Category: writing

Writing sucks (or at least the act of writing does), but I keep doing it anyway.

Didn’t the writer Dorothy Parker once say, “I hate writing, I love having written”?

She’s a total kindred spirit.

Writing is painful and torturous, but if you are like me, and Parker, you understand the bizarre satisfaction and joy of having written, of having produced words that somehow bring shape to your thoughts and help you build a more solid identity in this sometimes fluid world, in which we are so often lost.

Somehow, writing makes me feel more like a person. Or maybe I am already a person, but now I feel like I have told my story, and therefore I am better connected to the larger world outside of me.

In other words, I feel less alone.

Ever since I started writing regularly on my blog, I have also had a few friends come up to me telling me about how they too would love to start writing or to write more.

I do think there is something visceral about writing that draws a certain group of people irresistibly to it. And there’s no denying that in many people, there is this deep need to at least make some kind of noise, so that the world knows of their existence, and then they can feel like they have lived as a main character in this bizarre story of life instead of having just floated past, like a ghost.

I am of course talking about myself.

Crucially, I also have come to see how necessary writing has become in my growth as both a creative and a human being.

And despite the self-doubt (do my thoughts matter?) and the insecurity (who is even reading this?) and the lack of confidence (maybe I should leave the writing to people who are smarter than me!), I feel more and more certain that writing is something I need to do.

And certainly, starting to write regularly has been one of the best things I have done for myself in 2017.

Not only that, I have a strong feeling that writing consistently will pay off in more ways than I can imagine. How, I have no idea yet.

For now, I soldier on.

During my short blogging hiatus recently, I have had a lot of time to rethink my reasons for writing. Here are some of them.

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Writing to learn

I’m a learning geek/nerd, and the best way to learn is to teach others. Some people like to learn the French language or American history or astronomy; I like to learn about how to live life to my fullest potential, and how to find true peace and happiness and meaning in my life. When I write about what I have learned – either through the experiences I have had in my own life or through books I have read – my learning solidifies, deepens, becomes a more permanent part of me. (Plus I have such a bad memory, so writing helps me to remember more of my life than my memory is capable of doing…)

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Writing to understand myself

Self-knowledge is key. It is true that sometimes even I don’t know who I am or the reasons behind why I do the things I do. When I write, I open a door into a deeper part of myself. And if I give myself the opportunity to write honestly, without garnishing or covering up, then I also give myself the chance to see myself for who I am. And truly, I think, genuine self-understanding is the path to greater meaning and happiness, because if we don’t know who we are, how can we begin to contemplate how we want to live in this world, or what kind of a life is worth living? These are questions no one can answer except ourselves. And we must start to answer these questions by looking at ourselves honestly, even if it hurts.

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Writing to organize my thoughts better

I’m not a good talker. It’s always hard for me to adequately express what’s in my head when I talk, because unlike writing, I cannot sit down and edit and re-edit and organize and re-organize, which is what I do with my writing. Writing allows me to sort through my thoughts and imbue them with some kind of coherence and clarity. I also sound slightly smarter when I write =]

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Writing to help and inspire

I can’t tell you how many times an article or a book or even a single sentence has helped pull me out of a rut or shine a light through the cracks exactly when I needed it. My personal experience tells me that it is important for people to share their knowledge openly and generously, and writing is a great medium for that. Who knows when you can save a life with just one sentence in one entry on your tiny obscure blog that is read only by 20 people on most days? For me, if I can just make one person’s day brighter, I already have a good enough reason to write.

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Writing to build a community

Ever since I started writing, I have been getting emails and comments and messages from total strangers. They write me to tell me that they are on a similar path to living life on their own terms, or that they have a similar view towards life, or that they appreciate that I have written about my struggles, since they share the same struggles, and I realize: Wow, we are all part of an invisible tribe. As virtual as this tribe is, it is nevertheless real.

