Turning another page
Feeling a creative shift, willing myself to begin again...
However you found your way here, welcome! I’m Emily, and I write letters about how we seek and tell stories to make sense of a changing world and our place in it.
The moment I almost started to cry is when Isabel Wilkerson (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) is approached by a suave editor (Blair Underwood) who asks her, in a suave editor voice, “Are you interested in writing something for us?”—and then she replies, against a rippling piano and orchestral score, “I don’t do assignments anymore”—and then you see a soaring montage of the Holocaust memorial in Berlin, and the Taj Mahal, and more Nazis, and I think a cricket match? I couldn’t believe I was seeing this on a big screen: a writer turning down an assignment, being framed as the first step in a thrilling intellectual journey.
from a letter by
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Recently organizing the mess of my photo archives, I was reminded that I have divided them into clusters of years, with each cluster representing a phase in my life. Some are marked by a different material existence—my high school years, my university years, my sojourn in Latin America, some particularly immersive assignments; but others are marked more subtly, by a certain change in mental posture. What will I choose to turn myself more to, lift my face towards? I had started out grouping 2024 with 2022 and 2023, but have since moved it out into its own folder. This may turn out to be premature, but for now, it feels right. In my work—which I generally mean all my reading, real-world exploring, thinking, and writing, some of which I get paid for and some of which I don’t—I’m feeling the urge to peel away from what I’ve done before. How exactly, I have some skeletal idea; I just need to fill that skeleton out.
Admittedly, that’s easier said than done when one has gotten used to only moving on something when there’s a commission and knows what the end result will be. Whether my ideas will manifest or whether I will fail (better, hopefully), we will see, but I’m hoping to learn from the attempt anyway. Now advancing in my thirties, I honestly need to recapture some of my old teenage spirit. I built whole websites and made paper newsletters (stapled together, distributed to my cousins and relatives) about things I was simply interested in and even online literary magazines (I asked adults far older than me to submit their poems and short fiction and they did! At that early stage of the internet’s existence everyone was sharing things for free), without any thought as to what anyone would think of them and how many people would read them. Infelicitously, one can’t do things so carefreely as a grown-up who agonizes about prospects and achievements, but even a smidgen of that youthful can-do spirit would do me a lot of good right now. My enthusiasm used to just carry me over, and that’s what I want to let it do again—though, already I will say: I will struggle with this. I will think I should be doing something more “important” and get waylaid and have to find my way back, to believe in my unsantcioned ideas, again and again.
I remember when I first came to writing, it was through fiction‚ with amateur stories and poems no one else but my family would have seen. When I came into my teens, I surfed the wave of the blogging era, trying to articulate my thoughts on a multitude of things and about my personal life as a kid growing up in Malaysia. Then I started reading the “new journalists” like Gay Talese and Joan Didion and the literary nonfiction writers that followed in their wake (Susan Orlean, William Finnegan, many more I’ll perhaps list in a separate letter), which coincided, I think, with my time at university abroad: an experience that itself made me even more curious about the world. When I went to Central America after that, what propelled me was a desire to “see the real world” and write about it like those writers. But it was also my first prolonged solo trip, a milestone for me, so I was possibly more interested in my own experience of these places, in what traveling on my own there was doing to me. I don’t know when that changed, not long after I think, but I started to feel like my own travel experience was not what was interesting to me, and felt that if I were to write, my life would not be my material; I enjoyed reading the classic travel books but felt increasingly ambivalent about their place in our present. Then, not long after that, wanting to make some sort of a name as a writer on a decidedly more practical path, I looked for work in journalism (but not before a trial stint in copywriting flogging life insurance and Milo and period pads 😅), and found it much more gratifying to write about people whose lives are completely different from mine but who share basic human aspirations—being loved; and above all, being seen. That’s what triggers my curiosity, and still does: the co-existence of differing but parallel human realities. That changed my traveling too: I became a lot less invested in the experience I was having and more interested in learning about a place and the people who inhabit it. A positive thing, though it meant that all my travels thereafter became filled with anxiety, as I was thinking constantly about what story I could pitch, worrying that what interested me wouldn’t be of sufficient interest to commissioning editors (which happened often).
