The unlikely writer
How I went from failing English exams to being paid to write full-time to writing leisurely
As someone still figuring out how to write well, reading the memoirs and biographies of famous authors feels pretty demoralizing. Anne Lamott (Bird by Bird) has a writer father and started writing at seven or eight. Stephen King (On Writing) started at six. Terry Pratchett (A Life With Footnotes) published his first short story in his school magazine at 13. William Zinsser (Writing to Learn) wrote for his school newspaper when he was a teenager. Haruki Murakami (Novelist as a Vocation) might be the exception among the books I read; he started at 29.
I, on the other hand, avoided writing as much as I could in my childhood. Part of that was because of my weak English skills, which in turn was because I barely read. Between 11 to 20 years old, I never read a single book. I remember visiting the library with a classmate when I was maybe 12. He ran along the shelves, repeating, “I read this. I read this. I read this.” I couldn’t point to any book that I read, not even comic books. In secondary two, I had to read Totto-Chan for a literature class; I googled the summary1. My English was so poor that a kind friend once warned me that if I continued speaking the way I did, I might not make it in life. My difficulty with English made me fear writing. I only wrote when I had to: assignments, homework, exams. And I almost always fail my essay exams, even up to university. Just a few years ago, I would still jump up in the middle of the night after dreaming about sitting for essay exams. The nightmares were so vivid that my heart would be racing.
In Writing to Learn, William Zinsser wrote about why he thought Americans don’t learn to write and why they live in so much fear of trying:
One of them has to do with English teachers… it’s not what most English teachers want to do. Their real subject is literature—not how to write, but how to read: how to extract meaning from a written text. That’s what they were primarily hired to teach and what they were trained to teach. Inevitably, much of the writing that English teachers assign is based on literature—on what somebody else has already written—and therefore has little reality. And what students in turn write for the English teacher is more florid than what they would write for anybody else. They reach for a “literary” style that they think the teacher wants and that they assume is “good English.” But this style is no part of who they are. Nor is it necessarily good English; much of what academics write and read is fuzzy and verbose. Students should be learning a strong and unpretentious prose that will carry their thoughts about the world they live in.
Reflecting now, I realized I feared writing because I assumed I had to use big words and complex sentences, which was difficult with my limited vocabulary and inability to express my thoughts in English. I remember feeling like a failure for writing in simple language (which I could understand) when my classmates would write in flowery language (which I could barely understand). I struggled so much that I gave up on English, both writing and reading, for many years.
But despite all that, I became a writer.
It wasn’t like a flip of a switch and suddenly I love reading and writing. It took more than a decade and is still a work in progress. There were a few pivotal moments. The first was the turning point in 2013 when I entered university and picked up a self-help book. I cannot remember the title now but I remember finishing the book and realizing I could read a book. This might sound silly but I hadn’t read in a decade. Reading an entire book finally didn’t feel as daunting as before. I didn’t love reading right away; I just didn’t fear it as much. At the same time, I unintentionally signed up for a three-year English immersion program. Improving my English through real-life exposure wasn’t part of the plan when I applied for the University of Warwick in the UK but I found myself constantly surrounded by British who spoke the Queen’s English.
Another pivotal moment was when I started my personal blog in 2014. It was entirely serendipitous. While out for a run, my good friend and I spontaneously decided to travel to Paris from London on a coach bus for the winter holidays of 2013. We were late to the coach station, so we had to sit separately and with strangers. I sat beside Tomas, a designer-writer. Over the 8-hour journey, he convinced me to start a blog. I still had hesitations about what to write. But after the Paris trip, on 10 February 2014, I bought alfredlua.com and created my blog with WordPress. That was the start of my writing journey at age 22, which is still ongoing after more than a decade. It’s amazing to think about how unlikely this chain of events was, how we could have picked another country in Europe to visit, and how I could have picked another seat on the coach or chose not to talk to a stranger. Yet they happened the way they did and led me to writing. That year, I also applied to Buffer and was rejected. The feedback I received was to work on my writing skills, which inspired me to write 30 blog posts in 30 days. During the 30 days, my housemates traveled for the Easter break while I chose to stay in our rented house and agonize about writing. Perhaps that was the first sign that writing would become a passion of mine.
On my third application, I finally got a job as a community manager at Buffer. The job was amazing in many ways; one of which is we get a Kindle and unlimited books as a perk. The perk lowered the friction of getting a book, and I exposed myself to many more books than when I had to buy them myself. There was also an infectious reading culture in the company; my manager Kevan Lee often read 100+ books each year. Besides that, we also had a strong writing culture because we were a fully remote, mostly asynchronous company. Being in APAC while most of the company was in the US and Europe also meant that I wrote to my teammates much more than I spoke to them on Zoom. Six years in such an environment cultivated my reading habit and honed my writing skills.
About a year into the job, the startup almost went bankrupt. The managers laid off 10 teammates and restructured the company. I was assigned to the marketing team. One day, during my one-on-one with Kevan, he asked if I’d be interested in writing for the blog. The blog that was held up as the example for content marketing done right? The blog that was read by hundreds of thousands of marketers and small business owners globally? The blog that writers I look up to, such as Leo, Beth, Kevan, Courtney, and Ash, wrote for? Well, hell yeah! Under his strict guidance and encouragement, I wrote long-form marketing guides for two years. I doubt I wrote as well as my idols but I brought my own style of ideation, research, and writing to the blog. Ash and I eventually grew the readership to over 1.5 million visits per month. It still feels surreal to have written full-time, for a Silicon Valley startup no less, given where I started out about two decades before. I’m forever grateful for the opportunity.
Since then, I have written for other startups, including my own. Inspired by Stratechery, I even wrote a paid newsletter for seven months and grew it to about $150 in monthly recurring revenue. But nowadays I mostly write on my personal blog and my Substack. Every year, I set writing goals even when I often fail to achieve them. To be honest, I feel uneasy to call myself a writer. When I compare myself to some of my favorite writers, such as Morgan Housel and Ryan Holiday, I feel like an imposter. I have not published any books (though I would love to someday); I don’t have a popular blog; my email subscriber count has stuck around 600 for the last five years. How dare I declare myself a writer!
Then, I remember this story in I Decided to Live as Me:
I heard a story of a tourist who met a bartender in some European pub. When the bartender introduced himself as a poet, the tourist asked, “Have you published a collection?” The bartender replied, “No, I haven’t. I’m a poet because I write poems.”
Regardless of all the insecurity I have about myself and my writing, I am a writer because I write. As I would tell my son that he can be anybody he wants to be when he grows up, I should practice what I preach.
I am a writer.
As I learned to read more, I discovered there is a right time (or there are right times) for a book. Now that I’m a dad, I found myself drawn to Totto-Chan in a way my 14-year-old self never would. It’s on my reading list for 2025.
The good news is that there’s no writing police that tells us who can or cannot label themselves as a writer. Regardless of what you write and why you write, if the label is something you want in your identity, then why not?