Lines Leading Here

It has been about three months since I started this website and it took me about 10 minutes to question whether I had made a terrible decision. (I wrote about this experience of resistance already, but I have to tell you about it again, okay?)

Is this website pretty and am I proud of it? Yes. Did I work hard on it? Of course. Did I have many reasons for starting it? I did. (Read them here.) But that doesn’t stop me wondering about whether the work is worth it. It doesn’t keep me from worrying that I may not get any traffic, that no one wants to read this, or that it’s just one more distraction from what I actually want to do, which is… write.

Why is it so scary to type that word? Why is it so intimidating to take that dream seriously?

I cited so many reasons for starting this website in July. I had started writing just a little bit over on Substack and I had pushed my Bookstagram posting to overdrive. I was burnt out on one and feeling hopeless about the other, so I thought this would be the perfect solution to combine my efforts.

I am not so sure that has been the case. If the issues leading to burnout were comparison and self-doubt, how should I expect them to magically disappear by changing my outlet? News flash, if the root issues are deeper than the platform, the root issues will follow me wherever I post. What a novel idea!

I wonder if this is a distraction because the side of the website I’ve kept up with is the book reviews. I’ve been writing them for nearly 3 years, and while I sometimes get behind, they are not the thing I neglect. What I neglect is personal reflection, creative nonfiction, and thoughts about life and spirituality and grief. Starting a website has not pushed me to write as much as I had hoped.

At this point, my default impulse would be to call it quits, but I told myself this would be a one year experiment. I told myself I would pay for one year of Squarespace and then I would re-evaluate. So instead of burning it to the ground or falling into some kind of shame spiral wherein my inner monologue tells me “I’ll never get serious about writing. What an impossible dream!” I am going to keep going.

In the past few months I’ve read several fiction books featuring writers, writers who struggle with self-doubt and comparison like I do. (Did I just unintentionally call myself a writer in the last sentence? I think I just did. Cassie, do not delete that sentence.)

Last month I read the story of Leigh and Will, poetry MFA students who find themselves in the same program years after high school. (I gushed about You Between the Lines here). Leigh was one of the most relatable characters I’ve ever read. Her insecurities mirror so many of mine, and at one point she narrates,

“I studied creative writing in college because I liked making words breathe—and because I couldn’t imagine studying anything else. But then I pivoted my attention to copywriting instead of attempting the scarier kind of writing, the kind where you spit yourself out on a page and lay yourself bare for strangers to dissect.”

I, too, have avoided the scarier kind of writing.

I’ve lived so scared that I didn’t even allow myself to study writing in college. The safer route was being an English major who focused on literary analysis, just as the safer route right now is to write book reviews rather than write a book.

Earlier in August, I finally got to the highly-acclaimed Bookstagram darling, Divine Rivals by Rebecca Ross. There was a lot to love about it, but what hit me the hardest were the words sent between two writers about what the vocation of writing meant to them. The way Iris and Roman employed writing as a means to process grief, share hope, and connect deeply was an encouragement to my dreams. Roman’s character types on his enchanted typewriter, “Write the things you need to read. Write what you know to be true.”

What do I need to read? What do I know to be true? Can I be brave enough to write that?

And finally back in June when I started contemplating this (not actually very) wild idea of launching a website, I read Emily Henry’s latest novel, Great Big Beautiful Life. While not everything in that one landed for me, Hayden shares some solid advice with Alice about writing. Subconsciously I think I took it to heart as I made the decision to invest in my dream. Without knowing it, these words led me here:

“I’ve written stuff I’m really proud of that hardly anyone read. I’ve written stuff I’m proud of that no one liked. That doesn’t mean it didn’t deserve to be written.
. . . Just because something doesn’t make money or win awards doesn’t mean it doesn’t have value. Or doesn’t deserve to exist. The job is alchemy. You take a hunk of rock and try to turn it into gold, and the gold isn’t even the point.”

So for now, or at least for another nine months, I’ll give this thing a go, let some words exist outside the privacy of my journals and book reviews, and see if I can find some gold.