believing, I don't know if you two were like, maybe everyone else is having a great time and you're just having a bad time because you're really bad, you know what I mean?

That like your pain or difficulty is evidence that like you shouldn't be doing this and just like obviously difficulty is not proof that you're a good writer, you can actually be a very bad writer and find it really hard to, but just something that everyone faces and knowing that like it doesn't mean anything either way is very helpful to me. Like it's just this like universal experience. I'm gonna make a statement. I don't know if you resonate with it. Writing is torture. Sometimes. Yeah, but sometimes it's really fun. In what ways?

I think writing, like we talked about, is very aspirational for me in the sense of like, there's an ideal I am trying to aspire to, and falling short of the ideal can sometimes feel torturous. But I think this goes back to the mindfulness thing, when you realize that like, all of life is aspiring to an ideal and falling short of it. Actually, you can still have a great time, you just get over yourself. And so I would say like, when I get over myself, I have like a lot of fun writing. Um, also when it's going really well and it's easy.

And when I kind of Um, being very neurotic and in my own head, it's hard. I like this idea that writing helps you give shape to all the time that you spend reading. What does that mean to you? I think this is something I got from um, Cheryl Strayed where she talks about when she was writing her advice column how for her she ended up realizing when she wrote her memoir that all the time she'd spent like Being a waitress, like, traveling her twenties, like, being in these relationships that didn't work out, taking notes, like, reading, like, these things that felt kind of, like, pointless and not linked to anything at the time actually became the material of her life and the material of who she was. And I think there's something about that that's very true for me, where, like, before I started writing a lot, I just felt like I consume all the time. Like, that's my whole life. Like, I've always been someone who just consumes information.

And there was kind of this like pointlessness to it, I think, where I was like, what does it mean? Like, I'm just taking all this in, but like, it doesn't lead to anything. And then when I started writing, I felt like this is what it's been for. And so it felt like it gave shape and purpose to all the time I've been spending. And I didn't even know I'd been spending that time towards anything, but I was. Let's play a game. I'm going to just point out different times in the week, and I want to get a sense of your routine to know, like, I'm going to throw out some times, what are you doing at that time? 1130 a. m. on a Tuesday. I write in the morning, my own time. Then let's say I work from probably 1030 to 630 and then in the evening I'll probably do more writing. And do you do research? Yes, through reading, but I think I'm always, I'm usually always reading. And so basically whenever I have

a spare moment, I'm reading something on my phone almost all the time. And. I'm not very intentional most of the time about what it is, just like whatever I find interesting. Last question, what about writing has made it worthy of basically giving your life to this craft? I think this idea of being a good vessel is very important to me, where, yeah, maybe the sense of like, There are certain things that you can convey that are beyond you and it's like not even my job to have a lot of agency over them, it's just my job to be like a very good vessel for these things. And so I think the belief that like good writing or good art does not belong to you and it's like beyond you, but you just have to be a