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Writing because it is hard

A part of me is stubborn and enjoys challenges a little too much. Writing is challenging. Writing one article a week is even more challenging. But I want to do it anyway because sometimes it’s fun to do things that are hard. And it’s also rewarding, because the harder it is to write, the better I am going to be as a writer as time goes by. It’s like going to the gym, only I am growing writing/thinking muscles rather than actual muscles.

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Writing because I enjoy writing

I know I already said that I find writing to be a rather painful affair, yet it’s also true that I enjoy writing. On good days, the words flow. They come tumbling out of me. Writing becomes easy. But even on days when writing is tough, I do still enjoy doing it. I can’t really explain why, except that maybe it’s… true love?

For a period of about a year, I wrote a weekly column for Lianhe Zaobao, a national Chinese-language newspaper in Singapore. My article appeared every Thursday, like clockwork.

My very first column. I wish I had a better picture of it.

I wrote about everything under the sun. My topics ranged from photography, traveling, swimming, reading… to music, meditation, death, etc.

The newspaper had a huge audience (as of August 2016, their circulation is about 180,000), and the other columnists were all older, experienced writers, so it was both incredibly pressurizing, and also a great opportunity and platform.

My column started in March 2013. I wrote close to 40 articles in total over the next year. At that time I was about 27 and not quite yet a photographer. Nobody really knew who I was and I hadn’t really been published anywhere before.

Here are some lessons I learned from the experience:

(1) The fact that an established national newspaper would let a young nobody write a weekly column for it suggests that… anyone can break into any inner circle, no matter how seemingly impenetrable. So young nobodies take heart.

(2) If you let a big organization or company or brand know you exist, you would have given your chances of being “discovered” a big boost. I first wrote to the newspaper floating the idea of me writing a column for them in 2009 (I just checked my email archives). The editor replied me a week later, saying we could meet up for a chat, but I never heard from them again until three years later.

(3) Try to sell yourself in some way, even if you’re a young nobody. When I wrote to them in 2009, apart from being the founder/owner of a cafe that had received some media attention, I had only written some articles on my blog and been published in some small, independent publications. Since this was all I had, I used them to sell myself. Any small achievements can be part of your portfolio, if (and only if) they are relevant.

(4) It can take awhile for things to happen. About three years passed since my first email before I heard from the paper again. I think a columnist had just ended his run, so there was now an opportunity for a new columnist to come on board. In those three years, I had managed to write a lot more and was by then hosting a radio programme for a national radio station. I was still a nobody, but a much more experienced nobody.

(5) Writing a weekly column was fun at first but soon it became quite frustrating, since I had to write a high-quality article once a week while I was trying to break into the photography industry. It was challenging. I never learned to accumulate my articles so I could give myself some lead time. This is something to note the next time I write a newspaper column again.

(6) Being committed to something like this made me work hard. I’m a lazy person by nature, but being a columnist for a national newspaper gave me enough pressure to actually deliver. Week after week. It FORCED me to work because I was already (very publicly) committed. It’s a rather sado-masochistic way to “get things done”, but it works.

(7) There is therefore a beauty in commitments like this. Take Casey Neistat, who uploaded a short vlog of his life every day for two years. His popularity exploded over those two years and he grew his Youtube subscribers to more than 5.8 million. He recently sold his company to CNN for $25 million.

(8) Most of us will never be Casey Neistat, but as you can see, doing something consistently over a period of time not only allows you to become better at what you do, you also get to bring your audience along with you on the ride. That audience will only grow in number over time.

(9) Know when to stop. Once a commitment/project stops being enjoyable, and after you have learned most of what you can from it, stop. Move on to something different that can allow you to grow in new ways.

So now…

This is my something different.

I will be publishing articles here once a week, every Thursday.

Thanks for joining me on this ride. I can’t wait to see where we’ll go together from here.

Write a comment below to tell me a little about yourself and your journey.

Let’s keep moving forward together!

