Ava's Advice on Writing: The Emotions of Writing

Ava writes the Substack newsletter Bookbear Express. Her essays are intimate, honest, and emotionally precise in a way that most online writing is not. David Perell invited her on How I Write because her work demonstrates something rare: genuine emotional connection with readers, built not on sentimentality but on the willingness to go deeper than comfortable.

Her writing advice comes from that conversation and from NextBigWhat's podcast summary.

Writing as Consciousness

Ava does not describe writing as communication. She describes it as a form of consciousness. A process of continually excavating your mind to find out what you think.

This reframing changes everything about how you approach the blank page. If writing is communication, the goal is to transmit a pre-existing message clearly. If writing is consciousness, the goal is to discover what the message is in the first place. You sit down not knowing what you think. You leave knowing. The writing was the knowing.

This puts Ava in the same tradition as David Perell's core principle that writing is thinking made public. But Ava pushes it further into emotional territory. It is not just ideas you are discovering. It is feelings. Reactions. The specific texture of your experience that exists below the level of conscious thought until writing brings it to the surface.

The Paradox of Difficult Emotions

Ava makes a claim that sounds wrong until you try it: it is easier to write about difficult emotions than easy ones.

Happy emotions are simple. They resist analysis. You are happy. What more is there to say? Difficult emotions - grief, confusion, jealousy, shame, longing - are complex. They have layers. They contradict themselves. They provide vastly more material for analysis and dissection.

She keeps a running file of authors who seem both great and happy. Anne Patchett is on the list - a difficult childhood but a serene marriage, meaningful friendships, extraordinary productivity. Haruki Murakami runs five miles a day and has been married to the same person for decades. "Not everyone needs to live in the extremes. Some people are just better at writing about the human experience without having to dip into the extremes in their own lived life."

The practical implication: do not avoid the topics that make you uncomfortable. But do not confuse suffering with material. What writing requires is honesty about the full range of experience, not the cultivation of misery. Ava sees herself as generally serene. "But I think people write because they ruminate. If I didn't like to ruminate, I don't think I would write."

Excavating Past Cliche

Every writer's first instinct is cliche. You feel sad and reach for the obvious metaphor. You observe something beautiful and describe it the way a thousand writers have before. Ava insists that the work of writing is pushing past these first-layer responses to find something genuinely yours.

Cliches are not bad because they are overused. They are bad because they are someone else's observation. They were original once, when the first person thought of them. Now they are inherited phrases that allow you to skip the hard work of actually looking at what you are trying to describe.

The practice: when you write a sentence and it sounds familiar, that is the cliche layer. Keep writing. Push through. The next sentence might be cliche too. Keep going. Eventually you hit something that does not sound like anything you have read before. That is the real material. That is your observation, not a borrowed one.

This connects to what Ava calls the resonant truths of human experience. Every person has access to these truths through their own emotions. But most writing never reaches them because the writer stops at the surface layer of received language. The writer who goes deeper, past the cliches and past the comfortable descriptions, finds something that resonates precisely because it has never been said that way before.

Conversation as First Draft

Ava's best material comes not from solitary meditation but from talking to friends. "Most of where I get any kind of inspiration to write is conversations. I'm saying some sort of half-formed thought. They usually add to it and I'm able to refine it. Or they say something totally new and I incorporate that."

She describes conversational chemistry as the ability to "expand constructively on the same thing." Two people can share an interest and still be unable to talk well about it. Chemistry is when both sides want to go deeper in the same direction. The half-formed thought you express in conversation becomes the nucleus of a post. The friend's response shapes what you did not know you were trying to say.

Ava compares this to the tactile dome in San Francisco - a pitch-black maze you navigate by touch. "You're always expanding the frontiers of your own consciousness" without a high-resolution map. Conversation is like that: random, half-baked, but constantly pushing the boundary of what you understand. Writing then takes that expanded boundary and makes it legible.

