10 Year Reflections: On Writing

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Now, time to talk about what's been happening with my life.

I have said many times over that this blog began as a way to kill boredom during graduate school. But in the ten years of writing this blog, I stumbled into a career that I never envisioned for myself: being a public intellectual. Obviously, I am not a big name public voice like Andrew Sullivan or Tyler Cowen or Eugene Volokh. But over the last ten years, people began paying attention to what I had to say when it comes to Korea. The blog began to appear more frequently on mainstream media. I even parlayed the blog into writing about Korea on major publications under my real name. (No, I'm still not telling you what it is.) Journalists who cover East Asia reached out to me with increasing frequency.

At the same time, my day job as a lawyer was increasingly demanding more of my time. Here is a shocker: being a big law firm lawyer is a tiresome job, and it only gets more tiresome the longer you are at it. I stared down the future of my career, and--at least at the time--saw only bleakness. So, dear readers: I carefully plotted my escape. About a year and a half ago, I finally crafted a cautious middle ground where I can continue to work at my firm while studying at a graduate school, with an eye toward becoming a law professor. I did this for the last year and a half, living a life of balancing a number of spinning plates. I wrote law review articles, worked on my cases at the law firm, studied law more deeply. And I committed myself to writing more on this blog.

That was the plan, at least. As regular readers of this blog know, that commitment did not come through. I did not write more on this blog in the last year and a half; in fact, I wrote less. In the process, I ended up learning a few lessons about my relationship with writing.

First lesson was that I only had a limited reserve of writing in me. I have always been a fast writer who can bang out many pages in short order. (To be sure, those initial drafts are awful and require multiple rounds of editing for them to make sense.) For the first time in my life, I was in a situation in which I had more time in a day than the amount of writing in me--which made me realize more time did not lead to more writing. My desire to put thoughts into print may be greater than most people's, but its amount is not infinite.

I also learned when writing becomes work, the character of my writing changes in several ways. The more obvious change is the "fun" element. Part of the reason why I wrote less on the blog was because I had so much writing to do for law reviews. To be sure, writing a law review article is fun in its own way. But it is a lumbering process of reading background materials, navigating through terms of art, citing sources and crafting an argument--all part of a good writing, to be sure, but done to a point that can get tiresome. TKWife, a professional musician, enjoys playing music, but not like the way a hobbyist enjoys playing music. She might even mess around with music from time to time, but her messing around has a different quality from an amateur messing around with a guitar after a long day from work. Same became of my writing: when writing becomes a job, it can no longer remain as a hobby--or at least, not the kind of hobby you used to have.

The less obvious change, but equally as important, was what I might call the element of "groundedness" in writing. Academic writing is paradoxical: on one hand, it requires rigorous research and sourcing of facts than ordinary writing. On the other hand, there is no limit on how outlandish or fanciful the actual content of the article can be. Of course, we want big imagination and grand vision from academics. But often--to put it crudely--the process of academic writing ends up meaning that you can say any stupid shit you want, as long as there are enough citations for your stupid shit. In this sense, my continued work at the law firm was exceedingly important; I found that on days I came to the office, my writing was a lot more "grounded." I cannot reach that groundedness by reading more academic literature; it can only be achieved by living a regular life, and absorbing the intuitions of ordinary life that are rarely verbalized and memorialized in a research paper.

These changes led to a more fundamental question: is there any point to writing? When writing was merely a hobby, this question was not necessary. Of course there was no point to my writing. That's what hobbies are; they don't seek to achieve anything other than personal diversion. But the question became suddenly more urgent when writing became a job. You write, you explain, you argue, you accumulate knowledge--for what?

A common answer is: for influence and change. Many people--journalists, professors and regular ol' writers--write in order to become a leading voice, gain influence and change the world closer to their vision. But precious few people actually get to see the change they advocate. Most--really, nearly all--writing is just hot gas, making a puff when exposed to the world and dissipating immediately. To have a shot at avoiding that fate, one needs to put on a performance. One needs to pick the more salacious topic and present it with more alarm, more outrage, more cuteness, more warm and fuzzies. And one needs to do it over and over again, telling and retelling the same story. It is not a bad thing to be engaged in this type of writing. But do I want it for myself? If I am taking up writing as a job to keep blogging for fun, am I not destroying the thing I have been working to preserve?

Ten years in, this is where I am with Ask a Korean!. I am still spinning plates, juggling law firm life and academic life. At some point all the spinning will stop, and we will all fall down to our places. I might write more on the blog, I might write less, or not at all. More than once, I told my wife and friends I am shutting this down. That day may yet come--but for now, the plates are spinning, so we carry on. Who knows? We may be celebrating the 20 year anniversary before we know it.

Got a question or a comment for the Korean? Email away at askakorean@gmail.com. 

p.s. I am sticking this all the way at the bottom because I am hoping that not too many people notice.

Because of all the concerns listed above about not turning this blog into work, I made sure I made no money from the blog in the last ten years. My thought on it evolved slightly--for example, now I charge websites and medias to reprint a post from this blog, to protect the integrity of my original post. But I have never set up a paywall on the blog, nor have I put up any ad on the blog, despite the fact that this blog has gotten tens of millions of hits. In the last decade, I am running a net negative on the blog finance. (Remember, the domain name costs money to keep!)

However, I have been seeing an uptick of reader emails asking me ways to make a donation to the blog, because the readers found my blog interesting and helpful. With the rise of crowdfunding, this became a culture of the internet in some ways--you show your appreciation by sending in a tip. I still am not comfortable with this, because I am very firm in not wanting to turn this blog into a source of income. But I figured that a ten year anniversary celebration might be a decent occasion to relax a little.

So if you want to send me a tip, buy me a beer, celebrate 10 years of Ask a Korean!--call it whatever you want, I don't care--I opened a PayPal account under the blog's email: askakorean@gmail.com. And as always, thank you for reading.