Art By Kuri Huang

Art by Kuri Huang

the urge to do this ALL THE TIME but no I have to plot

but the way i'm so tempted right now-

so it turns out my writing process is “fuck around and find out”

when my name was keoko

ahhhh hello hello (not me coming back from the dead to talk about a novel of all things) but i just wanted to get this post out first before giving myself time to breath and enter the social media world again haha.

i think i spent the last few months researching about korea, its history, and just the folklore surrounding the culture. and there's just one book i stumbled on that i thought i had to talk about: when my name was keoko.

set in Korea during Japanese colonization and WWII, this book alternates the POV between a young boy and girl, both siblings, who have not only lost their names but identities as Koreans. it's the most heartwrenching and heartwarming book you'll ever read.

and it's hard, finding a book about Korea colonized. i'm just grateful that this book exists, and I had the opportunity to read it.

so if anyone wants to check it out [and read my long ass grateful/sappy review] go right ahead!

i'm just grateful for this book for existing.

if you don't know, Korea has been colonized by Japan for years, decades even. as a Korean American, there's barely any readings (much less teachings unless you search for them) on this topic; it's also even more difficult to find a novel based on the context of this era.

this era is so, so, important. it is the cause of the strained relationship between the two countries, a consequence that continues to this day. it is an era that all, and I truly mean all koreans remember. colonization has shaped us, but haunted us as well.

I come to Korea, and my grandmother remembers like it was yesterday. my mother lived through the park chung-hee era, under a dictatorship and through the march revolution. so many historical events and issues in Korea that I was never taught as an American, that I could never follow, that i was ashamed to learn.

it just shows the strength that we had. we lived through this. we found ways to fight back. we found ways to preserve our culture - our names, our language, our national symbols.

it's insightful, horrific, intriguing, heartwarming, and tear-jerking. but I'm just so grateful that somewhere out there, this book is piecing together another part of Korean history that is unheard and untold of.

Hi! Are you still writing what fate decides? I love it it’s so sweet ✨💖

hiii <3 wowowow feels like I've been gone forever. sorry for this super late ask as well hehe. uni has started for me once again, and i've been outlining + trying to decide on other projects, so it took the back burner for a while and now wfd is returning!

currently the next chapter of what fate decides is done and undergoing edits, so it'll be up soon! sorry for the long wait!

Olontsev Andrey

Writing and Anxiety

There’s this psychologist called Ian McGregor who has done cool research on creativity and anxiety. Here’s the gist of what he says:

When you believe you’re doing well, working feels great. When you believe it’s not going well, you get anxious, which makes your mind search for alternatives to whatever you’re doing. This is mostly a feature, not a bug: for instance, you might recognize some element of your story isn’t working, and the anxiety that sparks makes you look for a different approach. Anxiety in small doses is productive: it makes you want to switch gears, and that gear-switching helps us solve problems, forces us to get creative.

The anxiety can get intense enough that you switch gears all the way over to “not writing.” Which relieves the anxiety, albeit without solving the problem that caused it. But even that response can be productive. Sometimes your mind gets stuck in a narrow band of possible solutions to a problem, and doing something else for a while lifts your mind out of the groove it’s been wearing and exposes it to new stimuli. This ensures that when you return to the problem, your mind won’t just recycle the same ideas.

After a point, though, as we know, this useful anxiety can turn toxic. Some people’s gets so overwhelming that they stop writing entirely and don’t ever want to start again. And that’s perfectly reasonable, given their experiences: they remember how awful writing felt and have no reason to believe it will feel any different the next time.

These kinds of anxiety seem qualitatively different to me. Productive anxiety is about the problem: you detect it and you want to fix it. The toxic kind is about you, about your inherent capabilities and adequacy to the task. If you believe you have failed every time you’ve written, the “problem” must be you, right? That’s what makes it so unbearable: the sense that the problem can’t be solved.

If you get this kind of anxiety, your reasons for it are deep. They go way back, and I can’t tell you how to untangle them. I can only help you understand what’s happening when you get that awful, hollow “I’ll never be able to write” feeling. Everyone gets anxious when they do creative work, but your mind attributes the cause to you, not to the difficulty of the work. This spikes your anxiety and erodes your faith in yourself. You can’t see what resources you have inside you. You can’t trust time and the creative process, because your anxiety tells you you’ve lost the game before you’ve begun.

I get this. And I know you can’t fix it just by “giving it time” and “persevering” and “believing in yourself.” This kind of anxiety affects your ability to think, to be flexible and exploratory. It shuts down your mind - literally. And that’s not your fault, nor is it permanent. You aren’t incapable, you’re weighed down by very heavy mental chains. If people just tell you to throw them off and you can’t, you lose even more faith in yourself. But there are things you can do.

The drafting techniques I recommend don’t focus on “pushing through” the anxiety or making you feel more positively about yourself. That might be too big of an ask right now. The purpose of these approaches is to help you relax, to quiet down your conscious mind and give your anxiety a ball to chase so your creativity can work in peace. Freewriting accomplishes this. Writing so fast you can’t premeditate what you’re writing helps with this. So does writing in unfamiliar ways - out of order, in fragments, in a chatty conversational voice, dictating into your phone, whatever. There are lots of strategies you can try.

This is all good news. It means you don’t have to wait until you feel awesome and confident. You just need ways of throwing a steak to the guard dog of your anxiety - the bad kind of anxiety - so the rest of your mind can come out and play, which is how problems truly get solved.