At the end of this month, I will complete my first year of writing solely in English. When I say writing, I do not refer to manufacturing bodies of text that I do as my day job or sending out text messages with my phone. Living in Seoul, I produce many lines in Korean daily; however, if such an act made me a writer, I would call myself a chef as well since I microwaved a frozen bowl of rice for breakfast today. My firm belief is that one should write what makes him or her a writer. For other acts that do not bring out the same result, English has many other fitting verbs: jot down, scribble, doodle, and so on.
In a year, I managed to get one micro-play, one micro-fiction, four flash fiction, one short story, one flash memoir, and one essay published in magazines. A flash fiction, a short play, a short story, and a poem are scheduled to be published in the coming months. In addition, you can also read four essays, four short stories, and a collection of micro-fictions that I wrote on Substack. I have previously never had any year in which I was more productive in terms of readership since the biggest audience I have ever had when writing in Korean was less than a hundred people.
These days, I have been thinking from time to time about how less excited I feel when my works are accepted for publication. Don’t get me wrong; I still feel happy when I receive emails from editors that do not contain phrases like “unfortunately, we are not able to”, “we appreciate the opportunity”, “many exceptional submissions”, “not right for us at the moment”, etc. Still, compared to the time when I received my first acceptance email from a magazine in India, I tend not to spring up, run around, shout out, or throw a gargantuan feast for whomever I happen to run into right after getting accepted.
Honestly, submitting my works and seeing them published has begun to feel somewhat like a numbers game. Now I know that my works are good enough and if I continue submitting them to multiple publications, they will be published eventually. To be fair, The New Yorker and The Paris Review have rejected some of my works and I am still waiting to hear back from them about other pieces; yet when I am talking only about getting my fiction or essays published without regard to which magazine picks them up, I have become quite confident.
Whither am I to go from now? Since my twenties, I have never stopped striving to become a full-time writer (again, with all due respect to the workers of the relevant industry, what I have in my mind is not, for instance, composing articles on the latest tech news eight hours a day to earn bread) even though not a piece I wrote in Korean was published in the traditional sense. Now that I have found out my works in English are acknowledged to have literary merits by many people of the Anglosphere, I want more. My past self from just one year ago, who never saw his work get accepted by publications and had the faintest idea that I would be writing in English only, might think that I am grumbling over champagne problems, but simply seeing my writings in magazines no longer feels satisfying enough.
The first thing I am working on this year is none other than the English language itself. Surely, my English may be good enough, even better than the majority of its native speakers when it comes to writing, but being good enough does not guarantee that I am a proficient writer of English. Feeling that I need to enhance and expand my command of English, I am trying to read more works of various writers who wrote in English, all spread throughout different times: Ben Johnson, Edmund Spenser, Andrew Marvell, Samuel Johnson, Jane Austen, Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, Jean Rhys, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and many more. While I half-jokingly wrote “whither” at the beginning of the paragraph above, I want to sound like an Elizabethan lyricist when I feel inclined to. As of now, my English stylistics is much limited in comparison to how I can write in Korean.
Second, now I should make the first book with my name on it enter the market. With a few more new stories, I will start querying agents who may be interested in a short story collection from a debut author. I have also started preparing to write a novel set in North Korea. The basic plot and motifs have been staying with me for years, although in the past I did not know I would be writing it in English. Hopefully, I will finish my research soon and be able to complete the novel before 2025.
Next week, I will post a micro-fiction on Monday, not Tuesday, for
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Lovely article here! Being accepted to journals and mags are nice vindication for writers; it's very cool that you've so many published pieces. Even better, you're aiming for the Paris Review! I wish you luck on that venture and I'll certainly be looking forward to your next micro-fiction!
Keep on going Hyun Woo Kim. It is good you are starting to realized your dream of being a writer. Best of luck with your future plans.
If you ask me being a non-native English speaker, I love the language of old as it sounds just right to my ears. The banter and insults were rather better too, which is why I tend to use them even if they are obsolete! Might even revive some words who knows. It's a matter of preference.