How to Keep the Writing Coming

How do I keep the writing coming? Interesting. For me, this question is no different from "How have you kept going all this time?"

Yu Hua has a book called To Live. I first read it in high school and never read it again. Back then I was really chasing the meaning of being alive, and I think most people who read this book go to it for that.

But after finishing it, what's the meaning of being alive? I don't think many people could say. Later I saw a comment online from someone who said: "To Live isn't simply about Fugui's story. What it really wants you to understand is this: stop agonizing over anything. Don't agonize over the past, over suffering, or over the meaning of life. Living is just living. The book doesn't tell you how to succeed or how to be happy. It's telling you: don't ask so many 'whys.' As long as you're alive, live well."

Those words are undeniably powerful, so when I thought about how to keep the writing coming, I remembered them.

Last week, in the exchange at A-Fan's creator camp, Fanfan suggested I write on this topic. Honestly, I'd forgotten all about it for the past few days. Today one of the students in the group reminded me, saying we should write this post together, and that's what brought it back.

How far back does my writing go? Probably to 2015, when I was in the second year of middle school and wanted to write web novels.

My writing started with web novels, fantasy novels to be exact. Back then I thought writing novels was impressive. You could use wild imagination, create a whole world and a cast of characters, and it was really fun.

Later I did write some web novels, but I abandoned all of them. The longest got only about two hundred thousand characters.

Later I thought about it, and a big part of why I never wrote well was that I stopped liking web novels after middle school. Right after I read To Live, I almost never read web novels again and fell for literature and philosophy books instead.

So input matters a lot for writing, but back then I had no awareness of that. I could just crank out words on enthusiasm and passion alone.

Afterward I barely wrote web novels. But all those years of writing them gave me a writing habit and a wish about writing. It wasn't until college that I registered my own WeChat Official Account, which seems to have opened another branch of my writing.

In college, I updated my Official Account now and then, mostly with reflections on life. Looking back now, most of it was pretty overwrought.

Still, it felt great then. I felt I could write something every day and post it. Not many people read it, but it somehow felt more rewarding than writing web novels. And as I read more and more books and my thinking got more artsy, I'd grow sentimental at the sight of things.

After I started working, I occasionally wrote travel notes from places across the country, but I wrote far less often than in college. Not until December last year did I properly pick up my Official Account again and start posting daily. It's been more than three months now.

Why am I writing out my whole writing history, from middle school to now? Because I want to say one thing: writing and life are closely tied.

I basically think writing and living are the same thing now. In writing, you don't need to agonize over anything. Don't agonize over the past, over suffering, or over the meaning of writing. It's just writing. Don't ask so many "whys." I'm alive, so I write.

So the question of how to keep the writing coming is really a nonsense question, because as long as you're alive, you'll have endless material, and as long as you're willing to write, you'll never run out of things to write about.

If you want to write too, but always find it hard to put pen to paper, or feel that posting continuously is difficult, it only proves that you have too many worries, in your writing and in your life.

If you care a lot about others' opinions, you'll watch your writing stats, and the moment someone disagrees with you, you'll start to doubt yourself.

If you love worrying about the future, you'll keep asking what use writing like this will be later on.

If you love thinking about the meaning of life, you'll think about the meaning of writing the same way.

Writing is a reflection of life. Everything in life ends up decorating your writing in return.

That's why I've always agreed with this saying: "To write, you have to do things unrelated to writing."

Admittedly, writing takes technique. But before technique, we have to admit that writing is first something that needs to flow naturally. If you add technique before the natural flow, you've got things backwards.

All technique should follow the most natural and essential laws, like breathing. If you can make words flow out as naturally as your breath, your words will carry the mark of your soul. They'll be yours alone.

Recently I learned a term, "natural writing": sitting in front of the computer and recording everything that flows naturally out of your head.

I think it takes practice. What's valuable about "natural writing" is that it makes you listen to your own heart. Take this post. It's titled "How to Keep the Writing Coming," and before you clicked in, you may have thought it would be full of methodology.

Yes, under a title like this, I could say: take in a lot, keep a writing habit, build your own writing system. But when I sat down at the computer and actually tried to write this post, I found my inner voice didn't want to tell you those things.

The voice in my head kept saying: live well.

I think keeping up lots of input, building a writing habit, and building a writing system are all just parts of life. If you love writing, you'll naturally deal with them.

But if you're full of hesitation about writing and stuck in place, the best methods and techniques are futile, because your life surely has questions that trouble you more than what writing means or what use it is.

So if you want to write, you might as well start with the simplest sentence.

Don't think that the moment you start writing, you must write something profound. Don't assume that you'll write what you imagine the moment you pick up your pen. These are useless for writing.

What's truly useful is only the one word, the one sentence, the one paragraph, the one post you actually write.

As long as you write, it's useful.