If you’ve ever been a young, aspiring journalist, you would probably also have at some point parroted something along the lines of being “a voice for the voiceless”—a gratingly self-regarding ideal, the utterance of which makes me cringe now, though not exactly for the sentiment. After all, the amplifying of realities invisible to the powerful or apathetic can never be a bad thing, and has led to concrete improvements in the lived realities of marginalized communities in some cases. And it sure helps one feel like one is doing important, relevant, elevated work. For someone who had grown up shielded from the cruelty and caprices of the world, I found myself wanting to understand the struggles of those who had not been so lucky. I was utterly sincere in my desire to understand and to empathize, but there was something selfish in it too. Maybe I thought that I would be a better person by becoming more knowledgeable, more worldly, by not being that katak di bawah tempurung—frog under a coconut shell? Isn’t it often the case that those who have never had to suffer want to see and understand what suffering is up close, but not actually suffer themselves?
Last year, after I concluded my reporting in Sabah’s mangroves, thanks to a grant from the Pulitzer Center, I thought I would spend the next year planning more reported stories and applying for more grants. But it felt like the best way to get commissions and grants was to do newsy “important” stories, and I was feeling paralyzed somehow, unable to muster the effort to start in on any of the ideas I had accumulated in an unwieldy list on my Notes app. I know that at least a couple of them are good and likely to find a global audience once signposted with the appropriate bells and whistles, but I was in a deep slump and found it difficult to go through the paces. Instead, I worked on writing that felt lower-stakes and helped others with their writing, which only made me beat myself up more, feeling like I was whittling away time I could be using to work on my own things. A few editors wrote me to say they liked my work and asked for pitches, and since this made me feel validated I told them, yes, I would send them some soon, and then never did, even when I had stories sufficiently researched and ready, without too much more work, to be pitched. Like so many people, I’ve come to measure myself by my productivity, and when I feel I haven’t done enough (objectively: sometimes true, sometimes not), my mind has a tendency to run in circles. I think I was afraid that I wouldn’t, ultimately, be able to deliver.
I hate to use the word “burnout” since, as a freelancer, it feels to some extent self-imposed—but I think I experienced a bit of that last year. My partner pointed out that I had, for too long, spent entire days, including weekends, working without intentional mental rest. I never considered myself to have been working until I actually produced some writing (even when I was researching and pitching doing all the other things that lead to writing), so I always felt like I had to make up for lost time, which of course I never could, which also meant that I cut corners on my sleep often, since I never finished what I wanted to finish before bedtime. When I was younger, this was not such a big deal; I felt like I could always will myself into being a mostly functional person. But when I took a break after a spate of assignments last year, I noticed how much better I felt‚ how I could better open my mind to other things and spend time on other things besides work without feeling (too) guilty. I think our new puppy had a lot to do with it: she needed close care, and I had to give it to her whether I felt like I had time or not. I wasn’t imagining this uptick in my wellbeing either; it was reflected in my routine medical tests last year, which was a relief considering the uterine scare I had a year ago, due, according to the doctor, to “probably stress and lack of sleep”. I used to think that was such a wishy-washy thing to say, how am I supposed to just stress less and sleep more when there’s so much to get done? Also, I think I didn’t quite believe that stress, which seemed more like an emotional affliction, could actually impact one bodily wellbeing. Well, now I think differently. I’ve often thought that when I write well, I don’t often live well; and when I live well, I don’t often write well. As I grow older, I feel an increasing need to find more harmony between the two.
