[Current & Culture] The Importance of "Writing Every Day"

Even Just a Few Lines in a Diary
Recording Yourself Every Day
Is the First Step Toward Writing and Publishing a Book

When I was a graduate student, a senior who had completed their doctoral coursework said at a seminar, "We are only writing theses, but that’s not enough; we need to keep writing something else, though it’s really hard." At the time, I thought, "I should just focus on writing my thesis..." but that senior continued while looking at me. "But Minseop is a bit different. How much writing practice do you think you get from diligently writing a diary every day like that?" Another senior in the program chimed in, "Minseop’s diaries on his Minihompy are really fun. I live for the joy of reading them." Now that I think about it, I have been writing something continuously, even if it was just a few lines of diary entries.

In the early 2000s, when I was an undergraduate, Cyworld Minihompy was all the rage. Everyone bought virtual currency called Dotori to decorate their personal homepage. The number of visitors and the messages left in the guestbook naturally revealed whether someone was an "insider" or an "outsider." Back then, I created a website called Tokdream with a close friend. It was a space where we posted our diaries. We even made a menu called "Tokdream" and announced that we would open it when our dreams came true someday. We ran that bulletin board together for about three years before closing it, but it accumulated three years’ worth of diaries from the two of us. I still remember a junior telling me, "You know Tokdream is more fun than Cyworld these days, right? Please write lots of diaries." Such compliments and attention seemed to keep me writing something continuously.

After Tokdream, I kept writing diaries on the Cyworld Minihompy’s "Diary Board." From my twenties into my thirties, I recorded my daily life, experiences, and feelings, sharing them with people I knew. Through this, I think I developed my own language. I gradually learned which adverbs and adjectives best expressed me, which tones of sentences captured my emotions most effectively.

Recently, Cyworld Minihompy was relaunched as an app. After installing the app, I started receiving daily notifications saying, "On this day several years ago..." with the diaries I had written. Looking through them, I realized that although I used to kick off my blanket every night, from my twenties to my thirties, reading several diary entries shows me how I have gradually become the person I am, especially how my writing has evolved. This makes me truly feel that writing diaries was a great decision, and these few lines I wrote each day have shaped who I am now. Learning the language that suits you, being able to express yourself freely, and becoming familiar with language that resembles you?this might be the very first step toward writing and publishing books.

It would be great if one could immediately produce excellent works, but very few people can do that. However, whether it’s a diary or something else, starting with the simple act of recording yourself every day might be a better first step as a writer than preparing to debut by entering a Korean literature or creative writing program. Many authors I know seem to have suddenly succeeded with a single book, but they were people who had been steadily writing something all along.

Kim Minseop, Social and Cultural Critic