How I came to write

I’ve been writing for about 10 years. I don’t think I’ve ever stopped reading, but I don’t think I’ve ever stopped writing. The way I present what I write to readers has changed a few times, as has my perspective on writing.

stories

Before I became an adult, I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to make up new and interesting stories. Of course, I didn’t have a good story to tell because I hadn’t lived for a few years, so I would make up shitty stories and rewrite them in the back of the story I was writing.

I’m a very gossipy person, so I say things without being asked, and I still do. I think I had a lot of stories inside me, but I didn’t know how to get them out.

I was just reading a book on how to write a good novel because it wasn’t working out, and I felt really sad when my friend who had already published a book of poetry got drunk and said, “If you read this shit, do you think you can write? I envy him.

core things

I was about twenty years old, and I started writing for the school’s independent magazine, which allowed me to write about almost anything, as long as it was related to school or university students. I liked the fact that I had a steady audience, and that’s when I started to love paper publications.

I practiced how to clarify what I wanted to say in my writing. Originally, I came in with the intention of writing a lot of makgeolli reviews or something like that, but in reality, I wrote a lot of articles about who did what to whom and it’s really bad, and it’s ruining the university society, and it’s ruining the country.

Naturally, I was trained to put core things in my writing. There was a time when I seriously tried to prepare to be a journalist. I gave up because it seemed like too much of a hated profession.

“selling”

After I got out of the military, I wanted to be an editor, so I worked briefly as a campus editor at the University Daily. The articles I wrote were marketing content that had to grab people’s attention. I think I learned a bit about how to write to sell. I gained an eye for the overall presentation of a piece. Where to put the hooks, where to put the points, etc.

I had to be trend-sensitive in my topic, so I painstakingly gathered all the connections I didn’t have. In a publication whose main audience is female college students, my items were repeatedly killed in vain, but I think the results were still good. I still occasionally pull out my old college magazines and wonder when I’ll write something like this again.

By this time, I stopped thinking that I wanted to make a living from writing. It was only then that I was able to express my stories in writing smoothly, and the narrow-minded editing I experienced made me feel like I had to get rid of myself as much as possible, which was not a pleasant experience. I wished I didn’t have a desk. It was hard to find a job in the spec industry. There are no paper magazines anymore.

Concise

When I became an engineer and encountered the world of technical writing, I was overwhelmed. One sentence here, a paragraph there. Every Markdown bullet was a clause. Every sentence had to have practical value.

That’s all I saw and learned. There were many times when I wanted to explain something, and I hesitantly wrote everything I wanted to say, only to realize that no one would read it. The technical articles I wrote on my blog became more concise over time. This practice has helped me a lot when I write technical documentation for my company now.

This trend in technical writing has also affected my non-technical writing. I became more focused on getting things down. I like to write a bit colloquially, so the just now, now, well, actually, etc. that I used to cram into my writing is unnecessary except when it’s necessary. I don’t regret it anymore… I wish I could have included them in my writing.

Forward

I realize now that maybe the most important thing when writing is, “What do I want to write about?” I have a lot of things I want to write about. I dropped the “tech” from my half-hearted tech blog because I wanted to get a job as a developer.

In retrospect, I’ve been writing practical writing in various genres that are not literary. In the process, I became able to put “me” in my writing, adjusting the sugar level from 10 percent to 30 percent to 50 percent, like the sugar level of black milk tea with pearl added at Gongcha. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s this.

If I had a goal, I would like to publish a book with my name on it. I still want to publish a publication. I would like to collect people’s writings and make it like a magazine and distribute it here and there. I think it would be purely fun.

I don’t know how I want to write in the future. In the past, I wanted to write like Lee Woo-sung, Wee Geun-woo, and Duna, but I don’t have a destination like that now. I also don’t want to be competitive. Good writing style and feelings come naturally to my writing. I just want to keep going.” (End)

Some of my old articles that have been published on the web are linked on the about page.