In all honesty, I’ve also become a little disillusioned with being a freelance journalist. Some who are strangers to freelance journalism might think, why not just get a job? Well, that would usually look more like news news journalism, whereas I tend to mix it up with features, narrative nonfiction, essays etc.—I like variety. Many freelance journalists choose to be freelance journalists; they didn’t become one because they couldn’t get a job—though it might be true that they became one because they couldn’t get a job they wanted, partly because there aren’t enough of such jobs to go around. They hoped to be a different kind of journalist (there should be room for many kinds), which maybe required a different approach, such as more time or geographical flexibility. When I was younger I took it on faith that as one progresses everything will get better—not just bigger bylines, but more stability and more money, too. That hasn’t been true (at least, not in a way that makes enough of a difference as one’s life expands), and I know a few journalists way more accomplished than me who struggle with the same. An acquaintance said she was now mostly doing ghostwriting, which didn’t offer her as much job satisfaction but helped her live better, and at a certain stage in one’s life that does tend to become more important, doesn’t it?
I used to think that everything was my own fault: if only I were faster, more efficient, a better juggler! Now I see more clearly that the industry is the problem: how it so baldly undervalues deep reporting and writing and accumulated expertise in favor of who or what is cheaper or more popular (which in this present world means more followers on social media). Even if you are employed on staff, your job is never safe, as we’ve seen with the most recent media meltdown. And as a freelance journalist, you often have to step outside journalism to make the numbers make sense, which I think is challenging. Journalism is all-consuming, high-anxiety, and low-paid; you’re constantly pitching for attention and battling deadlines and worrying about getting things wrong, while still trying to bring a little bit of art into what you do. Do I really want to continue doing this? Some part of me fantasizes about abandoning it for something completely unrelated.
But I will always be writing, in some form or other. Because this obsessive documenter of the world, is who I am. I love being curious about something and simply going about looking for answers to my questions, piecing together all the different parts to make sense of them. And I love being able to share what I learn with others. Some of my friends used to tease me back in uni about being too ready to explain something—“Emsplaining”, I guess 😅—but I think I’m often just delighting in my own discovery, my own moment of realization. So, I will always want to be exploring new terrain, geographical or thematical, and coming back to tell you about something I (and perhaps you) didn’t know before. But maybe now, in part because of the seeming ineffectiveness of the narrow “news” approach in a more fragmented and silo-ed world, I want to take that same curiosity and apply it to subtly different forms—think more capaciously, more artfully, wrestle more with ideas and story, maybe be less afraid to bring myself into it.
I think, for a long time, I’ve been feeding off an ideal of myself as the kind of writer I’ve always thought of as more admirable, whose concerns I’ve always thought of as more worthwhile—either because they’re more worldly or existential, or they involve more grounded means of reporting—and it’s been difficult to unwed myself from this. Though my efforts have taken me to some interesting places and helped me claim some very modest achievements, I’ve been wondering if I’ve truly followed my heart through it. For so long, I’ve prioritized results over process. I don’t think I’ve truly let myself just sniff around and experiment and discover; I’m always trying to plan what comes next, which can lead to paralysis over minute decisions and strangle the process. And I wonder: were I to finally let go, at an age where I perhaps feel I have a little less to prove, would I find myself in someplace surprising, breathe new life into this craft? I’m trying to give in to what I feel I want to be doing next instead of what I feel I should be doing next—it hasn’t always been so easy to separate the two—in order to pacify or impress some imaginary critic, who W.C. says is the most punishingly critical version of myself. At the same time, I recognize that I could well have been following my heart all along; it just now feels like it’s tugging me in a different direction, propelled by a desire to try different ways of telling stories, even different stories—and that’s okay. We all have our seasons, and the world and the kinds of stories it needs change too.
