on my relationship with the written word
i guess this means my therapy is your entertainment
but first, two high level corporate updates
#1 notice something different? ☕️ spilling the tea ☕️ with tasha has a new banner! and logo! and cover art! thank you to my superbly talented cousin jasmine lin for her hard work, creative genius, and bringing my vision to life.
(how ironic that this second announcement lines up with an issue about my love-hate relationship to writing 🙊 anyway…)
#2 ☕️ spilling the tea ☕️ with tasha is featured on jellypod’s top 10 newsletters with <10k subscribers! which means you can now listen to my newsletter (and many others) as a podcast on jellypod.
thank you for stopping by biweekly to taste the tea 💞 and to the jellypod team for taking a chance on this little writer! now onto the fun stuff—
i received an email last month, notifying me that she smells of turmeric is a finalist for the 2024 next generation indie book awards. i smiled quietly and told no one besides my parents, five close friends, and my cousin (hi, jocelyn!) who were with me when i received the news.
three years ago i would’ve shouted this accomplishment from the rooftops, peppered it across the socials. but now, eyebagged and older, i tell myself, the book isn’t trendy anymore so nobody will care, or it’s not even your best work, or—my personal favorite—yet here you are, stuck on your second book.
i don’t know how my confidence went from launching my novel with kinokuniya three years ago to all this insecurity, how i became either too busy or too scared to sit in front of the computer and write. how my love for fiction writing soured into a whole lot of self loathing.
humble origins in the year 2000
my first piece of writing was for english in first grade, where we had to write half a page about two kids in a sandbox, and i wrote, bob and amy were playing in the sand. they were very very very […] very happy. which was obviously terrible because 1) nobody can ever be that happy, and 2) i had to redo the assignment.
for the redo, my teacher (hi, ms. indra!) prompted me to think about bob and amy. to see myself in their shoes, to feel the sand under their toes, to experience the lives lived beyond the illustration.
and so i wrote. i wrote about the beach, about the ocean, about burying my toes in the sand the way i loved to whenever my family took trips to bali. i wrote so much that i flipped the page and filled the empty canvas behind the worksheet.
the sand, or its lack thereof, was how i fell in love with writing. i wrote almost every day after that. i even wrote my first real novel on three scraps of A4 paper was when i was seven—a story about my three dogs creatively titled “the three musketeers”—and passed it around to my classmates like a library book.
my dream when i started my writing journey at such a young age was to become an author. then a bestselling author (getting crowned by an amazon category was good enough). then an award-winning author. now that i have reached all three, my next writing goals should feel more at-reach, right?
as most of you know, i started this biweekly newsletter to procrastinate on my second novel, but a lot of my writing time now is devoted to this newsletter. it’s not a bad thing—i love the challenge of writing for an audience and i’ve learned so much since i started in february—but i do wonder how i’m going to return to fiction, to fall in love with it again, when all hope has faltered into insecurity.
rebirthing childlike wonder
recently, i had a conversation with a friend who works at the fed (hi, ethan!) about dipping his feet into fiction writing. he spoke about how he’d lock himself in an empty conference room after work just to write, about how he finds the art so freeing, so therapeutic.
he had a glimmer in his eye throughout our conversation, something i haven’t recognized in myself in over a decade. it was the same glimmer i had in childhood, when i’d wake at 6:00am on weekends to have quiet time to read and write (i’m more of a night owl these days).
it got me thinking about where this sense of wonder wandered off to, about how i grew so… cynical with the craft. about how a passion that i had turned into a part-time gig grew gray. about how i had to resort to new methods (i.e., newsletter writing) to jumpstart my enjoyment with the craft.
i learned last weekend that competitive eaters can no longer enjoy food because food, to them, is hot dogs dipped in water and shoved into their mouths. maybe this is the case with me and my writing.
when you’re a creative, you’re working with an asymptote of perfection, and yet when you grow up with an academic relationship to your craft, you are wired to strive for perfection. this striving mindset is incredibly difficult to break if you’re type A like me. sometimes people get in the way. sometimes it’s your own head.
i’ve been preaching “your first draft is going to be shit, and you can edit shit but you can’t edit nothing” for so long to so many people—especially during press for she smells of turmeric—that i’ve somehow forgotten to give myself the same grace.
in anything and everything, strive for greatness with kindness, not perfection
the most eye-opening class i’ve had was in my senior year of college, with prof. nami mun, where she taught us writers to break out of the constructs of genre, to defy whatever rules we were taught as english students before we create. what came out of that class was the best, most personal piece of writing i’ve ever produced: it was a twenty-page piece about my relationship with beauty, womanhood, and family values while growing up mixed race.
it was once titled biotin, collagen, and beautiful women and has evolved to the three sisters of holland road. it reads like a family photo album. its sentences had no care for traditional grammar and were paragraphs long. it is so raw and emotional and daringly sad that whenever i return to it i’d relive the memories of a past self.
this piece was what drew me to non-fiction writing, to be more open with myself and my readers, which leads me to—
here, now
my conversation with ethan has inspired me to resume the rest of my novel in pen and paper to minimize the friction between my creativity, my love for language, and my obsessive need for perfection. to focus on what’s ahead without looking back so much.
it’s not uncommon to do so; my developmental editor for she smells of turmeric (hi, anne!) handwrote her book’s first draft. she then simultaneously edited and transcribed her manuscript into a word document.
handwriting my novel reminds me of writing essays for high school, with the pressure of a time and grade that always makes me write faster. if school has taught me anything, it’s that i can produce words quickly (my record typing speed is 110 wpm, and i’m a yapper, as you can probably tell).
maybe i’ll finally finish my second novel this way. maybe this time away from my story will help me soften the cringe towards what i’ve written. maybe my characters have taken this time to simmer and breathe, and i will finally feel connected to them, do their stories justice.
or maybe the whole pen-and-paper method will flop, and i’ll have to find another way. that’s also okay. because i’m still a writer, and having a shitty run at the most complex project i’ve ever undertaken doesn’t make me any less of one ☺️
thank you for stopping by,
<3 tasha
I think one of the hardest, scariest things in the world is sitting in front of your laptop, a blank word doc staring back at you, and somehow, you must conjure up words like a magician that will make someone else stop what they're doing to read your writing.
Best of luck on your writing journey!