“Why are you so bad at writing if you’re a journalist?
My brother writes really well.”
It was almost thirty years ago.
I had just had my first daughter and had gone back to work, leaving her with my mother-in-law during the day.
My sister-in-law said it casually, almost laughing.
“What?”
I was caught off guard, but I didn’t say anything else.
Later, I walked home carrying my daughter.
I was upset.
Of course she thinks her brother writes well.
He’s her brother.
That was about as far as I took it.
I didn’t stay upset for long.
And looking back, maybe I really wasn’t very good at writing articles yet.
I certainly didn’t start out as a good reporter.
I Just Did It
I had originally wanted to become an announcer.
I took the written exams for several media companies mostly for the experience.
I failed all the broadcasting auditions.
Then, almost unexpectedly, I passed the final exam for a newspaper reporter.
There was an age limit for applying to media companies back then, so I took the job.
I knew almost nothing about newspapers.
I knew almost nothing about being a reporter.
But I just did it.
I don’t remember sitting there thinking,
Why am I so bad at writing?
Why am I so bad at this job?
I simply worked.
I started in the culture department and moved through lifestyle, politics, international affairs, and other beats.
It wasn’t exactly an environment where people carefully taught you how to do everything.
If you did something wrong, people were more likely to talk about it behind your back.
Still,
I just did it.
The newspaper deadline gradually created a rhythm for me.
At first, I sometimes filed my stories a little late.
Then I got faster.
Eventually, I was writing before deadline without thinking much about it.
At the time, female reporters in Daegu were rarely assigned to the police beat.
I wanted to do it.
I watched my male colleagues get that basic reporting experience and sometimes felt that I was being treated differently.
Still, I kept doing the work in front of me.
Fourteen years later, when I chose to leave journalism and go to the UK to study, I left behind some of my most distinctive work in the newspaper’s lifestyle section.
For years, I had been disappointed that I hadn’t been given the reporting experience I thought I needed.
It turned out that lifestyle journalism suited me remarkably well.
I just hadn’t known it yet.
Then I Had to Learn Again
My first semester in a master’s program in Applied Linguistics in the UK was hard.
I had studied English Language and Literature as an undergraduate, but years had passed since then.
I had spent those years working as a reporter.
Suddenly, I was reading thick academic books in English again and trying to figure out how to write academic essays.
My grades during that first semester were terrible.
Then, in my second semester, one professor gave us an essay written by a former student.
“This is one way you can approach your assignment.”
I read it.
And suddenly I understood.
Oh.
This is how you do it.
After that, I received A’s.
I hadn’t suddenly become smarter.
I had simply found a way in.
Twenty Years Later
After finishing my master’s degree, I came back to Korea and taught students.
Later, I studied counseling psychology and went through several other chapters of my life.
I never imagined I would return to writing like this.
Twenty years after leaving journalism.
Haha.
And once again,
I didn’t know what I was doing.
When I started working on my blog, I wandered around for a long time.
Should I write in Korean?
Or English?
Maybe I should write informational articles.
I tried.
They didn’t come.
For more than a year, I spent a lot of time tinkering with the website without really knowing what I wanted to write.
Still,
I kept going.
Sometimes I woke up early and tried to write with coffee, almost as if I were a reporter again.
Sometimes I stared at a piece I didn’t like, deleted it, rewrote it, and tried to hold on through sheer will.
Then, almost by accident, I noticed something.
English had a rhythm that felt right to me.
And when I began with a scene,
my writing moved.
So I started trying to create a small rhythm around that.
Five minutes in the morning.
Ten minutes.
Just enough time to meet the writing.
Some days it worked.
Some days it didn’t.
Still,
I kept going.
I Just Pressed Publish
Then, on March 9, I pressed the publish button.
There wasn’t a grand decision behind it.
It was closer to,
Oh, whatever.
I just published it.
At first, I decided on two posts a week because I didn’t want writing to become a burden.
I tried to create a regular publishing rhythm.
Writing still took a long time.
I would write at a café in the morning and sometimes go to another café in the afternoon because the piece still wasn’t finished.
One afternoon, sitting in a noisy café, I suddenly thought,
Oh. White noise makes me work faster.
I kept noticing little things like that.
What helped.
What didn’t.
Where writing moved.
Where it stopped.
And I kept writing.
Before I knew it, two posts a week became three.
For a while, I wanted to publish every day.
The writing was flowing, and I wanted to keep going.
But I didn’t.
Three posts a week felt like a good rhythm.
I wanted to keep the rhythm, not push it.
For the first three months or so, I think I was intentionally trying to build the rhythm.
And then something changed.
I wasn’t trying so hard anymore.
The rhythm was simply there.
The Rhythm Took Over
Now, I don’t try to sit with a piece for hours.
If something happens during the day and a scene feels like it might become a story, I may write for five or ten minutes.
Then I stop.
If writing is flowing at a café, I write.
If it suddenly feels stuck,
I don’t keep wrestling with it.
I leave.
Sometimes I go exercise instead.
And strangely enough,
the writing often starts moving again afterward.
At first,
I was trying to create a rhythm.
At some point,
the rhythm began carrying me.
I think something else changed too.
I stopped trying so hard to write well.
Whenever I thought,
I need to make this good,
the writing became harder.
This sentence wasn’t right.
That paragraph wasn’t right.
Nothing felt right.
But once I discovered that my writing tends to move when I begin with a scene,
I stopped trying to force it.
I started enjoying it instead.
“Let’s Make It Fun”
There is something funny about that too.
When I was first trying to build this writing rhythm, I chose a little motto for myself:
Let’s make it fun.
I kept saying it deliberately.
“Make it fun.”
“Just have fun.”
The funny thing was,
I wasn’t quite sure what fun was supposed to feel like.
Still,
I kept saying it.
Let’s make it fun.
And I kept showing up.
Five minutes.
Ten minutes.
A scene.
A few sentences.
A walk.
A café.
Sometimes nothing.
Then another day.
Almost thirty years ago, someone asked me,
“Why are you so bad at writing if you’re a journalist?”
Maybe I was.
I was just beginning.
Later, I had to learn how to write academic essays.
Twenty years after leaving journalism, I had to learn how I wanted to write all over again.
Maybe we don’t always need to decide what we’re good at while we’re still learning how to do it.
Each time,
I didn’t really know what I was doing at first.
I just kept doing it.
And somewhere along the way,
a rhythm appeared.
These days, I don’t sit down thinking,
I need to write well.
I notice a scene.
I get curious.
I write a little.
And then I see where it goes.
I used to tell myself,
Let’s make it fun.
Now,
I don’t really have to.
It is fun.
