7.20.16
I don’t quite know what this new book is, who these people might be, or where it’s going, but I imagine it might also be true that, if I knew, I’d be too bored to keep going. So I hope, and I hack through thick leaves. I began Exhibit in 2014, and, until 2017, worked on it when I wasn’t editing my first novel. Starting in 2017, my fiction-writing time went to just Exhibit.
11.17.16
Last week’s election left us brokenhearted and afraid. I keep forcing myself to take deep inhales. It helps a little. What will become of us? I want to be a better person; I would like to be less selfish. I’ve made resolutions about how I’ll use my time. Will they keep? Will I grow up at last?
4.10.17
Each month that goes past, since the elections: flicker of surprise, we’re not yet all dead. Last night, I finished typing out notes for the second novel. I think I’m starting to see where it’s going, what it hopes to be.
5.9.17
Dream: you found a bug in your hair, like the shiny little brown bug casings that show up in flour, except there were more, then more. You kept trying to comb them out. The fear and anxiety. Where did they come from?
Here’s what you keep forgetting: the joy and peace you feel when you’re writing and reading late at night, music on.
10.26.17
Were early drafts in book one this hard? Trying to care less about how I feel, let alone how I feel about this book, and just—keep plodding along.
3.7.18
So many questions, such a lot of balls in the air, each one’s possible drop a future-changing threat. Rattled, fractured. High-strung. Bouncing around. Ups and downs. Can’t even stick to a metaphor in these three lines.
5.6.18
The power’s out for the night, so here I am with Scotch and four candles, rereading old journal entries and remembering that this halcyon “other time,” when I could prioritize my fiction, when I wrote every day—it wasn’t like that. It wasn’t halcyon. You were so fucking sad for most of it. What is real is that you had routine access to the short spells of transcendence that come with having your writing go well: you did have that.
Try to write, even if it’s just a bit, every day.
The idea of “don’t hate yourself if you fail“—what is that? Being hard on yourself, isn’t that what pushes you to be better?
12.6.18
Wrote fiction for several hours yesterday, the sense of plenitude that opened up, possibility, expansion, a calm you haven’t experienced in over a year—getting back to it. How could you have let it get away from you?
3.22.19
The novel finally sparks to life—starting to, at least, knock on wood—and still, you’re so afraid.
Lord in whom I don’t believe: More, please.
11.4.19
For a little under two weeks, I’ve written fiction every day—at least 300 words a day on weekdays and less on weekends. I’ve mostly been off the internet during the day. I’ve inhaled books, most of them books I just want to read because I want to read them, not because someone needs something from me. I’ve had no plans out for a week except with M. Why do you always think you need so much else? This is your life; this is your joy; stop getting distracted.
1.14.20
I learn again, afresh, as though this is new, that I’m made to write, that if I’m writing at length, seriously, I’m doing what I feel as though I was put here on this earth to do. Can you hold on to this? Is there a way to really prioritize this? To be more like the artists you so deeply admire, the ones who do not give a fuck except for this one holy thing? Just work, damn it.
Your novel’s bewildering you, but isn’t that always how it is?
A perhaps risible question, a perhaps excessively facile question: What is the most loving incarnation of this book, and is that the truest incarnation?
1.16.20
How you’re physically reacting to Yiyun Li’s Where Reasons End, the full-body shaking. One of the reasons you’re writing this book: you’re writing back from the midst of the loss. Make it clearer, plainer, brighter, even more than you did with the first book.
1.22.20
Hold on to this. The clarity of what matters, what your purpose is. I beg of you. What you’re made for, what it’s a sin to waste. Hold on, don’t let it go.
1.25.20
Even in the past couple of days, there’s been muddle—the difficulty of dictating, for yourself, what’s uppermost in your mind. What it is you’re thinking about in the shower—try to keep it Jin, Lidija, Philip. Who they are, what they want, and what they’re afraid of.
Two days ago, on Thursday, I finished the first full draft of this book—the fifth(!) overall. In retrospect, I think I might have saved time and cut away some confusion if I’d forced myself to write a full draft earlier, though maybe it didn’t feel possible.
Yesterday, after you’d read the draft and found it to be excessively, uninterestingly introspective, too often dull in language, not alive, not precise, and yet, with a shape that looks like something that might, one day, with work, love, rigor, and luck, turn into a book—I had what I think was a full-fledged panic attack, hours during which I felt low on oxygen. It was the first time I’ve had this happen since just before the first novel came out, and it might have to do with the terror of imagining this being a book, imagining anyone, maybe even including me, reading it?
