Overcoming the Fear of Writing

Embracing solitude and futility... What could be more beautiful?

My first serious attempt at creative writing was so long time ago that I did it by hand. By “serious attempt,” I mean that it wasn’t a school assignment, and I was at least in my adolescence. Back then, only serious professionals had laptops, so the only computer I had was our family desktop, which had no privacy whatsoever. At any given time, whether I was browsing the internet, doing homework, or playing Baldur’s Gate II, I was liable to be asked, “When are you going to be off?!” by my brother. 

So it was me, looseleaf lined paper, and a pencil. I must’ve written late at night, because I definitely wasn’t waking up early in the morning to do so, especially since I had to get up before even sunrise to get to band practice. After school, there was football practice, too. After taking care of homework, eating, and relaxing, I’m guessing I had about the hours between 8-10pm to write? Maybe the weekends, since I was housebound most weekends anyway?

The plotline of what I was trying to write isn’t terribly important (it was some faux-Tolstoyesque narrative, though I hadn’t read any Tolstoy then). I never got that far, about 30 pages. A couple of chapters at most. Finishing a first draft seemed like the world’s most daunting task, like a fat kid looking at the horizon, wondering where the finish line for the marathon was.

That was high school, though, and there was so much going on in terms of academics, extracurriculars, and a gradually burgeoning out-of-school social life to not make me feel as if I was being improperly distracted. Doing well in high school meant the right to go far away for college, where I’d have all the time and support to write, anyway. So what was the rush?

However, the freedom of college presented its own issues, particularly for someone who’d previously lived a contained life. None of my high school friends had lived near me, and I’d never even gotten my full driver’s license. But now, on campus, I was a short walk away from all my friends, or those whom I wanted to be my friends. As someone who’d gone to college thinking that it would be my best (and, fearfully, my only) chance to make lifelong friends, the crushingly solitary act of writing seemed like an absolute squandering of my time. It’d have been one thing if I knew I was really good at it and I had some reasonable expectation that all my efforts could result in something worthwhile. But I didn’t, and the prospect that I’d have spent perhaps the best years of my life—or at least my youth—holed up in the library, typing away at some hackneyed trash would guarantee deathbed regrets.

I found some compromise in playwriting, despite having neither prior experience nor future ambitions in it. It was writing, but at least it involved other people. By its nature, playwriting demanded the fostering of a community. Maybe I could find like-minded friends. Maybe even a soul mate. Still, I always felt like an outsider dilettante among the theatre kids and their years upon years of training, productions, and unabashed embrace of their interests that now formed the DNA of their identities. In one playwriting class, there was a guy who, despite being a couple of years below me, seemed so much more mature and talented in his writing. After Facebook-stalking him (Zuck can only dream of those glory days), I learned that he’d attended the kind of fancy prep schools that had theatre and film festivals for their students. My high school hadn’t even had a drama department, and the most theatre we had was monthly mass in our school gym.

In the middle of junior year, I hit an all-time low on my 21^st birthday, a premature quarter-life crisis where I hated myself for sacrificing the main thing I’d come here to do. And what did I have to show for it? Kindred-spirit friendships that seemed likely to last beyond graduation? A memory bank of romantic or sexual stories to fondly remember? A stellar academic record and a sense of professional direction? No.

That rock-bottom moment at least spurred me to try making the most of the time I had left. To a writing contest, I submitted a short story that I’d written as a final project for a class. The school TV station ran a script contest which I also entered. Before, a fear of failure would’ve spawned some excuse to abstain. I won the writing contest and was one of the winners of the script contest. These were the first instances that gave me some cautious reason to believe that my writing was at least not garbage.

But it all felt a bit too little, too late. Senior year was my favorite year of college, but it felt as if everybody else was running victory laps while I had just learned to walk. Thanks to these little recognitions I’d received, I was confident enough to tell my parents that I wanted to professionally pursue these interests after graduation. In what capacity, I had no idea. Their pushback was resolute and what fledgling self-belief I had couldn’t withstand it. In retrospect, I am rather thankful that they didn’t let me end up being some Asian American Millennial Buzzfeed writer. But as I’ve written before, as I get older, I do wonder what I missed out on by not directly chasing my dreams in my 20s, even if it would’ve resulted in turning me into someone my current self would loathe.

