How to Write and What to Write About (Ava Huang)

Ava Huang’s essay on why to make things and what to write about.

Why it was kept

Sixteen passages Kyle kept on making things: what you’re oversaturated with, the secret of creative success being disequilibrium, what not making things feels like, the regret of people who felt the call and didn’t answer it, the monotony and odd joy of getting better, making things as integrity, and wanting to give back a considered response.

As Kyle captured it

• How to write and what to write about by Ava Huang Writing
  • What are you oversaturated with? I’m at a point where I’d like to write less about relationships, physical appearance, interpersonal conflict and emotional turbulence. Not because I’ve artistically exhausted any of those things, but because I’m personally exhausted of them.
  • One answer is to shrug and say, I don’t feel like writing today, I will when I feel the urge. But that often results in not writing very much at all. How do you get better if you don’t put in the practice?
    • Reminds me of Andy Matuschak talking about there being very little deliberate “practice” in knowledge work; you don’t realize how bad you are at it because you’re rarely called upon to do it or reflect on it. Find the Quote
  • “Some people have a lot farther to go from where they begin to get where they want to be—a long way up the mountain, and that is how it has been for me. I don’t feel I am getting older; I feel I am getting closer.” Rachel Cusk

  • The secret to creative success is disequilibrium, which is to say noticing things in the world that confound you. When we pay attention, we see things that disturb our expectations of how life should be. Our surprise revises us. Ava Huang

  • To make better things, to write better words: that’s something that no object can give you, no person or experience. Which means that you have to give it to yourself.
  • But when I think about a life that feels meaningful, what leaps to mind is always a life in which I am making things that are expressive manifestations of my ideas and beliefs.
  • Which doesn’t mean that they necessarily have to be public, but they have to exist. Digital Garden
  • I can also tell you what not making things feels like: scrolling through Reddit gifs, watching Youtube videos compulsively even though you think they’re dumb, Facebook stalking people you barely care about, lying in bed having slept way too much, still unable to get up, moping over someone who is awful and also doesn’t like you, stressing out over work that’s fundamentally uninteresting.
  • “The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.” Mary Oliver
  • The difficulty and monotony and odd joy of getting better at something.
  • Loving yourself fully and expecting that same standard of love from other people—because God, self-loathing is boring.
  • Making things requires integrity, which is to say commitment to what you are trying to do. Without conviction there is nothing. I’m trying to take input from the world around me and give something back.
  • What do I want to give back? A considered response.
  • I want to dig within myself, and then keep digging past the cliches, the bad first drafts, the failed ideas. To keep myself constantly off-kilter, to expand the search space, to want to know. Life is a two-part excavation: of the undiscovered outer world, and the unexamined within.