A Thousand Words a Day Changed Everything

In 2020, Ava made one decision that transformed her writing: a thousand words a day, every day. Before that, she wrote about five times a year. "And before I was writing probably like five times a year. And so it was a huge change."

Her friends sometimes resist the advice. They say they have nothing to write about, or the writing is bad. "If you're not willing to get a thousand words out that you're not happy with, you can't really practice." She invokes Billy Wilder: "The muse has to know where to find you." Writing daily does not just produce words. It changes what you pay attention to. "You're almost creating space in your brain for certain insights or emotions to write about."

The relationship between reading and writing is symbiotic but not automatic. Ava was always a voracious reader and note-taker. But the notes sat inert without a regular writing practice to activate them. Once she started writing daily, the years of accumulated reading and observation had somewhere to go. "It felt like this is what all that consuming has been for. It gave shape and purpose to all the time I'd been spending."

Psychedelics Broke the Perfectionism

Before psychedelics, Ava was paralyzed by the imperfection of her own work. "Being able to live with the imperfection of my own writing was really hard." She describes the breakthrough not as creative inspiration but as acceptance: "Even if things weren't perfect, I could accept them as they were. And that acceptance actually can make my work better."

The logic is circular in a productive way. You cannot improve what you refuse to look at. "You have to be able to really look your work in the face and see it for what it is, and let other people see it for what it is, before you can improve it." Perfectionism disguised as standards is actually avoidance.

Her practical antidote: have low expectations and high expectations at the same time. Care enough to make it good. Accept that crickets are the most likely outcome. "Half the time, what you think other people will be excited about is not what they're excited about." Laboring in secret until something is perfect is often worse than publishing the imperfect thing and learning from the response.

The danger is not criticism. The danger is pre-emptive self-censorship - cutting the honest parts before anyone can object, smoothing the rough edges that are actually the most interesting features of the prose.

Can Writers Be Happy?

Ava addresses a question most writing advice ignores: can you be excellent and happy at the same time? The mythology says no. Great writers are tormented. The best work comes from suffering. The artist must sacrifice wellbeing for art.

Ava disagrees. Some writers manage both excellence and happiness. The two are not inherently opposed. You do not need to cultivate misery to write about difficult emotions. You need to be willing to remember and revisit difficult emotions, which is different from living in them permanently.

This matters because the tortured-artist myth keeps people from writing. They think they are not suffering enough to produce good work. Or they think writing will require them to suffer. Neither is true. What writing requires is honesty about the full range of human experience, including the parts that are joyful.

The Heart, Soul, and Contemplative

Ava describes writing as encompassing heart, soul, and contemplative exploration. This is not mystical language. It is a description of what happens when writing goes beyond information transfer.

Heart is the emotional content. The feelings embedded in the prose. Soul is the writer's distinctive perspective, the thing that makes their writing theirs and no one else's. Contemplative exploration is the process of sitting with a topic long enough to see past the obvious.

Most online writing has information but no heart. Some has heart but no contemplation. The rarest and best writing has all three: emotional honesty, a distinctive soul, and the depth that comes from genuine contemplation rather than quick reaction.

Key Takeaways

• Writing is consciousness. You discover what you think by writing, not before.
• Difficult emotions are richer material than happy ones. Do not avoid them.
• Push past cliche. Your first instinct is borrowed language. Keep going until you find your own observation.
• Authenticity beats trends. Write your genuine thoughts, not what is popular.
• Read for emotional education, not just craft. Notice how other writers see, then notice how you differ.
• Accept criticism as a constant. Pre-emptive self-censorship is the real danger.
• You do not need to suffer to write well. You need to be honest about the full range of experience.

Ava proves that the most powerful writing comes from emotional precision, not emotional display. The difference is subtle but crucial. Display is performance. Precision is the result of excavation - digging past what you think you feel to discover what you actually feel.

This post draws from Ava's appearance on How I Write and NextBigWhat's summary. Athens is an AI writing editor for writers who care about preserving emotional honesty in their prose.