How I Write, and What I Write For

In MA 2, my experiment focused on trying out the writing routines of authors Lee Min Jin and R.F. Kuang over the course of three days– their processes focusing primarily on reading and taking inspiration from others’ work while writing— and found it to be helpful to my own practice. I encouraged my reader to try out this practice for themselves and integrate it into their own lives and writing, expanding the reach of their knowledge and letting themselves be influenced by other great writers and works.

Henry David Thoreau’s essay Where I Lived, and What I Lived For highly praises the importance of immediate observance and being attuned to the surroundings in the present moment in the pursuit of finding and representing the truth in life; “to say what that thing really is before a true gaze” (1321), rather than distracting ourselves with banal mundanities of life undeserving of our attention. I will bring these ideas in conversation with Lee’s and Kuang’s ideals about “[choosing] the important over the urgent” (Frock) and “[using] fiction to process things”; in delving into texts and remaining present in them, we can better focus on what is worth saying. All three authors take writing in stride as a means of self-discovery, though through separate roads; as Thoreau writes in one of his journals, “There are innumerable avenues to a perception of the truth.” Thoreau’s primary philosophy on writing differs from Lee and Kuang’s central writing practices of letting oneself be influenced and absorbed by – while absorbing – other texts and other minds. Thoreau would ultimately disagree with this, preferring to look at and reach toward the self in his writing rather than directly toward others. However, all are still human, and share their pursuit, as do I, through everything that separates them otherwise, of the eventual and immutable truth in life.

Thoreau’s 1854 essay was inspired by his time living at Walden Pond in Massachusetts, where he focused on living a more ‘intentional’ life in seclusion by removing himself from the external distractions of the rapidly developing industrial world, spending his time thinking and existing in nature. Thoreau was a central figure of the transcendentalist philosophical movement that was a core aspect of the American Romantic period in the late 19th century. This movement focused on the individual gaining a higher sense of purpose and the meaning of life through distanced introspection away from the rush of everyday life, and reflecting on “the essential facts of life” (1317) and self-independence. Transcendentalists took progressive stands on issues such as women’s rights, abolition, reform, and education, arguing overall that humankind should look inward individually to come to the truth, away from the distraction that was centered in the rapid technological advances of the Industrial Revolution. Thoreau wrote and published Walden, from which his essay is excerpted, in order to share with the public his time living at Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, for a period of two years, two months, and two days. Thoreau condensed this into the space of a singular calendar year in his writing in order to better convey this to his audience of “fellow men”, who he wished to free from their prisons of ‘conventional thinking’ that supported the industrial grind; the same that reaches deep into the roots of modern life now.
Many of the themes Thoreau expressed speak to me still, despite almost two centuries separating us; especially relating to being grounded in the present moment. I tend to integrate scenes I see or experience in real life into my writing. Although I consider fiction to be my primary playground, the stories I write usually come from seeds of curious small things that unfurl into pieces stretching across the white expanses of several pages. The slope of someone’s back down the main street; rain dotting the window; the grey hairs on the inner parts of that man’s tragus; scat-spotted signs I pass when driving. There has to be some grounding for my writing in reality; in her essay Writing Short Stories, Flannery O’Connor writes, “Fiction is an art that calls for the strictest attention to the real— whether the writer is writing a naturalistic story or a fantasy…we always begin with what is or what has an eminent possibility of truth about it” (96). For my project, my ‘present’ was the other texts I was absorbing as I wrote; when I wanted a break from my own prose, I looked to those of others, drawing inspiration and motivation for my own writing. In looking closer at these words and close reading, I learned to be more attuned to what was working in my writing and what wasn’t; how to, as Thoreau put it in his August 1851 journal entry, write something “kinked and knotted up into something hard and significant, which you could swallow like a diamond, without digesting” (“Thoreau - Ideas - on Writing”). But I want to digest. Past holding the words in my mouth, I want to swallow, and let the meaning filter through gradually from what was only text before; let it seep into the bloodstream through the stomach lining; welcome the flow of the new, fueled by each heartbeat, and perhaps again downwards and up once more through the esophagus in a kind of reverse peristalsis, spilling a little into the voice-box; thus, in all this convolution, allow myself to speak, with all intention, to the audience I desire to reach.

Using a wider lens, Where I Lived, and What I Lived For is Thoreau’s appeal for all to slow down and take account of reality as it truly is, and not be superficial in our perception of what is before us, but really look and appreciate reality to its fullest. Thoreau writes, “I perceive that we…live this mean life that we do because our vision does not penetrate the surface of things. We think that that is which appears to be” (1321). With “mean” signifying the paltry or lacking feeling that we may feel, during mid- or quarter-life crises or otherwise, Thoreau labels our propensity for distraction as the primary cause of our unhappiness. Thoreau further elaborates, “Look at the meetinghouse, or a courthouse, or a jail, or a shop, or a dwelling-house, and say what that thing really is before a true gaze, and they would all go to pieces in your account of them…In eternity there is indeed something true and sublime. But all these times and places and occasions are now and here” (1321). By listing all these features of the mundane, that most would take for granted, Thoreau condemns the limited attention span of his fellows, claiming that these physical structures of concreteness that line the consciousnesses of our everyday lives, which we live in, are beyond our reach of true comprehension, and it is embarrassing that we would not know how to capture their essences if we were asked. In the lines following, he characterizes the present as the only way we can experience eternity, not as the grandiose, abstract concept we might conceive it as. All “times and places and occasions” are so “true and sublime”; therefore, Thoreau implies that this is what we should truly be focusing our limited time on and properly living in.

