Me again !
I will start out with some radical honesty in the name of the new year: I relaunched this newsletter over the summer with great ambitions, and then I quickly got overwhelmed with life, etc. and let it fall to the wayside because I could not will myself to do it. But I like it here, and I am back, and I’ve been doing a lot of reflecting on what this whole thing (imagine me gesturing broadly) is about.
When I started this newsletter as a Tinyletter (tbt) in 2018, it was a place for me to catalog and expound upon my various interests. I loved writing essays that were sometimes more experimental and loosely jumbled and others that were a hair more researched. Then, I had an idea: Why didn’t I talk to other people about what they’re thinking about getting into? After all, even I have my limits for new interests I can take up. That led me to do two very fun interviews with Stacey and Ama about how they spend their free time. I’ve also done two other interviews that you will see shortly (and, again, if you’d like to nominate someone interesting for an interview, LMK). But going forward, I would also like to pop in here and there with my own thoughts.
Which brings me to our current topic. In 2024, I’m focusing on doing more things for myself. That is—activities that are for general self-development and personal interest rather than immediate monetary gain or public viewership. For me, this mainly has to do with writing.
I know—I say this as I send this newsletter out into the ether. It’s all a fine balance. But to say that I have conflicting feelings about the way social media encourages mass-scale broadcasting of one’s entire life would be an understatement. And as someone who has written professionally for more than a decade, I have keenly felt the push and pull. As an early career writer, I reached to then-not-that-distant memories of adolescence to craft personal essays. I am relieved that many do not exist on the internet anymore—a rare upside to be had when a publication folds. And now I see the opportunities that self-promotional social media can afford a creative. I wonder how far I need to push myself to “build an audience” and at what personal cost; if you’re doing everything for the content, do you do anything for yourself?
Nora Ephron famously said that “everything is copy”—that is, for a writer, every moment, anecdote, rumor, or lesson is material. But what I’m interested in interrogating is the motive for creation. Where are the boundaries between journalism and fiction and essay-writing? What makes the act of writing in a journal or laboring over a work of fiction that may never see the light of day different from publishing a newsletter or article?
It’s all writing, of course. But I’ve grown dependent on the validation that comes from publication; to be seen doing something is to have proof of one’s efforts. And then, the irony: The impatience to publish leaves little room for growth, development, and the cultivation of one’s talents. I envy people who feel called to write with absolutely zero hope or ambition for publication. How often are we told that, in order to become “good” at anything, we have to enjoy the process of doing rather than anticipate the short-lived glory of non-guaranteed success?
This is why I am striving to write more for myself, diverting my mind from even the potential for eventual publication. A Google doc of one’s own.
A recent read has led me to examine this goal further. The narrator says in Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend: “But how rare to meet a person who thinks what they’re writing is meant to stay private. And how common to meet one who thinks what they’re writing entitles them not just to public consumption but to fame.” Ah!!
So much of Nunez’s novel questions the purpose and ethics of writing; the narrator engages in writing as an act of emotional exploration. But this is complicated by the fact that she is a published, and ostensibly successful to some degree, writer. What she puts down on the paper is, more likely than not, going to see the light of day. Compare that to the practice of another character, who says: “…I didn’t ever stop writing. There was no need for me to do that. I journal, for one thing—in fact, I consider journaling a kind of meditation—and I write poetry….For me, writing poetry is like prayer, and prayer isn't something you have to share with other people.”
Nunez herself was once a journaler—until she, too, felt the push-pull of private-public writing. In her 2022 Art of Fiction interview in the Paris Review—the interview that really introduced me to Nunez and also made me go insane upon the realization that she, too, is a failed ballet dancer who went to Barnard and decided to become a writer—she says that she started keeping a journal after getting her MFA at Columbia. “But at a certain point, in the nineties, I think, it started to feel boring and wasteful—I’d rather have been working on my fiction—so I quit.” Years later, she lined her diaries up chronologically, read them start to finish, and tossed them—not because they were indeed “boring” but because “there were many things about other people” that Nunez wanted to ensure they’d never see. I am, however, inclined to believe that those journals helped Nunez, who published her first novel in her early 40s, to develop the voice and quality of observation that is so pertinent in her work.
There are countless temptations to distract the writer from a longer or more laborious work. I came up in media in the thick of the personal essay boom, which Jia Tolentino memorialized in 2017 in the New Yorker. The essays—which writers pitched in droves and for which they were paid little if anything—boomed in popularity as drivers of traffic in the early 2010s. But thanks to clickbait headlines and a publishing environment that prioritized quantity over quality, often putting writers at greater risk for online vitriol, “the online personal essay began to harden into a form defined by identity and adversity—not in spite of how tricky it is to negotiate those matters in front of a crowd but precisely because of that fact.”
Over time, I increasingly started to see the value in not untangling whichever webs I’m invested in untangling in front of a digital audience. But that shift momentarily translated into a complete pause of just-for-me writing. The time I stopped writing essays and stories was the same time I secured a job that I felt finally gave me permission to call myself a journalist. That is in spite of eight prior years of quite literally doing journalism that, for reasons that are a topic for another essay, was viewed as being of lesser value. In pursuit of the facts, with the ambition to publish ironclad features, I found myself completely unable to put fingers to keyboard in search of something that didn't yet exist in transcripts or reporting notes. My steadfast focus on the objective left little room—or value—for subjective introspection.
Why? Perhaps for fear that I couldn’t concoct a narrative using just my powers of thought. Perhaps because I’d become more familiar, over time, with the stress that arises with the publication of any article: I got it right, didn’t I? And perhaps because I figured that actually, I didn’t really have anything to say because I didn’t yet know what I wanted to say. I am not an expert in anything.
I didn’t appreciate that the uncovering is part of the writing process itself. As Tolentino writes upon the death of the personal essay boom, “I loved watching people try to figure out if they had something to say.” And as Nunez says of her own writing: “I prefer to make everything up as I go along.”
In her memoir Crying in H Mart, Michelle Zauner writes of her late mother’s lesson to “save 10 percent of yourself.” Within that context, she referred to interpersonal relationships: “No matter how much you thought you loved someone, or thought they loved you, you never gave all of yourself. Save 10 percent, always, so there was something to fall back on.” But when I read those words, I found them resonating in another way. I had to get back to writing for myself.
But sometimes, it’s still nice to share.