The hardest part of writing comes before you write

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Via David Perell

“It’s about perception. It’s about slowing down. I think like 80% of writing is looking and thinking. The last part is syntax.”
— NYU Professor Teaches the Art of Writing (Ocean Vuong Interview), at 35:29

Most writing advice starts too late.

It arrives at the desk, at the draft, at the sentence. But Ocean Vuong – poet, novelist, NYU professor – traces the problem back further. When students ask him how to write a good metaphor, he doesn’t talk about technique. “It’s really about observation,” he says. “It’s about looking at the world.” The implication: if your writing feels thin, the deficit is probably not at the page.

Observation builds the material that syntax can’t manufacture.

Isaac Babel opens Red Cavalry with: “The low red sun rolls across the hills as if beheaded.” That sentence exists because Babel spent time as a war correspondent during the Soviet-Polish war – long enough that violence had seeped into his perception of everything, including sunsets.

You didn’t need to know that context to feel the sentence. It’s embedded in the image. Babel didn’t choose a striking vehicle for an ordinary tenor. He saw a sunset that way because of what he’d lived through. The metaphor is a consequence of the observation, not a technique applied to it.

Most of us believe we’re doing this already. We’re not.

Seeing and recognizing are different operations, and writers mostly recognize.

When you look at a sunset, you’re largely accessing a cultural archive – every painting, photograph, and poem about sunsets you’ve absorbed – and confirming that this one matches the category. That’s recognition: fast, efficient, and nearly useless for writing. Real seeing requires suspending that database. It means encountering something as if it doesn’t already have a name and a place in your mental inventory.

This is the gap between a writer who has material and one who doesn’t. Not talent, not technique – the capacity to actually look at what’s in front of them rather than at the category it belongs to.

The Japanese botanist is the operative model.

Vuong tells the story of a researcher who held the record at his university for finding medicinal plants in the rainforest. When asked his method, he said: “I don’t go into the rainforest looking for what looks like medicine. I simply look for anything that’s new to me. I hope it’s medicine. Sometimes it’s poison.“

That posture – radical openness to novelty rather than pattern-matching to existing categories – is what the 80% actually looks like in practice. It’s not a dramatic discipline. It’s walks. Conversations you’re paying close attention to. Reading slowly enough to absorb how a sentence moves, not just what it says. None of this produces a word count. All of it produces the material that will eventually become one.

But only if you don’t discard what arrives before you understand it.

Observation builds material, and that material surfaces in writing before the conscious mind catches up. Vuong describes censoring himself early in his career: if a line came out and he couldn’t explain it, he’d cut it. He didn’t feel in control.

Over time he reversed this. “I don’t want to judge what comes through,” he says. A line that excites you without your knowing exactly why is one to keep, not kill. Your subconscious has been doing observational work you don’t have full access to yet. Cutting the line because you can’t explain it is discarding the harvest.

The capacity to keep those lines – and use them – is daringness. And it’s trained, not innate.

This is where writers get stuck: they treat boldness as a personality trait they either have or don’t. Vuong disagrees.

Daringness is a developed capacity, built through exposure to writing that makes bold choices – Babel, Djuna Barnes, Anne Carson – and through the practice of making bold choices yourself until the risk starts to feel survivable. You read writers who’ve gone somewhere strange. You try it. You survive the bad attempts. You go further. The capacity grows.

Syntax, Vuong says, is “the spike protein – the downloading mechanism.” It’s how consciousness transfers to a reader. But you can only download what you’ve built. The 20% at the desk depends entirely on the 80% away from it.

Before you can write a sentence “the species never had yet,” you have to see something you haven’t seen yet. That’s the actual work.

Things to Try Today

Build the material:

Pick one thing you looked at today — a person, a room, a sound — and write three sentences about it that don’t use any word you’d find in a stock description. No “warm,” “busy,” “quiet.” Force a new vehicle.
Keep a running list of images, overheard phrases, or moments that struck you without your knowing why. Don’t explain them. Just log them. Return in a week.

Practice seeing, not recognizing:

Before you name something you’re observing, spend thirty seconds with it first. Describe what it does before you describe what it is.
Read a poem or passage you know well and try to read it as if the subject has no name yet — the way a child encounters something before language has categorized it.

Go into nature:

Take a walk with one rule: you’re not allowed to think about your current project. You’re just looking for anything new. Note what you can’t immediately categorize.
Read outside your usual territory — a field you know nothing about, a writer whose form you’ve avoided. You’re not looking for what looks like your work. You’re looking for anything new.

Trust the subconscious:

In your next draft, mark every line that excites you but that you can’t explain. Don’t cut them. Set them aside in a separate document and sit with them for a day.
When you catch yourself about to cut something because “I don’t know what I mean by this yet,” stop. That’s the line most worth keeping.

Train daringness:

Read one writer who makes you uncomfortable — whose sentences go somewhere you’d never allow yourself to go. Read them until the strangeness starts to feel survivable, then inevitable.
Write one sentence this week that you’d normally delete on instinct. Keep it. See what it asks for next.

🗒️ This snippet was written with the help of Spiral.