An Accountant Learns to Write Again, a Series
Photo by Jess Bailey on Unsplash
I made some breakthroughs in my writing back in December and promised I would write one post a week. Then work got busy, and the pandemic happened. My good intentions went off the rails — as usual. But I’m back on track now and was inspired to write about my journey to get back into writing because hey, I write about personal growth and this is the growth I’m going through. Hope you’ll enjoy! As I’m still learning and developing my writing, I would love any feedback you might have.
A couple of years ago, I decided to get back into writing. Fifteen years had gone by since the last time I did much writing besides journal entries and business emails. I had been an English major in college with my heart set on becoming a novelist, but I was naïve about how much work it took. My plan was to write a novel and become famous, meanwhile I did zero writing outside of assigned homework. By the time I finished college, I realized that wasn't going to work.
Since then, I've worked mostly office jobs, spent a couple years trying to start a Reiki practice, later going back to school to become an accountant. I enjoyed the structure and organization of accounting. My brain took to it easily, having excelled at math and science in school and grown up in Chinese culture, which was like training in cost accounting from birth. I was so relieved to do something I was good at and socially acceptable, but something was still not quite right.
I was bored. I loved the people I worked with, but doing left-brain work for long periods of time dried me up inside. I yearned to work more with people, to share the insights I've gained through years of personal growth work. As an accountant in small companies, I was privy to information behind the scenes. The way we treated people in a capitalist system often disappointed me and broke my heart. I decided I needed a change, again, and to return to my creative roots.
The Problem
Almost as soon as I decided to write, the problems started. I tried to write during my off-hours, but I struggled with the words so much I often gave up and played video games instead. Even though I had many ideas, the words didn't flow like I thought they would.
When I forced myself to sit down in front of the blank page, the anxiety was crippling. My words stumbled out between long pauses during which I fought with myself. The voices in my head told me that what I wrote wasn't good enough, nobody would want to read it, other people were way better writers, why do I even bother if I'd never be as good, etc, etc. I edited in my head so much that I'd still be staring at a short paragraph on my screen after an hour.
I started seeing much better writing everywhere I looked — beautiful opinion pieces in the New York Times, the ephemeral and thoughtful writing of Brit Marling, the penetrating and perceptive style of Mark Manson. As far as I could tell, the words formed on their pages in a single, perfect attempt. I could never live up to that.
Facing My Shadows
When I first decided to make a career change, I held this beautiful vision of doing something I love and becoming successful and finally getting out of the job that I hated. The excitement and possibilities pulled me forward.
Then reality hit. To do something that others would pay for takes skill and knowledge, and maybe I didn't have those things yet. Being a writer and figuring out my own voice take time, just as it took time to study accounting, pass the CPA exam, and gain work experience.
The accounting path was clearly laid out for me with its accredited college programs and recognized credentials. Creating a career through writing felt like a messy, daunting, and haphazard process of throwing things at the wall and see what sticks. There were no guarantees it would even work. How was I supposed to finally prove my worth and validate my existence so I can finally be happy with my life?
Learning to Write All Over Again
Writing is not like learning an intellectual subject such as science or economics where it's mostly about memory, comprehension, and application. I understand intellectual subjects. But writing, with its open-endedness and so many ways and angles and perspectives with which to express ideas, seemed overwhelming. I wanted my time put into writing to always produce something I can share, instead of just "practice." It took me a while to accept that producing shitty work, throwing out bad writing, or doing writing prompts are all part of the process. Writing, like most artistic pursuits, is a craft developed through practice.
The book Art & Fear told a parable that illustrated this concept. A ceramics teacher told his class that they were being divided into two groups. One group would be graded solely on the quantity of pots they made. The other group would make only one pot and be graded on the quality of the pot.
When it came time for grading, the group that was being graded on quantity turned out the dramatically better work. It appeared that while the quantity group was churning out pots, they learned from their mistakes and developed their own style along the way. The group graded on quality, on the other hand, spent endless time theorizing about the most perfect pot and ended up producing mediocre and generic work.
An artist's style and skill emerges from making art over and over. Good writing also requires cracking ourselves open and bearing our hearts, because that's how we ever truly connect with another. Good writing shows us the profound depths in our apparently mundane experiences. It penetrates façades and exposes our humanity, sometimes in experiences that may be controversial or difficult but always real. There is a mountain of difference between a how-to article that we read and forget and a deeply felt personal account that affects us years later.
The path of developing good writing skills was, of course, totally against my tendency toward perfectionism and fear of revealing my vulnerabilities. In the rest of this series, I will be sharing my journey to overcoming "writer's block," along with insights I've gained.
Next article in this series: If I Can’t Write as Well as a Professional, Why Bother?
