The Secret to Writing with Emotion, Without Oversharing | with Ava | How I Write Podcast
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- Опубліковано 23 чер 2024
- How do you create intimacy and connection with readers?
While some writers have a way of letting you inside their mind, Ava Huang has a way of letting you inside her heart. There's an intimacy about her writing - an honesty, a tenderness, a contemplative-ness, a sense of connection that shows up in her work and it's what makes her unique.
Ava sees writing as a distinct form of consciousness. This process of continually excavating your mind to find out what you think and then eventually you realize that you have so much more to say on this topic than you ever originally realized.
Ava Huang's story is a treasure trove of insights, of moments that make you pause and think, "Wow, writing is so much more than just words on a page." It's about the heart, the soul, and the contemplative journey that we all take.
OUTLINE:
00:00:00 Intro
00:00:45 Cliches
00:02:20 Going deeper
00:03:10 Difficult emotions
00:03:30 Self sabotage
00:07:00 Tools and methods
00:08:30 Dialogue
00:13:00 Writing style
00:16:00 Poetry
00:20:00 Ruminating
00:22:30 Experiences
00:27:00 Notes
00:32:30 Abundance
00:34:00 Psychedelics
00:35:00 Acceptance
00:40:30 Hatred
00:43:30 Twitter
00:44:00 Audiences
00:49:00 Quantity vs Quality
00:50:30 Cultivating taste
00:56:00 Love
00:57:00 Habits
00:58:00 Writing process
SPEAKER LINKS:
Substack: ava.substack.com/
Twitter: / noampomsky
WRITE OF PASSAGE:
Want to learn more about the next class Write of Passage?
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PODCAST LINKS:
Website: writeofpassage.school/how-i-w...
Apple: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast...
Spotify: open.spotify.com/show/2DjMSbo...
ABOUT THE HOST:
I’m David Perell and I’m a writer, teacher, and podcaster. I believe writing online is one of the biggest opportunities in the world today. For the first time in human history, everybody can freely share their ideas with a global audience. I seek to help as many people publish their writing online as possible.
Precision meets poetry - that's how I describe Ava's writing process.
She's grown her newsletter audience to more than 24,000 people and here's what she's taught me about writing well:
1. If someone’s much better than you at something they probably try much harder.
2. Personal anecdotes breathe life into your writing. First-hand experience gives you credibility as a writer and doubles as a wellspring for some of your deepest wisdom.
3. Writing is an altered state of consciousness, analogous to being drunk or deep in a meditative state.
4. Good personal writing describes the core truths of the human experience while avoiding self-help jargon.
5. When you write from life and not theory, you will be most able to create something that feels unpolluted by all the ideas you’ve consumed.
6. Writing is a tool to reach beyond consensus. Write and write and write until you transcend the cliches and step into undiscovered territory.
7. Writing is also a tool for knowing, shaping, and owning your story. Ava says: “Instead of relying on someone else to narrativize my life or offer an observation about me, I use writing as a way to assert my own narrative. It’s how I remain more subject than object, how I maintain conviction in my own agency.”
8. Creativity is inherently anti-authoritarian. As in: to be successfully creative, you have to shed the part of yourself that desperately wants reassurance. It’s only then that you can escape cliche and escape paradigmatic thinking.
9. Chase what feels valuable to you, even if doing so leads to eye-rolling reactions. Ava was told by her parents to pursue programming because “liberal arts is worthless,” only to hear tech bros say that writing is the most valuable skill in the world.
10. Writing is the creative residue of all the background rumination you do as you go through life (such as sitting in friends' living rooms, taking your dog to the park, getting dehydrated during a hike).
11. How Ava thinks about writing in public: Weigh the importance of feeling safe with the importance of being known.
12. Ava on how writing is sometimes not an act, but a state of being: “I’m trying to think of writing less as doing and more as being. A passive state, almost: a way of existing in the world. Something that takes me away from myself, and in doing so draws me deeper inwards.”
This is a masterclass in writing from the heart - expressing emotions, creating a sense of intimacy in your writing, and bringing your soul onto the page.
writeofpassage.school/how-i-write/
“The goal is always to transcribe an emotional experience honestly.” That’s it.
Love it!!! 😍
Thanks
Great episode!
✍️✍️✍️✍️