This blog is Looking For Alaska’d Out, I know, but its author, John Green, is brilliant in so many other different ways. Lately, I’ve been thinking about the importance of cohesion and unity and meaning in created works, and how a lot of my writing has been thoroughly insubstantial. I say this with an earnestness and a modesty that I hope will not be taken as me fishing for compliments.

The truth is that, when I began really thinking about being a writer, it was because of fiction. And now, after being a fellow for a Heights workshop two (three?) years ago, I have turned up with nothing to show for it. When people assume that my Biggest Life Dream is to be a designer, I politely correct them and say that what I really want to be is a novelist. I still want that, and I’m more than a little bit ashamed that I haven’t been doing anything about it.

I think I might have frozen up a little bit, and maybe I’d become a little paralyzed by the thought of potentially writing something awful or shallow or empty. And then, through the course of this stagnation, I’ve forgotten how to try.

The point of this entry is that, while randomly watching John Green’s latest update on the vlog channel he shares with his brother, Hank, this wonderful man gave me the jolt that I needed, I think. And with his parting words, the pressure has been lifted off of me, to come up with something beautiful or harrowing or life-changing, replacing it with the desire to create something true.

And then, I’m left beginning to think that, maybe, I’m ready to write stories again.

“There used to be a barn in this field, a barn where I first told a girl I loved her, and where I spent my first all-nighter studying world history by flashlight while drinking astonishingly bad wine. Emily Dickinson wrote that success is counted sweetest by those who ne’er succeed, and so, too, youth is counted sweetest by those who are no longer young.

Nostalgia is inevitably a yearning for a past that never existed, and when I’m writing, there are no bees to sting me out of my sentimentality.

For me, at least, fiction is the only way I can even begin to twist my lying memories into something true.” — John Green