Why is writing a solitary act? Utsudo truly committed to writing during the time her mother fell gravely ill and passed away. Her home suddenly felt empty. Afraid of loss, and even more afraid of forgetting, she felt the images and voices in her head urging her to write stories down, and from then on she couldn’t stop; most of what she wrote was about the important people and things around her. She believes solitude is also the charm of creating: writing is a quiet conversation with yourself, and while you write, you are keeping yourself company.

Translated from Utsudo’s original Chinese column.

I write because of solitude

Everyone has different reasons for writing, but I write because of “solitude.”

I wrote stories of over a hundred thousand characters in elementary school, but I didn’t finish my first short story until junior high, and I didn’t truly commit to writing until the autumn I was seventeen.

A turning point in my life

That year brought a major turning point in my life—my mother fell gravely ill.

Before that, my life went very smoothly. My family was happy and comfortable, my grades stayed decent, and my parents rarely interfered with what we liked to do, so I never went without games or manga growing up. On holidays my parents took us out too. Since they were both teachers, they had weekends, public holidays and winter and summer breaks, so we often drove around exploring.

Of course I had little worries, like daily quizzes on the 7,000 English vocabulary words, or the boy I liked being in the class next door. But overall, my family never let us go hungry or poor. Every day I came home to a delicious hot meal, and afterward I could play on the computer—I was so happy.

My sister was away at university in the north. After my mother fell ill, my father rushed to the hospital every day after work. So when I came home, a pitch-dark living room greeted me, and I spent long stretches of time home alone.

I was still naive then, thinking my mother would be hospitalized for a while and then come home. But after visiting her a few times, I realized things weren’t as simple as I’d imagined, because each time I saw her, she looked more worn down.

—In the end, when she was brought home, she was barely hanging on.

Looking at her hair, thinned by chemotherapy, and her gaunt face, I could hardly recognize the mother I knew, and my tears wouldn’t stop. I kept feeling that it was all a nightmare. How could something like this happen in my happy life? Without my mother, how would I live, and how would my future change?

All kinds of fears of the unknown rushed at me, almost swallowing me whole.

In a daze, I said goodbye to my mother, and for the first time I lit incense to honor her.

The pen wouldn’t stop

It was during that time that many images and voices surfaced in my mind, clamoring for me to write the story down quickly. At the same time, I was afraid I’d forget my mother. So once everything had settled, I picked up my pen and began my first full-length novel, 《絕命拍檔》.

I never imagined that from then on, my pen would never stop. As if trying to escape into a virtual world, I wrote desperately, day and night, as though I wanted to weave everything worth remembering into my stories, pouring every trace I could remember into them, mourning my late mother as I turned it all over in my mind.

The stories I wrote after that were about memories of the important people and things around me.

I love these people and things, and at the same time I’m afraid of losing them.

But even more than losing them, I’m afraid of forgetting.

Maybe it’s that deep fear of the things around me fading away that made me who I am today.

Solitude is also the charm of creating

A solitude no one could understand kept me company for a very long time.

I think solitude is also the charm of creating. Since writing is a quiet conversation with yourself, why would writing feel lonely? Aren’t you keeping yourself company? So I don’t quite understand people who want to find others to motivate them to write. Maybe they’re experiencing another kind of creative charm I don’t know about?

What about you?

Do you think writing is solitary?

FAQ

Further reading

• Previous: Hey! I Heard You’re a Writer on Ghost Island #254: Don’t Work With “Unreliable” People
• Start from the beginning: Hey! I Heard You’re a Writer on Ghost Island #01: Utsudo’s Debut — A Road to the Dream Covered in Frost
• Utsudo’s books

About the author

Utsudo is a Taiwanese light novelist and novelist VTuber with more than ten years in the industry and 40 commercially published print books. Her novel 《遺失的情書》 received a 2022 Ministry of Culture youth creative award. The 《嘿！聽說妳在鬼島當作家》 series records her experiences as a novelist in Taiwan.