sharing and caring

postcard 4: on writing online for over a decade, sharing pieces of myself, and what it has taught me

“But how could you live and have no story to tell?”

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prelude

“May you be for ever blessed for that moment of bliss and happiness which you gave to another lonely and grateful heart. Isn't such a moment sufficient for the whole of one's life?”
—White Nights, Fyodor Dostoyvesky

Last week, I took a break from my newsletter because I found out that someone had been copying basically every single thing I was putting out on the internet. This is nothing new for me (truly nothing new, because it has been happening for a decade), but it does throw me into a loop every time, so I wanted to take a bit of a breather and stay offline for a week. But it has prompted me to reflect on what it means to make and share content online, so humor me for a bit while I share.

I have been writing for as long as I can remember. My parents have around three big file folders of little stories I would write when I was between the ages of four to eight (below is one I wrote in 2005, on the eve of my fifth birthday). As a child, I was constantly parachuted around from country to country, school to school, so reading and writing were the constants I could fall back on. Writing became an outlet of sorts soon enough, and I soon progressed from writing one-page Aesop’s fable ripoffs to short stories that always included a pre-teen girl shouting, “moving again?!” (This is a running joke in my family now).

When I was twelve, I found various online writing platforms. I had been itching to share my writing, to find a community of people who also adored reading and writing as much as I did because nobody at my school seemed to enjoy it. Many of these platforms were mostly fanfiction based, but I finally found one that encouraged writers to post original fiction: Wattpad.

You may laugh, because who doesn’t know Wattpad at this point? And who knows it, dare I say…in a positive manner? But to pre-teen me, this site felt like finding an oasis in the middle of a desert. All of these stories were written by mostly teenagers, from the fun and clichéd bad boy good girl trope romances to some truly beautiful and amazing writing that rivaled published ones. I nervously copied and pasted the first chapter from my book (a truly horrendously written book in hindsight), and posted.

The reads came in slowly, but they eventually did. I dedicated a good portion of my high school life to writing on this platform. People seemed to be actually interested in what I was writing and a lot of readers followed me from book to book (which, if you’re an author, you’ll know is the biggest blessing and feeling in the world). I went from being excited about a thousand reads to being excited about a million reads, and made so many friends, some of whom I still keep in contact with to this day.

I think I began to write a lot of myself into these characters as time passed and I grew up. I wanted these characters to represent me in some way. Not wholly because that would be more of a memoir and all the more terrifying, but I wanted to feel tethered to them, to have threads of their identities connecting to mine. While I don’t write on there anymore, I have overcome my hating-every-single-thing-I-wrote phase and can now look back on things I wrote when I was 14-18 with a lot of fondness and affection. One book still stands out to me and changed my life in a way.

I wrote this one book and published chapters of it between the summer of 2016 and 2017. I was sixteen to seventeen years old. And in very typical sixteen year old girl fashion, the book was deeply angsty, sappy, and oddly filled with a lot of biology metaphors (I was taking AP Bio at that time). It wasn’t my best writing and it also wasn’t my worst, but even years later, it is still the book I hold closest to my heart. The reasons for this are twofold: the main character was heavily based off myself at that time, and the comments that I got on that story changed my life.

In hindsight, I don’t think the trajectory of the book was anything special or groundbreaking. It was, in essence, a romance, but I was so adamant not to call it that. I felt like it would be trivializing the main character and what she meant to me by saying she “just fell in love”. I never expected it to take off because I thought the main character was pretty unlikeable and wasn’t a typical romance book heroine, especially in teen fiction. But I lucked out with so many readers who not only loved my main character, but were so vocal about it in the comments section. Here are some comments I saved.

I think this is the moment that prompted me to think of writing as not just a hobby, but something I could actually pursue in the future as a profession. It floored sixteen-year-old me how people were saying things I wrote actually affected them, much like how I felt about some books I read. Good books are always such a joy and privilege to read, but great books are life-changing. I had this urge to be that kind of author, to try and better my writing skills as much as possible so I could communicate with people in the same way my favorite authors communicate with me.

While writing has taken a backseat for the time being because of work and studying, it is always on my mind. I still write in forms other than fiction. I write book reviews and this newsletter. I still find sharing my writing and thoughts incredibly intimidating because not everyone is going to have the same thoughts and opinions as I do. But it’s always the best sort of feeling when I find like-minded people who I wouldn’t have been able to meet and talk to otherwise.

And sure, I have dealt with my fair share of incidents. I’ve been plagiarized countless times—sometimes subtly, sometimes blatantly so. I was once doxxed when I was fifteen because I ended a book in a way this one reader hated. Most recently, this one girl copied me on virtually every single social media platform (including Substack), which was extremely creepy and bizarre and made me want to delete myself from the internet.

But I always find myself returning to the same conclusion: that I don’t think I’ll ever stop writing, reading, and sharing my thoughts (whether that be in a newsletter, an Instagram post, or hopefully later, a published book). And the benefits always outweigh the costs.

interlude i: what i read this week

I read Conversations on Love for my book club with Emma. This book was so beautiful and I truly don’t see anyone disliking it. I also reread White Nights by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, which is my favorite Dostoyevsky book out of everything he’s written. Ironically set at night, this is Dostoyevsky at his most hopeful, idealistic, romantic, and starry. a story of a man who spends his life in solitude yet dreams in technicolor.

Here are ten articles I read this week:

1. The Music of Other Tongues: On Translating Rhyme and Rhythm in Poetry

2. How Universal Are Our Emotions?

3. Consider the Vulture

4. An Icelandic Town Goes All Out to Save Baby Puffins

5. Does Anyone Feel Like an Actual Adult?

6. What Love Addiction Feels Like

7. The Trash Heap Has Spoken

8. Crying While Reading Through the Centuries

9. In Dark Times, I Sought Out the Turmoil of Caravaggio

10. Inventing the Perfect College Applicant

interlude ii: what i watched this week

Jaunary blues hit hard in the last two weeks, so I’ve been rewatching a lot of romantic comedy movies. I rewatched Just Like Heaven (it’s technically not even a rewatch because I watched this when I was eight and remembered almost nothing) and truly believe that we need a Mark Ruffalo romcom renaissance. Which then prompted me to rewatch Begin Again—a gem of a movie. And then, I rewatched The Prince and Me, which is definitely what started me on my love for corny Hallmark-esque prince-falling-in-love books and movies in the first place. And I love Julia Stiles, so it has always been, in a way, a perfect movie.

I have also been slowly rewatching Yellowjackets because I still have yet to watch the second season, and I basically forgot everything that happened in the first season. It is still so good the second time around, and hopefully the second season does not disappoint!

I also watched this video on dodo birds, this video on Boilly’s ‘A Girl at a Window’, this video on Christopher Nolan, and this video on the use of color theory in La La Land.

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postlude

Violin Before an Open Window by Juan Gris

things i love: byredo casablanca lily, white chocolate raspberry cookies, quiet movies, dior caro bag, lady grey tea, long walks over quick runs