But there I go again, talking about what stories the world needs. Ooof. I know I’ll serve myself best if I just write what I want to write and what I want to read (which in all likelihood will find others who need it too and have its own invisible ripple effects), which right this moment, does not feel like journalism in the conventional sense. It doesn’t mean I’m not going to do it all together, but I think I just want to cut loose and try something else that can better embrace the kinds of questions I seek answers to these days. My concerns will probably remain much the same, but the questions I’m asking are likely to be broader, in a way that can hopefully go beyond the usual frameworks of thinking, that are more personal but in a way that intersects with what’s going on in the world, with many more dots to connect over large swathes of different themes—and they probably won’t be adequately answered within the confines of a newspaper story. As Elif Batuman pointed out in the letter I quoted above about Isabel Wilkerson’s Origins and Proust’s In Search of Lost Time: they were still engaging with the material facts of their time—just in a more inclusive, all-encompassing way. That’s what I want to let myself attempt. I used to think that I could only embark on something bigger or more ambitious when I got really, really, really good at what I do, but since I’ll never satisfy my own standards anyway, I might as well give it a shot. Is what I’m thinking of a book? I’m not quite sure. I’m not being coy, I’m just wary of locking any ideas into my head before I let them have a chance to unfurl themselves. I want to start writing without conceptualizing too much, even as I fear failure and the lack of any guarantees in sight, and hope the material ultimately takes the shape that best serves it.
I know I’ll be writing all my life, and I know I have broad interests—so I’m prone, for better or worse, to being more of a generalist than a specialist, in both content and form. I also know I’ll have phases where one aspect of writing draws me more than another. A year ago, speaking to a friend, I told her how hungry I felt just to find things out, in the sense that I had begun to ask all these questions about our climate crisis, and I was searching for answers to them, and I had to read a lot since I don’t have a science background. I went down a rabbit hole and now have stacks of academic papers sitting along my window bench. Off the back of a story about the link between zoonotic disease and intensive animal agriculture, I started reading about global food systems, wondering: How can we nourish ourselves, all of us, without turning the world into a giant factory farm? And I told my friend that it felt like this insatiable thirst for information was overshadowing my hunger for story a bit, which really surprised me. I had always thought that the creative aspect of writing, i.e. the “narrative” in narrative nonfiction, was what called out most to me, that it was my edge among faster, more investigative, and more specialist reporters, and suddenly I felt a kind of identity crisis! But I needn’t have worried. It was a phase, and it will come again; a writer always needs specific material facts to make a story, even in fiction. But right now, my hunger for narrative has reasserted itself again. Part of how I’ll bring myself around may include a brief exercise in writing fiction, even if I don’t have serious ambitions to be a fiction writer. I feel it’ll help me break out of any sort of mould I feel I need to cleave to. I’m just in an experimental mood.
So, because of this, I think this newsletter will take on a readjusted dimension, and I’ve tweaked the About page to reflect that. I don’t think very much will change, but I may write more here about reading and writing as I wrestle over how to give expression to what I’m learning and thinking and feeling, charting my stops and starts as I feel out the contours of my new explorations.
p.s. Unlike Isabel Wilkerson, I won’t be saying no to all assignments! Please feel free to get in touch if you would like to work together. I’m especially interested in freelance or part-time editing work.
Recommended reading
So, the Proust thought exercise from last time was: if you feel guilty for taking a long time to write about personal experiences, as opposed to engaging with the pressing issues of your time, try thinking of Processing Experiences as a duty, and Engaging With Issues as a distraction that you’ve been using to escape that duty. I remember Twitter helping me to see things this way—viz. helping me see how I was using the pressing issues of my time as a self-important form of not confronting my own awful subjectivity. This now reminds me of Maggie Haberman’s tweeting advice, which involves asking yourself, “Is this something that needs to be said, is it something that needs to be said by you, and is it something that needs to be said by you right now?,” and tweeting only if it’s “yes” on all three. In Search of Lost Time helped millions of people, and nobody else could have written it, and it couldn’t have been written at any other time.