3.18.20
San Francisco’s living under a shelter-in-place law, starting yesterday. What terror—
3.19.20
It’s hard to work while so afraid; meanwhile, life still feels almost normal. You see people out on the sidewalks, in ones and twos, taking a walk. People post pictures of full store shelves. M. had a video call with Raja, who expressed hope the rules would be relaxed in two weeks. I think it unlikely; it was eerie, his far more optimistic-looking world brushing, as though it almost could exist, against mine.
M. coughed a few times during the night and once again I was afraid, but it turned out he was allergic to our blanket. We switched blankets, and then he stopped coughing. Good lord.
3.20.20
How to write while terrified? Ingrid, on FaceTime, talked about 8½, saying she had a writing assignment about writing into the strangeness, writing into the unknowing.
Deeply alarmed by the clown’s insistence on calling the virus a “Chinese virus.”
3.25.20
The novel feels less utterly impossible, though I’m writing at a crawl, a sentence or two a day. More glitter, more longing, I realized several days ago.
4.22.20
Stayed up forty-eight hours yesterday, having struggled to write a five-hundred-word review; I couldn’t even finish a relevant book I was really enjoying. I need to write my novel, but. The freefall of terror that too often comes with reading the news.
6.18.20
I feel the made-up ghost of Him drawing close again. The friend who said, I do believe in God. I think you give Him such joy with how you shine. The extent to which, Lord, You’re still always my first audience. The pleasure it gives me to live, even now, after You’ve died, for Your imagined eyes.
7.30.20
Oh, what is there to do? You did what you could. You worked very hard. So much time.
In the middle of a sex scene, and this is hard enough that you’re once again wondering if your book has no place to go. Today this country’s president started saying the elections should be delayed. Remember: write what could reach even you.
10.7.20
I’ve been living at a run. Last week: the conversation with MR, the first Field Team 6 event. I was in conversation with Marilynne Robinson about her novel Jack as part of a Politics and Prose virtual event. Field Team 6 is a get-out-the-vote organization that co-organized a number of events. The way talking with Marilynne felt like being washed in light. You asked for the video, not a link, a file so that you could keep it, a source of heat.
3.7.21
I haven’t been here in so long. The novel continues; Laura has the draft and says she’ll give me thoughts by early this upcoming week. Laura Perciasepe, my editor at Riverhead.
4.7.21
With the novel: I have edits back from Laura, and overall, she didn’t say a single thing to hurt me; she gave no hint of finding the book too anything; she didn’t seem to think I’m a terrible person, an abhorrent person, all of which has felt like a miracle. She also thought the book was further along than I’d thought; upon rereading it this time, I agreed that it was further along, maybe a year and a half more there than I’d believed, and it’s partly because of the piecemeal work I was doing while waiting for Laura, just writing a paragraph here, a paragraph there, as they occurred to me. I also found that kind of writing so much less terrifying that I’m going to keep trying to keep that way of working in my life on a daily basis if possible.
4.26.21
Trying to start the day with writing but irritated by—who knows? You need to do more to protect that first hour; it’s really important.
A few days ago, when you were in a bad place, and M. said, Here, let me absorb the poison, and pulled you close, and you said, No, I don’t want you to have the poison either, and he said, No, it’ll just dissipate once my body absorbs it.
6.9.21
Working beneath a shawl for the past week, and the difference it’s made, why didn’t you do this earlier, knock on wood, keep going. I began a habit, one that’s continued to this day, of writing while wearing a shawl I put on only when I’m working on fiction. It’s an adaptation of what Ingrid Rojas Contreras describes in a piece she wrote for the New York Times on how she writes.
6.24.21
Lord, I woke up sad today. I opened the dictionary yesterday, the OED, which I have wanted for years as I have never wanted a physical object unnecessary for my body’s survival. It arrived, and I didn’t open it for weeks, I think in case it fell short, maybe, or—but I opened it, and every volume except the first one had never been opened, the thin shining pages having the new book crackle. The first word I learned: chalypsography, steel engraving. But I still miss You; I’m never done with missing You, and I’m still left so sad, Lord.
I suppose I don’t have the good parts, not really, Lord. The part people say about grieving a person who’s died: that one day, I’ll think of You and smile before I cry. The good parts are all shot through with the irreal. With the imagined. I made it up, but I’m still the I who invented You, so I always reach for what I know I’ll not find.
