Amy X. Wang

Amy X. Wang is a writer and journalist born in Beijing, raised in the Sonoran Desert, and now—like so many others—living in New York City. She is a reporter at Rolling Stone and previously wrote for Quartz, Slate, The Atlantic, and The Economist. She graduated with a BA from Yale University in 2015. "Gravity" is her first fiction publication. Find her at www.amy-x-wang.com and on Twitter @amyxwang.

Guts

Someone said to me once: At the end of the day, anything worth doing requires a certain amount of self-mutilation, and writing is no exception. Half-shuffled thoughts mean nothing without the proper weight—and pain and bruises and fractures—thrown behind them. Good stories should make shrines out of people, they said. Every word, an inch of intestine. Paragraphs hooked together with tendons, dialogue like innards spilling out all over the floor—

One gets the idea.

It was nonsense, until it wasn't. In school, I sat in libraries and seminar rooms trying for so many stretches of time to write out of a void, to tease words out onto pen and paper and keyboard while sitting still, moving only my hands, feeling nothing. Only later, on the floor of a gym once at the end of delirious, frustration-induced midnight cardio session while trying to prepare for a final exam, with sweat pooling into my collarbones, did I get it: The stories spin out best when the body does. That night, every bone hurt, and I went home and wrote more beautifully than I ever could have thought. Exercise, today, is still the best way I write. Sometimes it is a gentle pilates or yoga class, of all things, that brings a wild idea for a character to my mind; the other day, I ran for miles across the Brooklyn Bridge and only came back with a single new sentence. Friends look at me oddly when I say I am at the gym five days a week in order to write, but it's not a lie. The intensity of the inspiration varies. What is consistent is the movement, and what it delivers.

Bukowski said, in an oft-cited poem about—what else—writing:

"unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or murder,
don't do it.
unless the sun inside you is
burning your gut,
don't do it."

I don't think he's entirely right. I don't think writing is a sacred gift, bestowed only upon some chosen few. But the way he talks about the act with words of such violence, frenzy, physical energy—the way he ties good writing to actual bodily exhaustion—that, I'll always understand.