Over the three days of my experiment at the head of November, I tried, with varying levels of success and productivity, to write, incorporating reading the work of others during my writing time. In summary; on the first day, I struggled to get started and spark momentum; the given treacherousness of sitting down at the desk in front of a keyboard. The first batch of word slush came out in the form of two hundred or so unsatisfactory words over a couple hours. It felt unfavorable, though it was progress, I later acknowledge, in unclogging the mental detritus of disuse. (Imagine the sound of a vacuum seal being broken, the garbage disposal used for the first time in a month.) The second day was my most productive, perhaps fueled by a revitalizing order of matcha bubble tea, as I read through a good section of R.F. Kuang’s The Poppy War while making notes on components of her writing that worked for her narrative and for me, while experimenting with my own prose. Finally, on the third day, I tried Lee’s method of longhand writing some excerpted segments from The Bible, a classic. The scribbling out of moments from Genesis helped me with some generative work and character building, as I considered more of the foundational themes that underscore so much of Western literature, and got to thinking about how my own work might fit into the canon itself.

The writers whose routines I tried out were Lee Min Jin and R.F. Kuang, both incredibly prolific contemporary Asian female writers who I see as academic and writerly role models. Lee, a Korean-American author and journalist based in Harlem, writes primarily about Korean diaspora; she is primarily known for her lauded work Pachinko (2017). Meanwhile, Rebecca F. Kuang (R.F. Kuang) is a Chinese-American born in Guangzhou, China, who has published five books already at the age of 28, her most notable works including Babel (2022) and Yellowface (2023).

Both Lee and Kuang are heavy believers in taking inspiration from other writers while working on drafts, reading other works before they start writing themselves. Neither of them has a very concrete work schedule time-wise; Lee says, “I write whenever I can” (Frock), which suits my schedule better as a college student with other commitments. Lee starts her writing practice with “reading a chapter of the Bible. After I read it and study the annotations, I jot down a verse or two I find interesting in a notebook. After this, I write” (Frock). Lee is Christian and grew up going to church, and is “deeply interested in God as the creator and God as an active force in the world, or inactive force” (Luo).

Meanwhile, Kuang’s “usual routine is to read a couple hun­dred pages in one session, and then jot down two or three things that work for me, or don’t, to see how I can make my writing emulate that…My one failsafe way to jumpstart the creative engine is to read 200 pages of really good writing. Then my brain starts thinking about how to imitate those sentence structures” (“Distortions”).
In her writing, Lee demonstrates the intensive, incredibly thorough research that goes into crafting each of her novels about the Korean diaspora, indicating how much attention she pays to the present that others have experienced and are still living the ramifications of in real time. “I read secondary material. I read academic material. I read scholarship. And then I also do numerous interviews of experts and the subjects…I have been interviewing undocumented Koreans” (Luo, The New Yorker). There are ten-year pauses between the two novels that Lee has put out so far during her career, and she has acknowledged that her “painful effort to listen for things that have timeless value” (Frock) has also affected her output. However, Lee maintains that the most important piece of writer’s advice she has received is to “choose the important over the urgent”, and “focus on the things that matter most to [her]” (Frock), which aligns with Thoreau’s philosophy of humankind not truly having “work…of any consequence” (1319) and that the things we should spend our precious little time on should be what matters most. For Lee, this seems to be communicating raw, honest human stories that are often overshadowed by history. She dedicates her present to picking apart the past, giving new light to things previously buried. The writing process technique I borrowed from Lee was one that she in turn borrowed from Willa Cather: “I will read let’s say—like, today was Psalm 113. So I’ll read the entire thing. And then I will read all of the commentaries twice, and then I’ll read it again. It’s really weird” (Luo). In dissecting and plucking from the Bible, Lee remains grounded in interacting with this immortal text, before adding its teachings to her own present.

Similarly, Kuang also treats writing as a method of processing, letting herself be influenced while immersing herself fully in the various genres she experiments with. As a longtime scholar of Chinese literature, Kuang roots her fiction in the “many story forms, myths, character types, anecdotes, and episodes in Chinese literature and wartime history that have not been repeated a thousand times in English yet…[presenting her] own variations on them…building on thousands of years of tradition” (“Distortions”). Kuang describes her writing as also a somewhat introspective, self-exploratory venture; “a natural way to process both personal trauma and family trauma, and a lot of stories that I’d been hearing from my grandparents about their experiences during WWII in China…that impulse to represent things through a distorted mirror” (Distortions). As such, the cores of her stories retain that spirit of pushing for discovery while playing within and without the boundaries of existing lore. Kuang herself reports, “I try really hard to be like a chameleon every time I fall in love with reading a new genre; I just try to become as like that genre as I can” (“EpicReads, Tiktok”).