Again, the idea isn’t that it’s “better” to process your experiences than to engage with pressing issues. The idea is that we need people to do both those things. But the first one takes longer, and is hugely disincentivized […] one way “the system” keeps itself going is by massively disincentivizing and discouraging anyone from sitting alone in a room long enough to reflect on anything they’re doing or thinking or experiencing.
—Elif Batuman again (I recently bought a paid subscription to her newsletter and it really feels like a guiding light)
Of course I do also believe in the political value of slow forms, of art-making, even if this value is quite intangible and unpredictable, and even if I fairly regularly experience crises of faith. People with different professions and temperaments might be more suited to quick action; the present extremity of violence will eventually crest (even though this is very difficult to think about right now) and the tempo will shift and the slow people will become useful again. And at the same time there are shorter-term things we can all do, like speak truth to power when power is lying. We can try to lift up the voices that are being suppressed or drowned out. We can insist on history, and on facts, and on humanism.
—Isabella Hammad in conversation with Sally Rooney on Israel & Palestine
“Deep down I want to make fiction and I think I might be really good at it”.
What I remember clearly is how daring that admission felt. How blasphemous it seemed to allow myself—even briefly—to consider a path other than the one I had set myself upon; a path that felt it belonged to much more interesting people than me. How arrogant to think I might be good at it!
I still remember how thrilling that felt.
I wish I could say I ran home with a fire in my belly and sat down to write the novel that would put both Hemingway and Orwell to shame. But, reader, you know that’s not what happened.
I realised there was something that I really wanted to do… and then carried on doing other things—for eight years!
—
Westbrook, who shares his own creative journey atFrom the dog park
After the daily scratchiness of my old wool stockings (from my uni days, with reliable holes in the big right toe) over the winter in Berlin, I’ve been enjoying being able to go around again with bare legs and flip-flops. It’s cooler this time of year here in KL, the sky often hung with grey-bellied clouds that take a while to let themselves go, which has made walking (admittedly over short distances) more pleasant—when I head out to a nearby cafe to read and write, when I go for pilates, when I take the dogs out. I’ve loved being reunited again with the two, and I especially loved the way the little one—let’s call her Little Miss Marple because she always has her nose to the ground, sniffing (it’s ridiculous probably, but I am reluctant to name my dogs publicly, even if it wouldn’t implicate my passwords 😆)—reacted when she first heard me calling out to her from the gate. Apparently, from inside the house, her floppy ears immediately perked up when she heard me calling her name. She stood up on her hind legs and put her ear to the kitchen door, and when it was opened, rushed out past the dining room and the living room to the main door to greet us, throwing her chubby little body against our calves, rolling herself over and over for belly rubs. My mum recorded all of it, which is funny to me. Every time I come home from a trip, she makes me wait until she has her phone ready before she lets me enter the house, so she can record how Little Miss Marple reacts to my return—if she rushes to me first, or W.C. Once, when—let’s call her—Ducky (the adult one, because her feet were oversized when she was baby, almost webbed) bounded to W.C. first, bypassing me, my mum sniffed, disappointed. Cheh, she doesn’t love you. How come she didn’t run to you? That rightly made me indignant, but maybe our Ducky knows it’s easier to rouse W.C. to play with her pawing provocations, haha.
Being back with the dogs again, taking some time out every day to tend to their energies even when I’m tired or otherwise busy with other things, I’m reminded of an Instagram post I came upon some time ago: something about how pet owners in Hawaii think of themselves, not as owners, but guardians—the word is “kahu”, apparently. True or not, I like this sentiment, though my heart breaks at what it also implies: that they are totally at our mercy, that they live a good life only if we treat them well. This isn’t just some truism. I’ve seen one too many videos of people exhibiting a disturbing sadism via an Instagram account that aims to raise awareness about the abuse of dogs in Malaysia. It darkens my day, every time, but I can’t bring myself to unfollow.
Until the next!
E.
I've just upgraded to paid - would love to support this new exploration of yours. And I do want to read more about reading and writing, the former I want to do more and the latter I want to start doing. :)