When blogging, I often find myself drafting main titles and subheadings, and perhaps even tacking on a subtitle once I’ve finished. Titles certainly have their merits: they help readers quickly grasp the content and structure of an article, and naturally, they are excellent for SEO.

This habit of strictly structuring everything before writing a single word was likely forced upon me during composition lessons in middle school. Accustomed to prompt-based essays, we unconsciously began by drafting a title, using it as an anchor to expand, diverge, and fill in the content, ensuring the piece never “went off-topic”. By secondary school, we were required to draft frameworks and outlines to ensure our formulaic essays always had something to say and wouldn’t run out of steam halfway through. People often describe this kind of exam-focused writing as “dancing in chains”. I once believed that the moment I left school, I would be able to “write whatever I thought”. As time passes, that sentiment seems increasingly laughable. Although the chains have long since vanished, the bird that was once in the cage has not found freedom; years of self-censorship have stiffened its wings, making taking flight again incredibly difficult.

The fundamental purpose of writing is to express the author’s inner world. Shen Congwen insisted on writing “the history of my heart and dreams” in his prose. It is precisely this carefree, unfettered expression that allows an author to achieve true internal freedom—like the poet Tao Yuanming finding solitude even whilst “building a hut within the realm of men”. This sort of writing, in its truest sense, is what I desire.

My previous method involved drafting a main title and then expanding on the content through various subheadings after the introduction. This created a problem: every time I drafted a new subheading, I would stop to think, agonizing over the wording, sometimes even racking my brains just to come up with a catchy header. When I finally wrote a paragraph, if I wasn’t satisfied, I would edit it, sometimes repeatedly. The joy of writing vanished without a trace during this process. Consequently, after half an hour, I would put down my pen only to find I had merely added a single paragraph.

“My hand writes my voice; my hand writes my heart.” This was my original intention when setting up this blog, and looking back, it aligns perfectly with what I am writing today. Over the past two years, moving towards the goal of having the blog actually “be read”, I made certain compromises. While these trade-offs certainly had their positive aspects, I have increasingly realised that even when writing technical articles, true writing is something that ultimately cannot be compromised. This blog has now been live for two years. The more I write, the more I learn. What seems like an ordinary daily life is, in fact, changing me bit by bit. Writing this article, I offer my heartfelt thanks to the person I was two years ago for starting this blog.

In the future, my lifestyle-orientated posts will likely have fewer and fewer subheadings, and outlines may become hard to find. Regardless, essentially, I intend to strip away all those elements that have become a cocoon of my own making. “Less formatting, more genuine writing”—to write the “history of my heart and dreams”.