What is Set | Reflect?

Over the past few years, I've embarked on a literary journey to try and make myself a better writer. I had been building up a backlog of essays and short stories and had taken a dive into some more philosophical literature. In 2019, I decided to put all of these thoughts and stories onto a website. I found a website builder that was easy enough for my inexperienced mind to use, but even then I totally flubbed the website name. Because I had no money to spend to fix it, I ended up with writingofdhruv-com.webnode.com, an absolute monstrosity which was impossible to market.

But I didn't care. For the first time, I was publishing my poetry, my reviews, my essays, and my short stories for public viewing, and the response was immediate, if rather small. Obviously, this website was getting little to no external traffic, but through my personal social media accounts I was able to generate a few hits and received nothing but kindness from old friends and acquaintances reaching out through direct message or responding to my stories. This motivated me to continue, to try and improve my craft with every post. For some time, I fell into a rhythm of posting three times a week, and traffic continued to increase. It was not monetizable, it was hardly searchable, but it was mine, and it was turning into a beautiful library of my work over the years. As time passed, I was able to see how I had actually built upon my previous work to create multiple miniseries of poems and philosophy. I saw how my storytelling had evolved. I cringed a little at my earlier writing, but I took that as a marker that I had indeed grown into something better.

The first major change came in 2021, when I saved up some money to pay for the premium version of my website builder. Among other improvements, I was, at last, able to remove the hideous domain and replace it with something much cleaner: dhruvwriting.com, and I thought it was the best decision I had made in a long time. A fresh wave of motivation hit me; a new spark hit an old fire, and I began producing more and better writing than ever. Around this time, I began to think of the website as not only a repository for my literary journey, but also as a potential way to build a platform from which I could leverage an audience for novel representation. I had just begun to flourish as a novelist, though the publishing journey was proving harder than I could have imagined.

But there was a problem with this vision. This website and all of its "marketing" were tied directly to me. Not only did this present an issue because all of my social media accounts are private, but also… no one knows who I am. Self-named websites can work for celebrities because they have a persona into which an audience has already attached itself. For me, that persona stretched as far as a few dozen people. Minuscule in comparison to what it needed to be.

So that's where Set | Reflect comes into play. After months of deliberation and brainstorming, I've decided to alter the look and marketing of the website significantly. Not only will it have its own social media accounts, but posts will be far more consistent - a promise I've made in the past, but which I intend to keep with all my heart now. As of writing this post, there will be one poem, one short story, and one philosophical essay or review posted each week. I'll try to make the social media accounts, particularly Instagram and Tiktok (?) more prolific, with more variety in their content and hopefully more fun as well. The goal remains simple; it remains what it has always been, and from it I have drawn the tagline for Set | Reflect: Perfecting Craft and Creativity.

I'm choosing to keep the old material up, and in many ways the content will not change. I'm not creating Set | Reflect to manufacture a new personality for me, or venture into alternative viewpoints. Everything I write will be inspired by how I, Dhruv Srivastava, feel and what I read and consume.

If you've made it this far, then please feel free to follow me on Instagram and Facebook (@setreflect), and check back in soon for my first post: "King's Biggest Victory". This will be one hell of a journey, and I'm thankful for everyone who has supported me this far and who will continue to support me in the future.