American writer Jack Kerouac in 1959

…the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!” – Jack Kerouac, On the Road

When I was about 17, I found the Jack Kerouac novel “On the Road” on the shelf of a second-hand bookstore. I was young, restless, in need of adventure. The book title appealed to me. On the road. How wonderful!

The book turned out to be a fictionalized version of Kerouac’s journey across America with his beer-chugging, pot-smoking, poetry-writing hippie friends.

I fell in love with Jack Kerouac and the Beatniks. Because of Kerouac I was also introduced to the powerful, charged poetry of Allen Ginsberg, also a core member of the Beat Generation.

How much I wanted to be like them – to drink & smoke pot & rebel against the establishment & cross America in a rundown truck.

More importantly, I wanted to write like them.

For a while I even learned to punctuate like Ginsberg (and that meant replacing “and” with “&” in all my sentences). I also dreamed of traveling to India, because that was where Ginsberg wrote his famed Indian Journals (I still haven’t been there, but I will one day).

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz… – Allen Ginsberg, Howl

It was many years later that I realized – it was a good thing I’d fallen in love with these writers, and then later with writing itself.

Because that was the beginning of my training to becoming a better writer.

Since then writing has become one of the most important skills I possess.

Even as a photographer, writing has remained an important part of my work. In my photo project Creative People + Projects, I accompany my photographs and portraits with my writing. Without my writing I don’t think I would have been able to fulfill what I wanted to achieve with the project.

I can only now share with you all that I’ve learned because I learned how to write well early on.

At this point, I just want to throw it out there: Writing isn’t for everyone. If this isn’t a topic that interests you, feel free to skip this article. But if you are a creative or a creative entrepreneur who wants to sharpen your writing skills (or you have a faint intuition that writing is somehow a good skill to possess), then read on.

I’m not saying I’m an expert at writing, but I have learned a thing or two about writing over the last ten years, and I’m happy to share these lessons with you.

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Write for what?

Let’s be honest. Most of us don’t want to be novelists or poets. You are probably reading my blog because you are interested in living life on your own terms or becoming a successful freelancer or a creative entrepreneur.

You want to learn to write better, but the purpose isn’t to indulge in your very private artistic passions. You want to write better so you can market yourself better, get more jobs, earn more money.

Examples: Maybe you are an aspiring photographer looking to add writing as another dimension to your work. Maybe you are looking to improve the writing of your “about” page on your website. Maybe you want to send a convincing sales email to a potential client. Maybe you want to spruce up your bio on your resume.

In other words, marketing.

I understand that “marketing” can sound like a dirty word to creatives, but all “marketing” does is to let potential clients or customers understand what is so awesome about you that they must hire you / buy from you. Which is super awesome!

And we’re lucky because we have the Internet. The Internet has liberated us, broken down all walls. Singer-songwriters don’t need to get signed to labels anymore – they have Youtube. Photographers can chalk up thousands of followers on Instagram and other photo-sharing platforms and directly attract the attention of photo editors and photo buyers who are also themselves on the very same platforms. Writers can start publishing their own blogs in ten minutes. Or start writing immediately on websites like Medium.

If you learn to write, you get to tell your own stories in your own words and sculpt the public’s (and your potential clients’) imagination and perception of you.

If you can’t write well, you can of course hire someone to do it for you. But who knows you better than you?

So start making use of the Internet to write and market yourself.

Let people know that you exist. Doing good work in a quiet corner of the universe isn’t going to bring you far enough anymore.

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Everyone can learn to write well, even if they think they can’t

I understand that writing can be a difficult thing for many people to do. When people think of writing, they think of this thing that only some particularly talented people can do.

That’s not true.

And we are not asking you to write like Shakespeare.

Without further bullshit, let’s get to some actionable steps on how to become a better writer (even if you don’t normally write):

(1) You suck at writing. Start writing anyway.

