For a long time, I’ve been putting off creating an outlet to share my writing more consistently. Part of this is that, like many writers, I have a hard time squaring my need for privacy with my desire to share my work. Another part is kind of embarrassing: I used to not want to make a Substack because then digital outlets would consider my work ‘previously published,’ and I wanted to ‘save’ my writing for the ‘real’ places. Also, I didn’t want to be one of those people who posts their notes app on Instagram for likes. Which is to say, I felt a misplaced moral righteousness about toiling away on my work without relief of external validation. In retrospect, this was dumb; I was clearly projecting my fear of putting my writing out there without the guardrails of a publication’s approval to legitimize it. In 2024, I’m letting go of that.
(My decision to start this Substack was also deeply inspired by Jackie Wang’s newest, Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun. It’s basically a collection of Tumblr blogposts and zines from the 2010s, a lot of which concern being a queer, half-Asian artist living under capitalism. So welcome to a way-less-emo version of my 2013 Tumblr, I guess.)
Thinking through my fear around creating a Substack allowed me to reflect on my relationship to fiction. Many of us, myself included, write fiction in order to protect ourselves. By labeling writing as “fiction,” we can writhe unseen, emanating the mucus of our innermost psyches. This isn’t to say that everything I write is from life. How to explain what Garth Greenwell summed up so efficiently during a reading once: that real life is the raw material with which you build the house that is your fiction. The way I explain it to friends: I write fiction featuring characters in different circumstances than I, navigating challenges that arise in response to questions that pressurize my own life. My characters aren’t me; we’re just moved to action by similar forces. Most of the time, those actions—real or imagined—differ. This, I think, is what makes the process compelling.
If you know me, you know I’m a big fan of autofiction. Authors like Sigrid Nunez and Annie Ernaux push genre boundaries in their novels, which alight from topic to topic in streams of consciousness whose intimacy pushes forth narrative. Yet confessional writers often face a sort of derision, as if their work doesn’t require use of the imagination. It’s true these writers aren’t engaging in the kind of worldbuilding required by a genre like fantasy, but also, isn’t language itself the act of plucking words out of the vast sky of the brain? And isn’t that process inherently imaginative? (In my opinion, any sort of writing requires use of the imagination; if imagination is a many-sided prism, the question of genre concerns which side you’re admiring at a given time.)
On the other hand, writers who work with circumstances, characters, and plots that veer far out of the confines of their own experiences are subject to cries of appropriation. I spoke with my sister recently about the controversy surrounding the writer Hanya Yanigihara, whose epic of a novel A Little Life (not so little, at 800+ pages) I devoured while quarantining with my family in the uncertain spring of 2020. Yanigihara is a Korean woman who writes chiefly about the lives of gay men. Many have described her work as trauma porn, and, to be sure, there are moments in which I had to turn away from her horrific descriptions of protagonist Jude’s self-harm. But I think the controversy surrounding Yanigihara’s subject matter is reminiscent of our culture’s obsession with identity politics to the point of breakage. Certainly there are instances in which writers cause harm by representing experiences that aren’t their own. But, within the cultural conversations I’m privy to, critics weren’t dissing Yanigiharas specific representation of gay men—it was mostly that she chose to write about them in the first place.
I don’t find this critique compelling. This isn’t to say I haven’t been rubbed the wrong way myself by writers’ representations of characters whose identities differ from their own. For instance, Torrey Peters’ Detransition Baby revolves around three main characters, two of whom—Reese and Ames—are white trans people, and one of whom—Katrina— is a cis Asian woman. In the book, Ames’ boss and lover, Katrina, becomes pregnant with Ames’ baby, and Ames, Reese, and Katrina consider all raising the kid together. Even though there are clearly three main characters, only Ames and Reese are afforded their own perspectives in the novel, whereas Katrina is not. This craft choice about perspective relegates Katrina to the limits of her body, whose only purpose ends up being to entertain a prospective future for two white protagonists. This soured my experience of the book. The trope of an Asian woman who exists only to provide sexual or reproductive gratification is boring at best, colonialist at worst.
That aside, there are many reasons I think writers can and should explore experiences that depart from their own. For one, it makes the work dynamic. For another, there’s potential for the writer to experience empathy in new ways throughout the process. Doesn’t attempting to inhabit a character unlike ourselves increase our capacity for connection and understanding? Isn’t that a good thing, especially in a capitalist culture that wants to cleave us from one another so that we each only exist in our little cubicles and boxes and self-contained cities? If our culture dissuades writers from exploring experiences that differ from their own, it makes sense that autofiction is trending as a genre. But I hate the thought that some writers might turn to autofiction simply out of a sense of fear that they won’t be able to do a character justice; I’m much more interested in writing propelled by bravery and experimentation.
In the past few months, I’ve been procrastinating working on my novel by writing a series of letters from one character to another. I tell myself this is a way of working on the novel, though I’m afraid it might be morphing into a different project altogether. Which is to say that when I told my friend I was thinking of starting a Substack and they asked what I was working on for it, I told them about the most recent letter. “But it’s weird,” I qualified. “It sums up what I’ve been thinking about, but it’s not my voice. It’s a character’s voice.” We went on to continue talking about why I was hesitant to share the entry. Ultimately, that process of consideration engendered these tangled thoughts about fiction, autofiction, and identity that I’m attempting to parse now.
I want to go back to Hanya Yanigihara for a moment to reify that I don’t disapprove of her choice to write about whatever she’s writing about, whether it has to do with her life or not. She has license to write about whatever she wants. I don’t know her as a person. I don’t know what her histories or intimacies or dreams are like. And beyond that, I believe quite doggedly in the sacred mystery of the creative process. Who knows how A Little Life came to her, and who are we to know? As creatives, I think we have to respect the mystery of the process. I can’t remember where I heard this—maybe The Creative Independent?—but there’s this notion that if you have an idea for a creative endeavor and you don’t act on it, the idea will jump into the mind of another. Maybe that’s where people get their ideas for plots that have nothing to do with their lives, and honestly, I think that’s kind of beautiful. The idea has a life of its own! It wants to be expressed, to be born into this world, and it’ll do whatever it takes to get there, the little idea that could. (I’m thinking now of those white blobs in The Boy and the Heron, floating up into the sky to be born as babies in the ‘real’ world up above. So beautiful, mysterious, and magical.)
I applied to MFA programs in fiction this past fall, and I wrote something corny in my personal statement that feels appropriate to repeat here: “I have received other writers’ bravery time and time again, and I can only hope to pay it forward.” This is a space in which I hope to do that, and your readership is truly a gift. Thank you for reading, for bearing with me and for bearing witness. Please be in touch if you have thoughts on Jackie Wang, Annie Ernaux, Sigrid Nunez, Torrey Peters, Hanya Yanagihara, imagination, the mystery of the creative process, or the like. Stay tuned for more! <3
XOXO,
Hana