Thoreau, in his own writing process, was notably more focused on a longer, continuous revision process over time instead; conversations with different aspects and ‘versions’ of himself, rather than with other writers; he was actively against keeping updated with the news in today’s obsessive style, but not necessarily fully opposed to referencing other writers. The Walden Woods Project characterizes Thoreau’s journals as “a more deliberate creation”, the seeds from which his finalized, immortal texts sprouted. From a journal entry to part of a lecture to an essay to a segment of a book, Thoreau held on to the part of himself in that moment, then reworked it; interacting with his past physically and intellectually. “With each new draft he cut and pasted sections from the previous one and added more writing” (“Thoreau’s Writing | The Walden Woods Project”). Thoreau interacted with the reality he knew to be true at that given moment; and then seeked to generate from these realities a collective truth. In a February 1859 entry in his journal, Thoreau writes, “The writer must to some extent inspire himself…only when many observations of different periods have been brought together…he begins to grasp his subject and can make one pertinent and just observation…The more you have thought and written on a given theme, the more you can still write. Thought breeds thought. It grows under your hands” (“Thoreau - Ideas - On Writing”). We can conclude that Thoreau prefers to be mostly self-inspired, preferring to let his ideas circulate within the individual until they are fully formed, and allowed to be released into the wild.

All three writers, eventually, want to capture reality in their writing; they are all dedicated to and have a great respect for the craft, using their writing to communicate about the important things in life. However, Lee and Kuang’s methodologies, as opposed to Thoreau’s, push to capture reality through manifold lenses; these writers imbibe themselves deeply in research, in the genre, in order to learn what the world wants to speak to them, before reforming it into narratives that seek to uncover and spark incisive discussion. Thoreau, meanwhile, believes in writing that is far more self-involved and introspective, following suit with transcendentalists in looking inwards and turning within oneself to find out the truth, instead of looking and reaching outwards. All want to get to the truth; “...to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world” (1317). Thoreau finds himself in the looking-glass of Walden Pond, reaching towards his reflection as an 18th-century Narcissus; Lee and Kuang both seek to find themselves mirrored in the dark pupils of others, of generations, pulling something out from their aching gazes that color the eventual word-portraits they form.

Everyone seeks only in the end to reach and convey their own truth, whatever it may be.

Between these unique approaches to writing and thinking, my MA 2 experiment in living deliberately has led me to discover that there can be a balance struck between both; frankly, that Lee and Kuang and Thoreau are not completely at odds; there is and can be an overlap in the Venn diagram connecting all three. There is value in self-consideration and looking inwards, as well as in seeking to understand the lives of others and discover the truth that they, too, may know. For who are we without the eyes who watch over us?

“Be it life or death, we crave only reality” (1322), Thoreau writes, and especially today, what with all the additional noise floating around us, I find that to be strikingly true. Through conducting this experiment, I discovered the sense of freedom and lightness that comes from allowing yourself to be influenced and inspired by other great minds of one’s choosing. I write for myself, certainly, and I write for those to whom I am indebted. I write for my family, my teachers, and for those who came before me; who did not have access to the same opportunities I am now so lucky to experience. Eventually, I hope to write for those who can find a voice in me; strangers whose faces I may not recognize but whose souls I may know, in innumerable and treasured shards.


Works Cited:

Frock, Elizabeth. ““Choose the Important over the Urgent,” and More Writing Advice from Min Jin Lee.” PBS News, 6 July 2018, www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/choose-the-important-over-the-urgent-and-more-writing-advice-from-min-jin-lee.

Luo, Michael. “What Min Jin Lee Wants Us to See.” The New Yorker, 17 Feb. 2022, www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/what-min-jin-lee-wants-us-to-see.

O’Connor, Flannery. “Writing Short Stories.” Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose,
edited by Sally Fitzgerald, 1957, p. 96.

Segal, Stephen H. “R.F. Kuang: Distortions.” Locus Online, 15 July 2019, locusmag.com/2019/07/r-f-kuang-distortions/.

Thoreau, Henry David. "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For." Walden, Bedford/St. Martin’s, 8th ed., 2020, https://bcs.bedfordstmartins.com/webpub/english/bedguide8e/Public%20Domain%20Readings/Thoreau%20Where%20I%20Lived%20and%20What%20I%20Lived%20For.pdf.

“Thoreau’s Writing | the Walden Woods Project.” The Walden Woods Project, 2024, www.walden.org/education/for-students/thoreaus-writing/.

“Thoreau - Ideas - on Writing.” Vcu.edu, 2024, archive.vcu.edu/english/engweb/transcendentalism/authors/thoreau/hdt-art.html.