Making the work you're meant to

years of sun and water

Solitude in the garden, Octave Denis Victor Guillonnet

You write beautifully because the way you pay attention to the world is beautiful. There’s a porousness to perception that seeps into everything you make. The most banal things are not banal at all — but filled up to the brim with aliveness.

Rebecca Solnit claims that all writing begins with a ‘cosmology of the self.’ The structure of your internal universe that flows into everything you create.

Writing is often treated as a project of making things, one piece at a time, but you write from who you are and what you care about and what true voice is yours and from leaving all the false voices and wrong notes behind.

Her observation has stuck with me for a long time:

Underneath the task of writing a particular piece is the general one of making a self who can make the work you are meant to.

In other words, writing as identity. And identity formation is hard! It requires a great deal of invisible labor and discipline. In fact, the common thread among friends I admire for their precise and elegant writing is their absurdly dogged work ethic.

At Dandelion Chocolate, M tells me of his recent endeavor to consume more classics, the likes of Proust and Eliot. By calibrating yourself toward excellence, he says, the detail at the sentence level gets imperceptibly better. S wakes up at the early moments of dawn and writes for 4 hours straight before going to his full engineering time job. Celine Nguyen has written about the art of the deep copy: close reading and reverse outlining, making extremely pedantic, precise observations of the underlying decisions and technique that makes a piece compelling.

Here’s Henrik Karlsson and Anu on how long writing, or mentally intensive work, can take:

I’ve been reflecting on how is easier than ever before to use technology to produce “good” writing that passes the sniff test. You can prompt a model to sound just like you. Feed it some writing samples and it’ll mimic your tone. It’s reasonably good at doing so. I find myself asking ChatGPT about work and health and the mundane questions that are annoying to pester another human being with. What is the name of this bird? What are all these different entities? It’s excellent for challenging research papers, for example.

Yet, I’m stubbornly protective over my personal writing. Precisely because I care about this squishier concept of identity, and identity creation through consuming and discarding information and killing your darlings and knitting together the ideas that, like brief stars, orbit far apart.

If art is the product of many many micro decisions, I care about the fidelity of those decisions. And frankly, I care about hard work. At the heart of writing is the moment when the words don’t flow. You sit in the stuck-ness, and eke it out. At its best, this sort of meandering and micro-judgment trains you to be a better thinker. Writing warps your brain so you attend to the world more diligently: the ordinary days become more alive, more nuanced, more interesting.

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What to write about these days? I could write about where I’m staying in Insadong, near Tapgol park, flanked by hanok, craft and trinket stores, and street hawkers selling charcoal roasted sweet potatoes. What odd nocturnal beauty rises from Seoul at night: the air is thick and pale with the gloss of stars. I could write about the long summer of 2025 that I spent in a two storey house in 24th and Harrison sitting at the long oak table watching the smoke rise off of the Mission District. Or I could confess the feeling of self ownership and responsibility I’ve been sitting with: no one is coming to save you or provide directional guidance to alter the size of your life. You are at the helm of your own ship staring out into a vast, blue abyss.

In a novel I read last year by Kaveh Akbar, the narrator has a dream where someone cuts down his family’s fifty year old pistachio tree. The family debates the cost. Some say one year’s crop of pistachios is enough, others a replacement tree. “I do not care about the tree,” The landowner says,

"He owes us fifty years of sun inside the tree, fifty years of water inside the tree. Fifty years of sun and water.”

These days I’ve been quieter. Mostly because I’m just reading and writing and working. I don’t believe the cumulation of efforts beyond the visible go to waste. Only that these are inputs to a life, stored components of great utility and beauty. Words and passages and experiences and memories. All these years of sun and water.