Ocean Vuong’s Writing Routine

"Those ideas have to be developed through time, and the best way is to just live your life but tend to the work mentally."

When Ocean Vuong was starting out as a poet, he adopted a strict daily writing regimen that had him waking up at 5am and writing for hours. “I thought, like anything else in life, practice makes perfect,” he explained in an interview. As he progressed as a writer, the Vietnamese-American poet began to understand that slowing down the process could elevate the impact of his words.

Instead of writing every day, which he felt cheapened the language, Vuong would spend months, or sometimes years letting his poems brew in his mind before ever putting pen to paper.

“By slowing down the process, I was able to narrow the mind and filter the poem with more precision, and so had better command of the poem’s voice and rhythm,” he told Connotation Press. “With a slower process, there’s more at stake, and I like the intensity that can bring to the composition.”

Born in Hồ Chí Minh City, Vietnam, Vuong and his family fled the country when he was just two years old. They arrived in a refugee camp in the…