Ava Huang is a writer and copywriting professional who explores how to create emotional resonance in writing without falling into cliché or self-help jargon, emphasizing that the personal is universal and that honest emotional transcription — not literal accuracy — is what makes writing come alive.
Moving Beyond Cliché
Ava’s core writing principle is to avoid anything she recognizes as a cliché or jargon, because familiar phrases fail to light up the brain the way original language does.
She gets beyond surface-level writing by absorbing influences from other art forms — music, conversation, reading — and rephrasing them in her own words, which brings her own essence to shared emotional truths.
She believes most humans share common emotional threads, so writing honestly about her own experience naturally resonates with others.
Difficult Emotions and Self-Sabotage
Writing about difficult emotions like anxiety or grief is easier than writing about happiness because sadness is more analytically rich and harder to say something novel about.
Ava questions whether writers need to sabotage themselves or live extreme lives to have something worth writing about, noting that many great artists have emotional problems.
She keeps a mental file of great writers who seem genuinely happy — like Anne Patchett and Haruki Murakami — as proof that a serene life doesn’t preclude great work, and that some people have a more nuanced appreciation of ordinary experience without needing extremes.
Dialogue and Craft
When reading, Ava used to get lost in work subconsciously absorbing craft; when she started writing fiction, she became conscious of how dialogue works for the first time.
Dialogue styles vary widely: some authors use highly stylized dialogue (Woody Allen, Yorgos Lanthimos in The Lobster) where characters don’t talk like real people but serve the author’s voice, while others like Sally Rooney achieve “shockingly real” conversations.
Good dialogue is not a literal transcription of real speech — that would make a terrible novel — but a recreation that captures the essence beneath what’s being said.
Ava’s own writing style leans toward maximalism with adjectives and complex sentences, but her editing goal is to distill and simplify, removing everything extraneous.
Poetry, Emotion, and Writing as Thinking
Ava wrote poetry as a teenager but shifted to essays and prose in her twenties; she believes poetry is the hardest form because it demands poignancy in very few words.
The goal of emotional writing is to transcribe the emotional experience honestly — not literally, but capturing its essence so the reader feels it.
Ava does not have an internal monologue; she thinks in images and emotions rather than words, which challenges the Wittgenstein idea that language limits thought.
She believes writing is thinking — or more precisely, thinking deeper — because it forces the mind to stay in one place rather than skipping between topics, and allows her to hold and develop complex ideas she couldn’t manage mentally.
Writing is also a way of choosing which parts of experience to magnify and narrativize, giving her agency over what to preserve and what to let fade.
Ruminating and Making Sense of Experience
Ava defines ruminating as obsessively deconstructing particular things, and she believes the impulse to write comes from the impulse to deconstruct lived experience.
She can’t understand people who have experiences and don’t try to make sense of them through words and structure — for her, if she can’t put something into words, it doesn’t feel real.
She’s drawn to capturing the emotional range of everyday small moments — conversations with loved ones, chance encounters — that are deeply meaningful internally but might seem mundane or trite to an outsider.
Conversation as a Creative Tool
Conversations are a primary source of inspiration for Ava; she develops half-formed thoughts by talking with friends, who then help her refine or challenge them.
She compares good conversation to the Tactile Dome — a pitch-black maze you navigate by touch — where you’re expanding the frontiers of your consciousness without a high-resolution map, gaining originality of thought even without clarity.
Good conversational chemistry is hard to define but involves both people wanting to expand on the same thing and being able to contribute constructively to each other’s thinking.
Psychedelics, Rejection, and Acceptance
Psychedelics helped Ava overcome her fear of rejection by teaching her to accept her imperfect work as it is, which paradoxically makes it better.
She used to be a perfectionist paralyzed by the possibility of criticism; the realization that she needed to confront her work and get feedback — rather than laboring in private until perfect — was transformative.
She believes in holding both low expectations and high expectations simultaneously: write with pride and care, but accept that crickets or indifference is normal and not a reflection of self-worth.
The fear that peers and mentors are gathering to discuss how bad your writing is is narcissistic — in reality, if your writing is bad, most people simply don’t care, and that indifference is comforting.
Audience, Resonance, and Hatred
Ava writes for people who feel similar to where she was years ago — she’s gratified when readers say they feel understood or see a model for change in her work.
She distinguishes between the crickets of indifference (which is fine) and hatred (which is harder to handle), noting that hatred only exists when something resonates — people only get angry when you’re hitting a nerve.
She tries to maintain a balance between audience capture and training the audience, teaching readers to value parts of her work that may not be the most popular.
She finds Twitter useful for inspiration because it captures raw, deranged, half-formed thoughts and cultural moments that wouldn’t survive the refinement process of book publishing.
Quantity, Practice, and the Muse
Ava’s process transformed when she committed to writing at least 1,000 words per day starting in 2020; before that, she only wrote about five times a year despite always taking notes and reading.
She believes quantity leads to quality through practice, and that the muse finds you at your desk — writing every day creates the conditions for inspiration by training your brain to pay attention and generate insights.
She’s skeptical that talent alone determines success; she’s observed that people perceived as middling in MFA programs sometimes become the most successful authors later, while the most praised students don’t always sustain careers.
Taste, Love, and Writing as Aspiration
Ava didn’t always have taste — she spent years mimicking others’ opinions before developing her own sensibility through practice, using other people’s tastes as a bridge to build confidence.
She sees a parallel between love and writing: both are aspirational, striving toward an ideal of perfection that can’t actually be achieved, and both require constant revision and recommitment.
She believes in repetition and consistency as paths to improvement, combined with meta-awareness to make adjustments — not blind repetition but directed practice.
Writing as Letting Go
While some people worry that writing about something means holding onto it, Ava experiences the opposite: writing is a way of letting go, of making an experience safe outside herself so she can move on.
She doesn’t journal privately — her Substack is her journal — and she writes when she has an emotion she wants to share, which is sustainable because emotions always arise.
She believes anything she pays a lot of attention to is worth writing about; the subject matter matters less than the writer’s genuine engagement with it.
Writer’s Block and Stillness
Writer’s block happens when you’re not generating anything in your mind that you want to put down; it resolves when you start experiencing life in ways that make you want to write again.
Ava used to agonize over not feeling inspired, but having a day job in copywriting actually helped by removing the pressure to be inspired — when she has something to write, she writes, and when she doesn’t, she’s busy.
She’s learned to trust stillness and serendipity, recognizing that the anxiety that “this time nothing will happen” is unfounded based on her own experience of creative cycles restarting.
The Vessel
Ava’s deepest motivation is the idea of being a good vessel — the belief that good writing comes from beyond the self, and the writer’s job is not to control it but to be a clear channel for it.