4.9.22
In a dead panic about this novel and how badly you want to have it out before the end of 2024. This would mean it needs to be done within about a year, but you can’t let a single part of it be hasty or messy or ill-considered or ignorant or unintentionally hurtful or anything. One bad sentence would break your heart. But you want this done. But.
I read over some journal entries from 2014–2018, and you were mostly so sad then, too! And so doubtful.
I ate a small bowl of kimchi, then a large full bowl of kimchi, then had yukgejang.
6.17.22
Heard from Laura today, who said:
“Thank you for this update, my update is that I’m more than halfway through the manuscript but not quite finished yet. I could send you my notes for the first half—would that be helpful? They’re mostly ideas for where to tighten or cut or when a piece of information might need to be added or placed elsewhere. The manuscript is really reading so wonderfully. Reese, it’s just crystallizing in a beautiful way. I’m so happy with it, and it’s an absolute triumph to read . . . I can’t wait to finish! Really—I keep trying to steal away during the day from meetings just to have time with these pages.”
I’d woken up at 9:30, anxious, and M. read Laura’s email first then handed me his phone. I was still so tired I could barely see, so he read it out loud to me. I lay awake for two hours, not quite able to move or reply. I had a panic attack on Tuesday. It was relatively short but physically a little new: tingling all over my skin, especially my face and arms. Not every day, but most days of the past month, I have been teetering on the edge of a panic attack and, at times, have tipped over, falling into one.
Going to start fully revising today or tomorrow, I think.
What helped, on Tuesday, with the anxiety: starting to revise again, a little bit, here and there.
What are you going to try to do with this next draft? Be even less afraid. Don’t hold back. Don’t indulge yourself. Serve the book. Waste as little time as possible. Read for the book, torque your mind around it. Push each line to be the most truthful, living version of itself.
6.18.22
Wrote six-hundred-plus words. Yesterday, spent time looking for a replacement for a repeated use of the word “pine,” looking up tree-related words, then deleting the line entirely. It was excruciating but satisfying. This is the part I’ve been waiting for, trying each word for its life.
6.19.22
I think you should resume starting each day with reading a poem. Something to whet your language, make it as sharp as possible.
6.20.22
One thousand, one hundred and fifty words yesterday! We’ll see how this pace goes, but if you can be obsessive enough, you might have time to get through an aural revision before you send this to Laura again, knocking on wood, fingers crossed.
Virginia Woolf, on the proper response to criticism you don’t agree with: “The thing to do is to note the pith of what is said—that I don’t think—then to use the little kick of energy which opposition supplies to be more vigorously oneself.”
Keep starting the writing day by reading a poem.
8.23.22
Finished a New Yorker review of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s work yesterday. It was difficult. I worked against and inside of the terror of getting it wrong, not doing right by her spirit, hurting the people who’ve loved and championed her work for decades, bringing more pain to her family.
Back to the novel! So many fingers to cross. Lord, my longing for You has me crying again today.
10.3.22
I’ve been writing a lot; I’m close, I hope, to finishing a draft. The kisaeng’s voice is ringing through me. I grieve the old losses; I can’t quite let them go. I know there are more to come.
12.2.22
Lord, I am so tired. I am afraid. Lord, let me leave nothing untried. Let me not go lax. Lord, let me work to the height of my abilities, for why else have they been given to me? Let me, O Lord, go past those abilities.
2.6.23
Been working so much and mostly feeling so grim and stilted and balked, and I hope the book is getting truer, more itself, knocking on wood. Yesterday was eight hours of what felt mostly like stasis, reworking old parts, not moving forward, but you did revise a central scene, the burial scene, that had always felt off, so that’s not really stasis at all.
8.6.23
You’ve been so scared. And you’re right to be afraid; you have good reasons and past knowledge, but you’ll fight for this book. It’s trusted you with itself, this great act of trust, & you’ll meet that trust. You’ll do right by this book’s trust in you. You’ll prepare. You’ll have the language ready. You’ll be more careful about the parts of the world you expose yourself to. You’ll remember you think no differently of anyone else for what you might know about their desires.
But you worked so hard. I think I gave it very close to all I could. It will mean so much to the scared, lonely girl in you.
R. O. Kwon is the author of the nationally bestselling Exhibit, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, which was published in 2024. Kwon’s bestselling first novel, The Incendiaries, has been translated into seven languages and was named a best book of the year by over forty publications. The Incendiaries was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Award. With Garth Greenwell, Kwon co-edited Kink, a New York Times Notable Book. Kwon’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, New Yorker, Time, Vanity Fair, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships and awards from MacDowell, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Yaddo.
