Welcome to another writer feature! This interview is with Cindy Tran, a seventeen year old writer from Boston, Massachusetts. She writes personal essays, creative prose, and poetry. She writes for Reclamation Magazine, Unpublished Magazine, and Unfiltered Magazine, as well as edits for the Young Writers Initiative and Kalopsia Literary Journal. You can find her website here, and follow her on Instagram @cindytranwrites.

How would you describe “The Young Writers Initiative?” How did you get involved with them and what do you do?

I don’t want to sound like an infomercial, but the Young Writers Initiative is absolutely life-changing! I met my amazing mentor Angel Martinez through them, and she was the one who opened my eyes into the world of freelance writing and creative nonfiction. My life would seriously be totally different without the Young Write’s Initiative and Angel (i.e. I would still be sitting on my couch eating potato chips and wondering about my place in the universe). 

If I’m not mistaken, I believe I found TYWI through an Instagram ad. As I went through their profile, I fell in love with their mission to bring accessible and affordable writing services to young writers around the world and immediately applied to work with them. As of right now, I work with them as an Advanced Editor. This basically means that I work with clients on more complex issues, like head-hopping, narrative flow, and character development.

What should a reader expect from “Reclamation Magazine?” What’s your position working for them?

Reclamation is a great platform for underrepresented writers to publish their work! There’s a wide variety of works on their website–anything from entertainment to empowerment to politics (and more) is welcomed. I’d highly recommend giving their website a browse. I guarantee you’ll find something that sparks your interest. 

I work with them as a Contributing Writer. My speciality is talking about mental health and life. I’ve written a piece about embracing loneliness through Animal Crossing and another about quarantine workaholism. I especially love working with Reclamation because they are super flexible and understanding in terms of deadlines. They don’t set a date for you to write by. You write and submit whenever you’re ready!

What is the “Kalopsia Literary Journal” and what do you do for them?

Kalopsia is a literary journal dedicated to empowering the voices of writers regardless of skill level. I work with Kalopsia as a Poetry and Prose Editor. I especially love my job because I think it’s wonderful that Kalopsia doesn’t just send out rejections/acceptances. For every submission (regardless of its status), two editors provide detailed feedback so that they can improve their piece and writing in general. I think Kalopsia is a great way not only to get your work out in the world, but also to learn and grow as a writer.

What’s a regular day look like for you?

I wake up relatively early in the morning. After eating a quick breakfast, I start every day off with answering emails, checking messages that may have come in from the various magazines that I work with, and writing out all the tasks I have to finish that day in my bullet journal. I admittedly spend way too much of my time on social media before really getting productive, but I swear it’s a work in progress. After all my browsing, I start off with an hour of math studying (since, believe it or not, I am taking AP Calculus BC next year). Once the hour of math is done for the day, I have a quick meeting with my case manager for my community wellness internship. After that, everything else I do is related to writing (talk about balance, haha). My schedule is really sporadic depending on what my editors send to me, but it can range from editing a piece or two to writing essay, submitting to publications, or even updating my blog or Instagram with new posts. 

Despite not wanting to work too long into the night, I find it hard to stop working even past 7-8pm. I swear I’m not a workaholic… Later at night, I wind down with a nice book (I recently finished reading The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller, and it’s absolutely stunning!). Then that signifies the end of my day!

How old were you when you realized you wanted to work within the field of writing? What made you realize that?

Hehe I have a whole essay on this very topic on Overachiever Magazine, but I’ll briefly run it down right here. 

I have always loved writing. When I was in elementary school, I tried to write a first grade reading textbook. In 10th grade, I was convinced (or coerced into believing, more like) that I wanted to be something more “esteemed,” like an aerospace engineer or a pediatric doctor. A year of AP Computer Science, Physics, advanced math, and a perpetually uncomfortable feeling in my gut every time I tried to do my homework later, I realized that perhaps STEM really wasn’t for me. I never felt that way with writing, even after taking AP Language and Composition. It wasn’t long until I fell back in love with writing, and I’ve been taking it seriously ever since! 

Can you share a short excerpt/quote from your work?

This is an excerpt from a longer piece I’m writing. 🙂 

I hide my smile behind my collar. I pull my hand out of my pocket to reach for him but the movement jostles my pocket and Regris’s cigarette box falls out. 

