Sophie’s Starting a Blog?? On Storytelling, Human Thoughts, and Finding the Way Back Home

To tell you the truth, starting a blog scares me.

There are a lot of reasons for that. The first reason is familiar to me, because it’s the same thing that scared me when I started writing my first novel. These days, everyone and their dog has a blog or Substack or some other online platform, just like everyone and their dog is working on a novel. Some of those blogs and novels are well-written, original, and offer something valuable to the world—but with so many people publishing their writing, some of it is bound to be mediocre. Maybe even a lot of it.

So it feels pretentious to start a blog. By publishing my thoughts, I’m saying that I think those thoughts are worth reading. In the marketplace of ideas, which is more saturated now than at any other time in history, I’m putting my two cents on the shelf. Listen to my ideas! They’re just as valuable as the rest! 

A blog is also personal. I have almost always published my writing under the umbrella of a publication (such as the essays I published during my time as a senior writer at the excellent journal VoegelinView). Even when I published more introspective pieces as a writer for my college blog, I was still writing on behalf of an organization. In both cases, I liked putting a little distance between myself and my work. It felt somehow less vulnerable, less exposed, than it does to publish on my own website under nobody’s name but my own.

I have a few other reasons for fear. My dark past as an SEO ghostwriter haunts me, and I still get war flashbacks when I hear the words “blog post.” I don’t like the idea of fighting for first-page Google results, I don’t post consistently on social media, and almost nothing I have to say fits neatly into the short-form format of X posts and Instagram reels.

Given all that, why start a blog?

Here’s the first answer: I love stories. I love writing stories, and I love writing about stories, and I love writing about writing stories. I have loved stories since I was a child growing up in the Pacific Northwest and devouring Christopher Paolini’s Inheritance Cycle and Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. When I was six years old and people asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, first I told them I wanted to be a ballerina, then I told them a nurse, and finally I told them an author. Eventually I stopped giving that answer, even though it never stopped being true, because of the self-doubt that crept in as I got older. You can’t make money writing, people told me. Lots of people think they’re writers, but they’re deluding themselves. Don’t waste your time. Do something easier with your life.

All of this advice was well-intentioned. Much of it was probably even true. But at the risk of sounding melodramatic, I literally can’t follow it. I can’t not write. I don’t know how.

But in 2026, that might not be such a bad thing. We live in an age of SEO optimization and AI-generated content. Lots of articles are published for the sole purpose of driving as much traffic as possible, whether or not those articles contribute anything of value to the world. What’s worse, many of those articles aren’t even written by humans. Much of the internet is just robots talking to each other. And in that landscape, I think human thoughts are especially valuable.

When I first started teaching writing and literature, I dreaded reading and grading student essays because they’re often boring, clunky, and badly written. (Deepest apologies to any of my students who might be reading this—of course I don’t mean your essays.) But as time went on and the use of LLM chatbots exploded, my perspective on those essays began to change. I became far less critical of bad writing. At least a real person sat at their desk, I thought, and struggled to churn out this mediocre thesis and muddled argument. At least this is the product of genuine thought and suffering. At least a human wrote this.

I don’t mean to claim that I am a good or bad writer—you can judge that much for yourself. What I am is a human who thinks hard about the world, tries hard to see things clearly, and works hard to write about it in a way that is orderly and sometimes, I hope, even beautiful. If this blog does nothing except encourage more humans to think and write and share their own thoughts, then my time and effort will have been well-spent. 

So what is this blog about? Storytelling, mostly. In this space, you’ll find reviews and analysis of books, movies, shows, and everything in between. You’ll also find my humble thoughts about the craft of writing fiction, gathered from my personal experience as I write and read and learn from my mistakes. And every now and then, you’ll find my musings on life from my little corner of the world.

I recently listened to an interview with Maryanne Wolf, a professor at UCLA and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain and Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World. In that interview, Wolf explained how we form a circuit in our brains when we learn to read, a circuit that grows stronger the more we read. As we read, we are building a network of worlds and thoughts while comparing new ideas to everything we have read and experienced before. In other words, thoughtful reading is the bedrock of your ability to recognize the truth when you see it.

Stories are experience. Stories give us an idea of what real virtue might look like, and on the other hand, real evil too. Stories build our empathy and teach us how to see people with differences from us as fellow humans, and not as enemies. I venture to suggest that here in 2026, society sorely needs all of these things.

Wolf says that if you don’t exercise your reading muscle, the circuit that formed when you first learned to read begins to weaken. You lose your way. But Wolf also says that even in a world of screens, you can still reconnect with the written word and strengthen that circuit. You can return to the skill you once had, but have since forgotten. You can always find your way home again.

So why start a blog? I think that’s the real reason why: I want to create a space where we can celebrate and think deeply about stories. Through humble conversations about storytelling in all its forms, I hope that together we can find our way back home.