Esther Liu’s book Shame: Being Known and Loved made it to both SOLA Network’s Best Christian Books by Asian American Authors in 2022 and SOLA content curator Aaron Lee’s “My Favorite Asian American Christian Books I Read in 2022.”
In this interview with Aaron, Esther shares more of the practical part of being an author—the actual writing of the book. She gives advice on how aspiring authors can tackle writing. We hope this encourages writers to continue to share their perspectives and create stories for the glory of God.
Editor’s Note: Below is a lightly edited automated transcript of their conversation. There may be typos or grammatical errors.
Aaron Lee: Hi everyone, this is Aaron again from SOLA Network. Esther Liu is the author of Shame: Being Known and Loved. And this is just a quick question, a bonus episode that we have. Esther, do you have any tips for people who want to write, or author, or be published?
Esther Liu: This is just a real question for me. Given that, yeah, I still feel like I’m learning so much, and how to learn so much. What I’ll share here is just some of the best advice that I heard going through my own journey of writing, so none of it is original to me.
I would say one of the biggest things for me is to invite community to be a part of it. I don’t think I would have been able to make it without that. But having people who can support you in prayer, because writer’s blocks are inevitable, and there are going to be days where you’re just going to kind of despair of your writing and be like, “I don’t know what I’m doing” or just sapped of all creativity and energy, or like “I’m done with this project.” But it’s not done yet.
There are just so many hurdles and obstacles that having people surrounding me and cheering me on and being excited for me when I wasn’t excited myself anymore. Like that was such a game change for me to have those people.
And even like the times when I got the most stuck, like just utterly, hopelessly stuck, having people who are willing to read the manuscripts and even just give like, one or two comments. They don’t even have to be editors or writers themselves, but just having a different pair of eyes on it to like say something about it to kind of jog my brain to have some semblance of creativity and inspiration was really helpful for me. And people who just believe in you more than you believe in yourself is always helpful people will cheer you on, when you’re like, “Okay, I’m done.” So that was huge for me.
And I think another piece of it was [that] people always say the book [is made of] really bad first drafts. I don’t know if I ever fully mastered that principle and being okay, and coming to terms with like, really horrible first drafts. But it was helpful to have some freedom to be like, “This doesn’t have to be the final thing.” And so to kind of take that pressure off of myself that this is going to be the end all be all, and you need to have it perfectly worded or even just like the general outline needs to be good enough.
But there are some that I just word-vomited. You know, it was a devotional. It was like, “Today’s is a little bit easier, just word vomit for two pages, and then kind of come back to it.”
But it’s fascinating. It was fascinating for me to realize that, even if I ended up rewriting the entire thing, and you would not be able to recognize any part of the first draft in the final draft, that word vomit still served a purpose, in a sense. It was still the stepping stone to get to the next iteration of it.
And so that was really helpful for me to learn that I just didn’t realize they’ll be okay with like, vomiting words, like just getting words on the page is helpful. And like, even stream of consciousness if you’re hitting writer’s block, and know that those things, even if you delete everything, and none of it is there, by the final draft, it still served a purpose. And it was still helpful to get you to where you need to get eventually.
That was something that I really appreciate and it’s always in for me, it was a lot easier to edit. When the words were already on the page, staring at a blank Word document and trying to go from zero to something. Like nothing to something was harder than, “Okay, this is something and it’s really, really bad. But it’s something, let’s edit it.” So at least for me, it was easier to edit something bad than to go from nothing to something.
I could go on and on. But I think one of the biggest things for me is kind of what my aim is in each writing session. And as soon as I started thinking about kind of, I need this to be helpful to the readers like I need this to be eloquent. I need this to make sense to be coherent. I think those are all really good things. And I don’t think that’s probably a good thing for writers to be thinking about. For me that ended up being paralyzing. And so I didn’t know if I could do it.
But I think what was helpful was like, my goal for each writing session is not necessarily like okay, I’m going to finish X number of reflections stay or this is going to get to a certain place by this and it’s going to get to this type of quality by the certain time. I think for me, being able to show up and say, to each writing session and being like, I’m going to do my best and simply be faithful with this time that I’ve carved out. Even if I end up staring at the computer blankly, for 45 minutes. Just that discipline of like, Lord, here I am, and I want to be faithful to you was really helpful to give me the courage to sit back down in front of my laptop time and time again.
And I found that I could get further with writing, when that was my aim and aspiration was just show up, like to show up again, do your best and trust God with that. So it led to many unproductive, virtually unproductive writing sessions, where it’s like you did nothing last hour. But yeah, I think anything else would be paralyzing for me. So simply writing out what I’ve needed for myself, and being faithful in that way, was very empowering for me to continue plotting forward and writing.
Aaron Lee: So good. Thank you, Esther.
Check out our interview in which we talk with Esther about her book, Shame: Being Known and Loved.
You can also read our review of Shame: Being Known and Loved.