Why I Write: On Soul Debt and Min Jin Lee

My most personal piece yet

I have a very cyclical relationship with writing that correlates with my happiness: generally, I can’t regularly motivate myself to write. Then every few years, at points when I am particularly, I feel compelled to write. Even though I still find it difficult to write, words somehow pour onto the page.

During these moments, the pain of not expressing myself outweighs the pains that come with creating coherent writing — the immense frustration of staring in front of the screen unable to word the things I can so easily say during conversations with friends, the constant fear that my writing isn’t worth anything at all, the recognition that I must be a masochist for returning to this craft and wondering if I’m crazy for choosing such a painful hobby.

During my freshman year of college, I was incredibly unhappy for reasons I won’t go into. I cried almost every day that spring. I’d take math class and start crying in the middle of class. I’d go eat dumplings with friends and start sobbing in front of the waitress. Wherever I go, my tears would follow. At some point, I didn’t know how not to cry anymore: crying was all I knew, and I was resigned to feeling miserable.

There are two pivotal moments from that spring: the first was deciding that I would read Jenny Zhang’s Sour Heart from start to end. Reading Sour Heart taught me that I could still appreciate art and get consumed by writing even if I felt like complete shit and felt like wallowing forever. The second was sitting in on a writing workshop with Min Jin Lee, the Korean American author of Free Food for Millionaires and Pachinko.

Min Jin Lee’s workshop was very simple: she had us spend ten minutes writing about a time when we felt angry. Then she had us share what we had written. Most people didn’t share anything, but the ones who did ended up crying in the middle of their readings. One person wrote about an argument with her parents. Another person wrote about being forced by her boyfriend to take medication.

I unsurprisingly broke down crying when I read my piece during that workshop. I think out of all the times I had cried that term, that was the only cry that lifted a burden from my soul, rather than making my misery worse. It makes sense: these tears were tears of liberation. No matter how upset I felt, I could still create art, even if it was shitty, even if writing felt painful, even if no one would ever read it.

The way Min Jin Lee put it, when you write from a place that is real and genuine to you, you will never have writer’s block. You might be an incredibly slow writer, the way she deemed herself to be (she took around ten years to write her first novel), but you’ll always have something to say. Write from a place where you feel visceral, intense emotions. That’s your motor. Keep writing from there.

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What is my motor? Why do I keep returning to writing, even if it is so difficult? Why am I compelled to keep writing even though I might never be published? The phrase I keep returning to answer these questions is soul debt. There is a bank account for my soul. My balance gets lowered by working long hours, feeling overly cynical, or not giving myself the space to dream and sit and think. I feel poor when I don’t replenish my account, and when my balance is negative for too long, I no longer feel alive.

In some ways, I only know how to crush my soul. If I had it my way, I would let my soul account go to -$5 million, and my physical bank account go to $5 million. Heck, I’d let myself be a billionaire in soul debt if I could be a billionaire in real life. My soul always comes back to remind me that isn’t possible, because the only way I can feel happy and healthy and alive is to nourish my soul.

Min Jin Lee understood the concept of soul debt: she worked for two years as a corporate lawyer before she quit to write fiction. Her husband was the main breadwinner, and she stayed at home to take care of their son. She was ashamed to admit she couldn’t afford drinks with her lawyer friends, but she still tried to become a writer anyways. Whenever I think about her decision to quit law, I think not only about how hard that must’ve been but also about how wise she was to fill her soul account.

Here’s how she describes it in her words:

I did the dishes, paid the bills, folded the laundry and cooked dinner, took care of our son, took care of our extended families, while my husband got the salary and our health insurance, but I made sure that I got an hour or two each day for my fiction. On Saturdays, my husband took our son out so I could get a few more hours.

My payments to my writing life came sometimes early in the morning, more often, at night when everyone was asleep, but I noticed that if I didn’t get paid that bit of time to grow my novel—word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph—I felt poor inside. So I guess the currency was time, and the payor was me, but the payee was me, too. It took eleven years to sell my first novel, and twelve years to see it in a bookstore, but it got done, albeit on my steady and low rate. And it was quite something when I got to hand a copy to my mother.

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My first few years of college, I glamorized the writing life. All these brilliant, wonderful teachers I got to learn from — Laura van den Berg, Claire Messud, Teju Cole, ZZ Packer, and Michael Pollan — were so cool and trendy and successful. I thought my life hinged on becoming a writer, but the whole way through college, I was engineering myself to go down a different direction: math major, CS classes, finance internship.

How do you become a writer? How did you make it? I kept asking my teachers. What if I’m not talented enough or not hardworking enough? What if I write all the time but never get published? I think I wanted to hear some guarantee that it would all work out, but now I’m able to actually take in the simplicity of their answers:

If you want to be a writer, you keep writing. Even when you’re unpublished, even when you’ve gotten rejection after rejection after rejection. Make a routine and write. Pay yourself word by word, page by page. Wake up in the mornings and write. Quiet down your mind and write. Press send. Hit publish. Rinse your routine and repeat. Being a writer is in many ways a difficult life — even after you’ve become successful — but the reward is very rarely going into soul debt.

I might never be disciplined enough to be a novelist. I’m not wired to completely quit my job to attempt to write fiction. (I am too financially risk adverse to make that decision.) I might never be published (which would make me sad), but goddamn it, I’m still going to write! Even if I’m not prolific enough to call myself an actual writer, even if, at the end of the day, only two people read this my writing (hi Zach and Thomas!).

But holy fucking shit, given that I do have a soul, I’m going to write enough to make sure I don’t go into debt, no matter how painful the writing process may be.

Thanks to Duncan Sabien for coining the term soul debt, Thomas Hollands for making me get on Zoom to write, and Zach Esparza for promising to read this.