[Current & Culture]What Matters More Than Writing Every Day

The Subtle Difference That Turns Scribbles Into Resonance
Listening Closely to Others' Feedback

These days, it has become easy to find people who write every day. A man in his 50s I met in a recent writing class said he writes for 50 minutes each day. He records his daily life and thoughts on his phone during the 50-minute subway ride to work. Writing a piece every day on the subway, using the phone’s Cheonjiin keyboard?he truly earned my sincere respect.

I currently work as a writer, but I don’t write every day. Although I tell others that writing daily is great, I think I write only two to three days a week. My routine has become busily writing pieces with immediate deadlines?newspaper or magazine articles, book manuscripts, recommendation letters, instructor cards, and so on. When I look back to when I wrote every day, it was in high school. Back then, I observed daily life at school, came home to write about it on internet forums, and in the morning, I would read comments on my posts before heading back to school. It was a time when a single recommendation or comment made me feel as if I owned the world.

There was a time I stopped writing for about a month. A high school student quitting writing on internet forums over trivial posts?thinking about it now makes me want to kick the blanket off in embarrassment. It was right after I wrote about the scenes and people on the subway. In the 1990s, many people begged for money on the subway, including some without legs. I referred to them as “the rubber pants uncle who crawls while playing the harmonica whenever passing Sindorim Station.” Even after writing that, I eagerly awaited comments without any shame. There were comments like “Interesting,” and “As expected, NAMYLOVE is the best,” but someone wrote, “I am truly disappointed. My time enjoying your writing until now feels wasted. How can you use such expressions?” He was someone who always read all my posts and commented regularly. Not only him, but several others expressed disappointment and said such hateful expressions should not be used. Yes, the words I chose could make someone uncomfortable. Writing should never ridicule or make a laughingstock of anyone in any situation. I must always imagine the weak, not the strong, as I write.

In fact, I declared I would never write again, not just for a month, but once you start a life of writing, it’s hard to let go. Creating a new ID was easy, so I began writing again under a new ID. At that time, I had run out of material, so I turned my attention to stories outside of high school.

Writing every day and writing a lot are important. But what you gain from writing daily is your own language?your attitude toward writing. You invite others into the world you create. Those embarrassing writings from high school were part of the process of creating the language of my world. If I hadn’t shown those writings to others and seen their reactions, my writing today would surely be very different. I believe that continuously writing while always imagining others’ situations, especially those of the weak, is what makes a world healthy.

Kim Minseop, Social and Cultural Critic

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.