What’s the Use of Writing?
And other updates on my book and the Booklife Indie Author Forum
In the late 1940s, Anais Nïn wrote in her diary that our culture has “no use” for writing.
Seventy years later, nothing much has changed. Now, as it was back then, books and writing are considered non-essential. And with modern technology, writing as a craft is underestimated and undervalued more than ever before.
I can’t go one day online without seeing someone insist that writing is a matter of copy-pasting, how all you need are psychological tricks, templates, and hot takes. Then there’s the current tech obsession for trying to replace human writers with AI.
Still, we can’t seem to get rid of the enduring fascination for human-written stories and books — print books at that, still around and resurging more than half a century since the futurist forefathers and Egon Spengler (bonus points for those who don’t need to google him) declared: “Print is dead.”
We’ve also seen so many times how the best and most unforgettable writing are the ones crafted beyond templates, outside the mold.
So maybe we’re asking the wrong question all along.
The question has never been what’s the use of writing, but why do human beings keep writing?
Ms. Nïn kindly gives us an answer to this as well:
"I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live. I could not live in any of the worlds offered to me — the world of my parents, the world of war, the world of politics. I had to create a world of my own…
We also write to heighten our own awareness of life…We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection.
We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it.”
Storytelling Mishaps and Writing Again
I like telling stories.
Some of my childhood mishaps were the unfortunate “side-effect” of my attempts at storytelling.
There was the time I was re-enacting a Filipino fable in front of my cousins who weren’t that much younger. It was the story of a greedy monkey who didn’t want to share his pepper harvest. The cunning rabbit told him rubbing peppers in his eyes would give him special powers.
So of course, I wanted to make the story “real” to my audience.
I remember rubbing the red peppers growing in my great aunt’s garden and rubbing my eyes, just like the monkey did.
The painful burning and swelling is now part of my core memory.
There might have been screaming after that, from me and my younger cousins.
If anything, that incident succeeded in keeping me and my cousins from messing around in that garden again.
Luckily, I never stopped telling stories.
I just wisely switched from the “telling” to the writing of them instead.
The only thing was, I kept writing for other people. Ghostwriting memoirs and biographies. Writing articles for coverage and reporting.
Now I’m finally sitting down to write for myself. Back to square one, relearning storytelling outside the bounds of my comfort zone.
Some days, I wonder if I should forget it. Stop trying to be a published author and stick to only editing and helping other authors instead.
It would be easier.
I could keep writing privately to my heart’s content, and post occasional social updates. I wouldn’t need to be accountable or put myself and my words out there.
But for better or worse, I’ve started picking at the keyboard again, working with a coach, and writing “the book” after almost a decade of leaving it undone.
As I wrote to my book coach, I feel like I'm at just the right junction to write my book and navigate the new landscapes of experience that go along with it.
Indie Author Inspiration
Last Saturday, I was fortunate to be one of the Editorial Freelancers Association members representing at the Booklife Indie Author Forum.
I picked up these inspiring and much-needed reminders for aspiring authors. I added my own reflections as someone finding my way back to writing for myself again:
1. Writing as a way of moving through the world
In her keynote speech, Leslye Penelope (The Earthsinger Chronicles: Song of Blood & Stone) said that she was a “violent introvert” who dreaded even the thought of speaking to people she didn’t know.
Writing became her way of “moving through the world.”
Like Leslye, I’m not always at ease with the “mechanics” of daily life. I may have learned to be what they call a functional introvert, but I’ve relied on coping skills to make it easier.
Writing is one of them. I may not be sure how to navigate every social situation, but I know I can always make sense of things by putting words to paper.
And while I’m at it, I might as well create something that shows what that looks like for someone like me.
2. Writing to fulfill a purpose
“I wanted to be someone’s favorite author.”
This was Leslye’s “why” when she started writing and aspiring to be a published author. She wanted to reach that reader, spark their imagination, and maybe even inspire them to write stories of their own.
My own “why” keeps going back to that memory of my childhood mishap with the peppers:
I like telling stories.
Documenting things that happened, words said, places seen. Turning words into images you can see in your mind.
I like unearthing stories and letting them take root and grow in me, then retelling them in ways that make them my own.
I want to leave stories behind that become a link to the past, a lesson for now, and a hope for the future.
3. Writing to capture the truth
It’s easy to think of writing as a binary: writing to report and document real events (nonfiction) and writing to imagine or escape (fiction).
But writing is a way to find meaning in events as much as it is a way to record or conjure them. It’s not just a playing with imagination, but “a way of capturing deep emotional truths,” as memoir author Laura Davis says.
She describes writing (memoir writing, in particular) as:
a way to explore “how our relationship to memories change over time”
a way of telling the story beyond what happened — how we experienced it in our unique way, how it impacted our lives.
Writing in Public: Home is a Moving Thing
As part of my Writing in Public (WIP) commitment, I’m including these sections in the next newsletter:
Mini-updates and excerpts of my drafts
Writing and publishing tips as I come across them from my book coach, Janice de Jesus, the Blocked2Book cohort, and other writing conferences
First update: Rebekah Borucki required the Blocked2Book cohort to write a working “elevator pitch” for our books.
Here’s mine:
What is my book about?
Home is a Moving Thing begins with a mysterious old photo of my grandfather that leads me down a rabbit hole of family legends, secrets, and the real story behind a suspicious death that I’m determined to uncover.
What is it really about?
Through my grandfather’s life, I explore our family’s unresolved grief over having to leave a country we love during different waves of migration. It’s a retelling of family stories that were buried in the middle of countless moving and uprooting — stories that redefine home not as a physical place, but an undeniable belonging that no one can ever be exiled from.
What do I want readers to take away after reading the book?
I imagine you (yes, you) reading it. I imagine you recognizing yourself in the story, no matter our background, countries of origin and family stories.
In spite of appearances, in spite of language barriers, in spite of the kind of lies, cultural and political, with which we were indoctrinated, we all have more in common with each other than we think. The only way we can survive the world’s perpetual conflict is by making space for each other to belong.
Publishing Notes:
Quote by Anais Nin from her diaries, Goodreads.
“Print is Dead. Long Live Print” by Michael Rosenwald, Columbia Journalism Review, Fall/Winter 2016.
Who First Said, “Print is Dead”? from Emdashes.com, April 2012.
Earthsinger Chronicles Book 1: Song of Blood & Stone by L. Penelope aka Leslye Penelope.