Five Years, Fifty Stories // A.C.

Posted on Apr 16, 2025

Five years ago, Wakako Takagi asked if I would like to contribute essays to Baum-kuchen’s Love Letter on a regular basis. I remember feeling elated, and also kinda scared. “Are there any specific topics I ought to focus on?” I asked. “ANYTHING!!”, came the reply. I was welcome, but not required, to write about journals or stationery at all. My sense of awe and bewilderment increased. Insecure thoughts ran amok. Can I really write something interesting or worthwhile every month? Who am I to talk about my creative practices as if it matters to anyone else? Won’t people be like, who’s Nobody McNotebook over here? Well, after all this time, I can safely say that…those thoughts never go away. Never. But I write nonetheless. How I’ve gone about it, and what I intend to do from here, shall be the subject of today’s story—my 50th for BK.

How I decide what to write about. Start with curiosity and questions:

1. What are people around me talking about or responding to?

When it’s hard to know what qualifies as interesting enough to write on, conversations with others can light the spark. While with friends, family or strangers, catching up with each others’ experiences, work, habits and etc., I pay attention to anything that makes me go “huh…yeah, why do we do it that way?”. Sometimes this is how I find out that an idea I’m inclined to dismiss is exactly what someone wants to hear about. For example, I’m making this “story about writing stories” because a friend is starting a blog and said it could be helpful to them.

2. What am I thinking about or doing in my creative practice(s) right now?

This can be as casual and obvious as “closing a four month gap in my 5-year was wild, let’s detail the process.” It can also take some poking around. What is the “why”? Not just “I wanted to catch up in my journal”, but “why choose to fill it now, and what difference does it make to me? Do I even believe it is possible to catch up with lost time?” Ah, there we go. There’s something that feels meaty, like the heart of the matter—I’ll write around that. A good idea will feel like it’s tugging at my sleeve, telling me it has something more to say.

3. What are my current desires as a writer, and do I have the capacity to meet them?

Based on the insights above, I make a list of prompts in my TN or work notebook. To narrow down my choices, I think about things like: if I were to assign verbs to the story I want to write, what would they be? To inspire, update, joke, provoke? This helps sets an intention. But whether I can follow through depends on where I’m at that month. Do I need to take it easy with something lighthearted and photos-focused? Or is something weighing on me that might be worth considering more in-depth? Am I comfortable doing that on a public platform? If the answer is no, I keep it for myself. I’ve noticed, though, that some of the stories I found almost too personal to share, but pushed myself to send in anyway, turned out to be some of the most rewarding.

How I start writing. These methods can be alternated and combined at will:

1. Free-write a bunch of messy, unfiltered stuff by hand. Seeing it all on the page makes it easier for me to pick out narratives, common threads or points of interest. Process of elimination works, too: I cross out ideas that strike me as too basic, trite, abstruse or private. Whatever remains is what I have to work with.

2. Simply start typing. Sometimes I work off of a couple core sentences and a bullet point outline. Other times I’ll disassociate for six hours and write the whole story straight through. It really just depends on the day.

3. Take photos first, then write around the images. This is helpful when I’m feeling tired or uncertain. Ideas can come up just by holding things in my hands, by spending time with what’s already close by.

How I get past the self-consciousness of knowing my writing is being read.

1. I don’t.

2. I read other writers. I look at how they handle storytelling, structure, tone of voice, rhythm. I may try these things out in my own work, or echoes of them may show up on their own. Either way, it’s probably not obvious to others, so I don’t worry too much about copying anyone’s style. That’s how you develop your own, if you do it right. (Important note: I’m talking about humans having natural encounters with art while going about their lives and developing their self-expression through conscious observation and practice. I am NOT talking about plagiarism, nor am I okay with the copying or reuse of art through “generative” artificial means, which currently uses the labor of thousands of artists living and dead without permission and at considerable environmental cost.)

3. I imagine those who may be reading my words. Forget follow count. Forget audience numbers. I try to picture unique people, their lives that may be so different from mine, yet also the things we may have in common. I remember that while the act of writing is done alone, the life of the words begins when it finds good company.

4. To boost morale, I reread this part of W.S. Merwin’s “Berryman”

I asked how can you ever be sure

that what you write is really

any good at all and he said you can’t

you can’t you can never be sure

you die without knowing

whether anything you wrote was any good

if you have to be sure don’t write

Why write these stories, then? A certain phrase keeps coming up in my stream-of-consciousness pages lately: “I want to be real”. Kind of strange to say. Then again, maybe Pinocchio’s sentiment is quite normal in an age so thoroughly saturated, so absolutely ruled, by powers that seek to isolate, disconnect and dehumanize us. I find myself thinking a lot about how to counter these destructive powers with healing, connective ones. How am I best equipped to help as I am now? How do I become a person who can lend their strength in other ways? Searching for the answers means looking both inward and outward, and I think sharing stories helps with that.

To write as honestly as possible, where people can see it, is a way to practice authenticity, communication, protection, joy, embodiment. The way an intentional breath, whether shallow or deep, can soothe the nervous system, dissipate nausea and bring you back into yourself. It’s only a tiny part of the vast and varied work that must be done to oppose the greedy Strombolis and conniving Coachmen of our collective story, but I do believe it is a vital part. Does it truly make a difference, is it any good? You can never be sure. So what the hell. Start the blog. Go to the stationery/hobby meetup. Pitch in at the local community event. Make the thing that scares you to make. Say yes to “ANYTHING!!”. It is proof of life; it is a way to go on living. In order to change our reality, we must be real. Write like you’ve got no strings.