Most people think they are bad writers. They are ashamed of what they write about, or they think their writing reflects badly on them. Write anyway.

The act of writing itself exercises your writing muscles.

It’s just like how the more you run, the better you get at running.

Write and write and write. Slowly and surely you will get better.

(2) Use simple words.

There is this misconception that good writing is made up of flowery language. That can’t be further from the truth.

There are probably as many definitions of good writing as there are people, so I cannot define good writing for you here.

But for our purposes of writing to market ourselves, to write well is to bring our points across successfully.

To do that, you don’t need a huge vocabulary.

Chances are, you know enough English words to write an entire book without searching up the dictionary.

Use the words you already know to bring your point across. Some of the best writing in the world are made up of simple vocabulary and short sentences (check out Raymond Carver’s works to know what I mean).

(3) Economy is beauty.

Ruthlessly edit your writing. Cut out the fluff.

James Althucher famously said, “Write whatever you want. Then take out the first paragraph and last paragraph.”

I think he’s trying to say that sometimes less is better.

You can ramble on and on, but it isn’t going to make your writing better if your audience doesn’t get your message.

Take out all the flowery descriptions and all the unnecessary stories. Strip your writing down until you are left with what you really want to say. You will be amazed at how effective your writing can be if you do that.

(Unless you are writing poetry, then ramble all you want. It’s your poem, not mine!)

(4) Tell the truth or speak from your own experience.

We often think it’s difficult to write because we have no idea where to start, or we think we have no material. Well, start from the truth. Your life is your material (that’s why it’s so important to live an interesting life!). Be honest. Be brutally honest if you can, and be real. No one has tolerance for fakery and hypocrisy these days. Don’t pretend to have an opinion if you don’t have one (and if you do have an opinion, don’t be afraid to share it even if it’s an unpopular one).

(5) Read.

I don’t think it’s quite possible to become a better writer if you don’t read. But don’t just read any writer. Read good books. You can Google for reading lists and book recommendations online. People on the Internet have read through thousands and thousands of books and come up with must-read lists for you – make use of them! You also don’t have to read only books. There are a ton of good writing online. If you are lost and don’t know where to start, follow my reading recommendations in the Resources section below. If you read all of my recommended books/links you will almost certainly become a better writer.

(6) Imitate your favorite writer(s).

Find a writer you like. No, if you can, find a writer you LOVE, and imitate the hell out of him or her. The truth is, we all want to write like our favorite writers. Find that writer whose sentences make your heart skip a beat. When you write, pretend you are that writer. Put yourself in his or her head. After some time, you will slowly find your stride and develop your own style.

(7) Write for an audience.

If you do this, you have the chance to receive feedback for your writing. Even if you don’t, knowing that people are reading will make you put in more effort into your writing. Intentional practice works wonders. Even though blogs are deemed to be pretty old-fashioned these days, start one and make your friends and family read it. Who knows, maybe in time you might even attract an audience.

(8) Write like how you talk.

The best way to start writing is to write like how you talk. Try it. It will liberate you from all your worries of not having a “personal style” and will get you to actually start… writing, which of course is the most important thing you need to do if you want to improve your writing.

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So there you have it.

Simple, actionable advice for non-writers. Practice them. You might not become the next Ernest Hemingway if you follow the above advice, but you will most likely become a much better writer.

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Resources

Here are some resources that will help with your writing. I love all of the following writers and I’ve selected them because they all write powerfully and beautifully, and share a certain effective economy of style.

Books on writing:
On Writing – Stephen King
Bird by Bird – Anne Lammott
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running – Haruki Murakami

Blogs:
Zen Habits
The Minimalists
Derek Sivers
James Altucher
Ryan Holiday

Writers:
Ernest Hemingway
Raymond Carver
Haruki Murakami

Good luck with your writing, and drop me a note if you want to open a conversation about this subject.

To end off…

“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” – Ernest Hemingway