Moving to Medium / Chuyển nhà sang Medium

(cuộn xuống dưới để đọc tiếng Việt)

Hello you, you who have wandered into my blog. Thanks for being here. My most current works now live at https://medium.com/@linhngo. If you have a Medium account (which can be set up super easily with your Facebook or email), feel free to follow me there.

English posts are in Sciwalk Cafe.

Vietnamese posts are in Tập Tầm Vông.

While you are here, feel free to browse through my previous writing. Enjoy your stay, and I hope to see you over there in Medium.

Linh

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Bạn gì vừa vào blog của mình ơi: Cảm ơn bạn đã lạc đến đây. Dạo này mình chuyển sang viết bài bên https://medium.com/@linhngo bạn nhé. Nếu bạn có tài khoản Medium (nối từ Facebook hoặc email sang rất là dễ) thì theo dõi mình trên đó nhé.

Bài tiếng Anh: Sciwalk Cafe

Bài tiếng Việt: Tập Tầm Vông

Trong lúc còn vương vấn ở đây, xin cứ tự nhiên thăm quan các bài cũ của mình. Hẹn gặp lại bạn bên Medium nhé.

A writing about writing - part 3

What do I write about?

I often don't have to hunt for writing topics, they sort of just fall onto my plate. The source of this luxury is not some extraordinary talent I possess, but rather mundane: I do something else for food (and bills). I let writing be as free as a bird: it doesn't have to carry deadlines, cranky bosses, lame coworkers, and worst of all, a dreadful purpose "I have to do this to pay the bills". It is my hobby. It's like basketball or video game or Facebook (none of these are hobbies of mine, but the point is, you don't think "Ugh, it's time to Facebook again, how I hate it! What am I gonna do here?") 

Writing is easy to me because I can write whenever I want, about whatever I choose, in whatever style and length I feel like. When an idea pops into my head ("Let's write about writing!"), I walk around with it for a little while, collect random odds and ends that fall into the topic, then when I feel like it's time to write them down, I write them down. That's it. If you don't do that, writing is probably not your hobby. You don't do it for fun.

Not until recently have I realized that professional writers don't write for fun either. This is a very obvious fact if you think about it. They have to write for food. They have to pay their bills. They have to send their kids to school. They have to race deadlines. A lot of times they have to write about something they are not at all interested. Just like us with our jobs, they procrastinate and avoid doing it. Even when they get the writing done, they have to watch it torn apart by their editors, ignored by their readers, and forgotten inside a magazine or on a shelf in the back of the mall's bookstore. Who would find that fun? 

I fall snugly into the narrow range between people who hate writing because they couldn't care less about it and people who hate writing because they have to do it. Writing is the getaway car for my brain, it takes me away from things I avoid doing, like working on my matlab code or cleaning the house or sending an email home. 

So I like writing and have an easy time with it because I'm a hobbyist. That doesn't make me good at it. Often I don't have any point to make, and when I do, they don't get across. Readers, if I'm lucky enough to have any, would see something completely different from what I write, or what I think I write. This is normal - who knows exactly what Van Gogh was thinking when he painted Starry Night? I'm sorry, have I just put myself in the same league with Van Gogh? But hey, when it comes to doing art, in one aspect I have an advantage: I'm currently alive. If I write about donuts and you think I write about stars, I can tell you that no, those are donuts. Van Gogh can't tell you anything about his original intention. You just have to guess.

Starry Bite by Ellen Brown @ELLE.ART

Which is fine, because art is supposed to do that to you. It wakes your imagination, your thoughts, your feelings, your everything. Once the piece of art is out there, it is you who choose how to take it. The artist, live or dead, has little to do with it now. Their work is no longer their baby. It is now a grown-up with full autonomy, and it gets to choose whether it wants to be stars or donuts. This is cool for you as readers but rather lame for the writer-artist. They made the piece, they are the poor parent who's stuck with this child now. The child could grow up to be a lovely person whom everyone loves, or they could be a total a**hole, or they could be so boring and characterless that no one would even notice if they disappear. The writer is the only one who has to work hard rearing their piece, hoping everyone would love it. Still, it doesn't always work.

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This is temporarily the last piece in this series "A writing about writing". Thanks for staying until this point. I hope you find them pleasant.

A writing about writing - part 2

I'm not a story teller. That is why I don't think about writing books.

To tell a story, you have to have a story in mind. You have to imagine all the characters: what they do first thing when they get up, what they say to the barista at that local coffee shop where they are a regular, what they wear on a cold Tuesday... All these tiny things that you probably don't even notice when you read a story are what make the characters who they are. They make them imaginable for you as readers. They become alive in the story.

And you have to build the scenes, or the situations where your characters act in. You can put them in a poor house nested in a crappy neighborhood then give them cancer so their life becomes impossibly difficult and they will find the love of their life then but their life has become so impossibly difficult that it makes them cry and the love of their life cry and the readers cry. And then you decide to not kill them with cancer, you kill the love of their life instead. (A good thing about being a writer is that you can kill anyone in your book without getting arrested.)