I yank my hand back. 

We stare at the box. 

Bellair is still stuck in the window, but he no longer looks like he wants to take my hand. “You smoke?” He asks. 

I see that his nose is wrinkled. Joji’s words echo through my mind. 

Bellair’s too pure for you. 

It’s your responsibility to look out for him. 

You can’t fall for a guy like that and expect him to love you back. 

I scoop the box back into my pocket and turn away without saying anything. She’s right. He deserves better. If this is the thing that’s going to get him to avoid me like the plague, then so be it. 

I hear him shuffle and thud back the way he came. 

Tears prick at my eyes but I quickly blink them away. 

You’ll never be good enough for him. 

Might as well end the disappointment here. 

I turn back to the city I’ve stolen from and think that it has stolen too much of me.

What gives you inspiration? Where do you take it from there?

My biggest inspiration is my mentor, Angel Martinez. Besides being an absolute writing beast herself, Angel taught me the principle that everything can be content if you can find a different angle to look at it. Finding inspiration is easier for me because of what she’s taught me, but it’s overwhelming sometimes to think of all the possibilities out there. Many of the stories and poems I write are something that resonate with me as a person–whether it be from a YouTuber I’ve taken a liking to or the trope of the assassin with a heart of gold–all of my stories are something that have impacted me or made me grin like silly in one way or another. TLDR; My stories are snippets of my life and sometimes they can be really dark. I can only hope that they’ll find light in someone else.

What do you love most about your career?

What I love about writing is that it’s both a selfish and selfless art. It’s selfish because it’s you using words as your way of understanding the world. At least for me, writing is my way of getting things off of my chest and giving physicality to the characters that live inside my head. I write these stories and people praise me for them, but they don’t know that I would keep writing even if I didn’t get praise. These words just claw their way out of me and I have no way to stop the urge. 

I say that writing is also selfless because there’s so much to be learned from it, and this community is so open to sharing ideas and tips and tricks. For example, if I hadn’t met my mentor Angel, I probably would have never gotten my work out into the world through freelancing. I would have never gained the courage to reach out and to send my work to all of these publications with the hope that they would accept my dark stories. But because of her, and the Young Writers Initiative, and all the people in the writing community who have a desire to help others, I am here. I think that’s what I love the most about my career: The fact that I know I’m not alone in my struggles and that there will always be people here who are willing to lend their shoulder on a difficult day. 

What is your biggest writing struggle?

Two words: Waiting and rejection. 

I didn’t realize this until I became a freelance writer myself, but being a writer is half about the writing and half about the waiting. When you submit your work to a publication, you don’t just get to brush off your hands and call it a day. There’s a ton of frantically refreshing your email to see if there’s a new message in your inbox and jumping every time your phone lights up (only to slouch in disappointment when it’s not the email you’ve been eagerly anticipating). As someone who is incredibly impatient, I find that this is one of the most difficult things in freelance writing. 
The other is obviously rejection. Rejection hurts! There’s no other way to put it, and freelance writers know all too well the feeling of being unwanted. My coping mechanism is to avoid rejection like a plague (read: deleting emails!), though it’s usually unavoidable and unfortunately inevitable at times. 🙁 I am so passionate about this notion of “rejecting rejection” that I even wrote an essay on Unpublished Magazine about it. If I didn’t say it enough, rejection seriously hurts!

What advice would you give somebody less experienced as you?

First, if you want to become a better writer, read! Read books, articles, magazines, the back of the shampoo bottle when you’re in the shower (note: the last one has not proven to be very effective, but it is a very therapeutic experience). Practicing your writing through routine is important, but consuming words helps immensely in developing your style, finding your voice, and in general improving your technique! 

Second, rejection is not the end of the world. When I got my first rejection, I literally cried for a couple of hours, only to feel immeasurably dumb when an acceptance dropped into my inbox the next day. Acceptance and rejection do not define your worth. Don’t let someone’s opinion dictate the choices you make for the rest of your career. Keep your chin up and move on, there’s something better for you on the horizon. 🙂 

Huge thank you to Cindy for her awesome interview! If you would like to be interviewed for my blog, send me a message on Instagram @elizarkent.