Phil Nguyen

My high-level advice—which supersedes everything below—is that you should decide what you want from your writing, and then completely ignore any advice which detracts from this goal. This includes advice which is practically sound but psychologically destructive when it comes to sustaining motivation.

A lot has been written about how the internet radicalizes people. But the same dynamics that turn a slightly lonely young man into a seething misogynist—recommendation algorithms; social contexts that concentrate and intensify discourse—are also the dynamics that turn a young person who “likes reading” into someone who spends a year reading Proust,... See more

What gives multinational corporations the right to pollute the air we breathe, drain our groundwater and exhaust our planet’s dwindling resources – and deprives us of the right to stop them? One powerful idea: private property. Because the rich own things, and the poor do not, it is legal for the rich to destroy Earth and illegal for the poor to st... See more

What these fears come down to is a deep false belief that we have to give ourselves up to be loved and to be seen as a caring person. Giving yourself up - giving up your freedom to be yourself and do what brings you joy - is a terrifying prospect. As long as we have these false beliefs - and they might be unconscious - we will likely find ourselves... See more

You’re a beginner. You haven’t become who you want to be—yet. You want to wake up in the mornings to write, but you often don’t manage it. What we learn from Agnes Callard—and Kafka, and Proust—is that here’s nothing wrong with this state of affairs, nothing to be ashamed of, no reason to stop. We can, and should, continue to aspire.

For the aspirant, there’s nothing more comforting than realizing you are not alone in trying. You’re not alone in trying to find a subject, trying to develop the discipline, trying to turn your life towards something that you can’t quite understand yet.

Doing something badly, she insists, isn’t a sign of unworthiness. Nor is the fear that you are doing it in a way that seems fake, insincere. If you can’t apprehend the value of a writing practice yet, it’s enough to apprehend that there is something there, something desirable and important to you. That’s more than enough to begin. Aspirants, Callar... See more

We aspire by doing things, and the things we do change us so that we are able to do the same things, or things of that kind, better and better. In the beginning, we sometimes feel as though we are pretending, play-acting, or otherwise alienated from our own activity. We may see the new value as something we are trying out or trying on rather than s

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What Agnes Callard argues—and what writers’ diaries show us—is that we have to keep trying. Write regularly! Don’t give up! Don’t let the doubts stall you, the doubts that say: Who do you think you are? What makes you think you can write? Aren’t you fundamentally unqualified and incapable, in this moment, of writing well? Why are you trying so hard... See more

The work is visible in her struggles to sustain interest in the hobby or relationship or career or religion or aesthetic experience that will later become second nature; in her repeated attempts to “get it right,” attempts that must be performed without the benefit of knowing exactly what rightness consists in; and, most generally, in the fact that... See more