Insa-dong in summer of 2012, taken on Fuji X10

I left college with no more certainty with what I wanted to do with my life than I had going into it.  Maybe even less. With my parents having returned to Korea once my brother and I had gone off to college, I moved “back home” to Seoul. In retrospect, it was a perfect blend of the comfortable familiarity of living at home, but in a new environment. I’d been to Korea several times before throughout my life, but only for a few weeks at a time, and only always as a visitor. Having taken the LSAT in the summer after graduation, I could take a year to just spend time with my parents, improve my Korean, maybe work some part-time jobs here and there.

With all that free time and basically no friends or even acquaintances, I began to turn a screenplay I’d written during my LSAT summer into a novel. Why not? That screenplay had 0% chance of ever amounting into anything, and even if the novel only had a 1% chance, that was still more than zero. Besides, a screenplay was not a finished work, needing actors and directors and cinematographers to bring it to its full form. A novel, on the other hand, could stand by itself. And even if I was going to be the only who read it, it would still exist and nobody could take that away.

On my first attempt, I got to about 30,000 words before I became discouraged and put my efforts on standby. Every writing session, with every typed word, there were an infinite number of choices, and each sentence felt like the compounding of wrong choice after wrong choice, all headed towards a soberingly embarrassing result. But unlike in college, at least I didn’t exactly feel like I was wasting time, because it wasn’t as if I had a ton of better things to do.

Actually, I was wrong about not having better things to do, because my first full year in Korea turned out to be wonderful. So much so that I ended up gladly staying for another. I studied, I worked, and got to know my parents better. I even got into my first serious relationship. The whole “2^nd generation kid goes back to the motherland and gets his/her mojo” may be cliche, but it’s told and re-told because it’s true. Even though I’d lived and studied at some of the most diverse and progressive places in Canada and America, I’d still been inundated with the message that there wasn't much worthwhile about Asianness besides the tastiness of some cuisines and the sex appeal of Asian girls. Maybe anime if you were dorky enough to be into that. Getting away from all that for a while was salvation.

At around the one-year mark in Korea, I applied to law school. Once I got in, I had about 8 months left of this unexpectedly blissful post-college limbo left. My long-distance girlfriend had gone back to school in America, and the Korean American and Japanese international student friends I’d made tended to not stay long. Above all else, I did not want to feel that horrible feeling I’d felt on my 21^st birthday, that I’d wasted a precious time. Once law school began and my legal career began, when else would I have this freedom to just write? Above all else, I wanted to have something to show for this period of my life. The novel, which was set in college, would be a time capsule of my 24-year old self. Soon, that self would disappear. Probably for the best, but I still didn’t want to forget him. So let it all out. Let it suck. Who cares? Just don’t be a coward.

I scrapped those previous 30,000 words, and whereas before, I’d just try to write in my room whenever I felt like it, I created a structure this time. I learned that I could focus better when out at cafes while listening to music, just cocooned in my own zone. I also realized I was a morning writer, not only because my mind felt freshest then, but because a good writing session (1000 words) would give me a high for the rest of the day. There were two cafes that I’d do most of my writing in: a local one (Cup Has Bean) that I could bike to, and for when I really needed to get away, one near Gangnam Station (The Coffee Standard).

Two works inspired me to keep journeying into uncharted territories. One was The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen, which I’d read around that time. I’d mostly read literary classics, which had the unfortunate and stultifying effect of making me think I had to imitate their language and style. But The Corrections was the first novel I’d read that was written “normally” but didn’t seem worse for it. In fact, it came off as its strength. The other work was, weirdly enough, the music video for IU’s song, You & I. I don’t know, I just really liked the story in that music video and I realized if I ever wanted to will a story of mine into existence, I’d most likely have to write it in prose form.

It was around when I hit 50,000 words that I knew I was going to actually finish this thing. The story was past its halfway point and I’d already known how it was going to end. Crucially, I knew the key points to reach that ending as well. It must’ve been a May morning, at Cup Has Bean, when I finally typed out the last few paragraphs that I’d had in my head for so long. I don’t think I wrote “The End.” That’s for children’s books.

If I’d ever thought, should this day come, I’d jump around, hooting and hollering, that didn’t happen. I wasn’t even that ecstatic. I just let out a satisfied sigh and closed my laptop. I’d spent hours upon hours alone, working at something that might all be for nothing in terms of external recognition and reward. So what? I’ll still just keep doing it, no matter what. It was a nice bicycle ride back home.