Once you have the scenes set up, you have to put them together so they make a story. This is important because you shouldn't combine Korean dramas with John Green and a hint of Mark Haddon and call it your story. You can, but I won't read your book. 

Putting your scenes together is what they call "organization" or "structure". Do you remember what they told you about how to write an essay? First your write down a thesis sentence - that is the theme of your essay. Then you write down sub-thesis sentences - each of them is the theme of one paragraph. Then you write down supporting ideas and details. Then you put in transitions to make the whole thing cohesive. Then you add introduction and conclusion and a title. Then, you have your essay. It is organized, smooth, well-supported, easy to follow, and will get an A from your teacher. 

I'm not good at this. Writing to me is just catching thoughts and turning them into text. I don't make outline. Thoughts come and if they have a nice ring to them, I pick them, not in any particular order. It's like writing poetry. You write down a thought, then you write down a second thought. But the second thought has to rhyme with the first thought in some way, so you only have a few choices of how you can write it down. It's like putting a jigsaw puzzle together. There is only a few pieces that might fit with the one you have out, and there is only one piece that fits best. You try them out and choose the best one. Watch this:

My first thought: "I'm not writing poetry anymore"

My second thought: "Poems are sad"

"Poems" sound sadder than "Poetry", and repetitive patterns are sadder, too, (like when you are watching the rain), so I'm going to replace "poetry" with "poems" in my first thought. That way it sounds really sad.

"I'm not writing poems anymore

Poems are sad"

So now my third thought has to fit in the rhyme and the number of syllables and the stress patterns of the first two thoughts, and because there are not too many ways to fit in all of those things, I don't have a lot of choices to pick, which make it easier. It's like going to a shoe store and you only look at the shoes in your size because they will fit your feet. You don't have to look at the other shoes because they don't fit. If you just move to another country and you don't know your size there, you will have to try a lot of shoes on.

So my third thought could be "Roses are red" and cannot be "The chai latte I had yesterday at Panera tasted like soap" because "Roses are red" is shorter and "red" kind of rhymes with "sad", but "The chai latte I had yester at Panera tasted like soap" is too long and has nothing to rhyme with "sad" or "anymore". 

But I won't put "Roses are red" in there because I don't like this thought. It is like finding shoes that fit but you won't buy them because you don't like them. 

My writing is clear to me because it is my thoughts and I follow them. It is not clear to my readers because they don't know my thoughts. They don't know why I write about poetry after I write about structure of stories. These two thoughts stand next to each other in my head so I marry them to each other, but they look like strangers to my readers. 

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Hi. Thank you for reading again. I'll write more later because this thing is getting very long and I'm trapped in Mark Haddon's style and I need to escape first.

 

A writing about writing - part 1

I like writing. That is kind of a fact. When I was a little girl who thought she would become the greatest writer of all time, my parents had to either gently or violently hint at me that no, I wasn't so great, and even if I had a chance to become a great writer, it wouldn't be a very well-paid job. Writing is not a sexy career. Writers are these strangely dreamy and expectedly poor folks who often die at young ages if they are great at their job. 

So I didn't become a writer. My parents and my potential readers probably feel quite relieved. I'm on a track to become a biologist, which is not anywhere close to writing, except that 200-page dissertation and a bunch of papers I have to write with the vocabulary that sounds like Greek because it was actually derived from Greek (and Latin - I respect a language that manages to create so much troubles for users so long after its death). And I spend most of my time avoiding writing them, which means I don't necessarily enjoy that kind of writing. 

My parents were right, becoming a writer isn't easy. I read somewhere in an essay by Ann Patchett that she was annoyed when everyone just approached her and told her they had a story that she ought to write about, and that it would definitely be a great story, and the writing would just be final presentation, like putting cooked food from the stove top to the table. Except it isn't. Ann Patchett said in her essay that the story was just a very small part, the writing was the hardest part. The story is like a bag full of grocery, the writing is prepping and cooking and serving and cleaning and everything in between. And sometimes, the food isn't that good, or it isn't what your guests want for that dinner, or it is good for you but it is too salty for them, or they eat it too quickly to even appreciate it. (OK, this food analogy is mine, not Ann Patchett's, so don't quote her on that.)

I read a book written by an old friend. It was a fiction. It was okay. I mean, it wasn't one of those books that would make it into literature textbooks 100 years from now. It got out there, became popular for a little while, then probably disappeared. And that is how it goes for the majority of books. Really. Have you been to a bookstore lately? Or on Amazon? Or to the library? There are just so many books. I can't help but thinking there might be a chance that some books never even get read at all. 

And that is why I admire my friend. She had a story, she put work into writing in down, she published it, she watched it getting welcomed and forgotten by readers. She faced the fact that her book might not even get read at all, after all those days and nights she put into writing it. She faced the fact that some people, or a lot of people, might read it and hate it. She faced the fact that some people might read it and would not understand it at all. 

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This part doesn't belong to A writing about writing. I just think I drop you a note, because you happen to be among the 10% of my Facebook friends who don't mind reading long things hidden in a link. Thanks for reading. Leave a mark (a like, I guess, because that's pretty convenient), so I know you were here, and there is a bigger chance that I might keep writing. And if I choose to do so, I will write about how I write.