I strive to write as if I’m on death row, with the execution in two hours, and my sentence decrees that all work must be burnt on my end.
There seems to be no other way to be in the age of social media, where we’re promised eternal recognition if we brand ourselves, package ourselves, and market ourselves. But that promise is false.
You can be marketable and timely, with no audience. You can have content and insight, and people scroll past you. You can even be living on the pulse of the zeitgeist and be forgotten when the beat disappears into the next.
Those dead writers knew something we don’t want to accept because it’s our greatest fear, that to write is a gamble that no one will give a shit, but you will continue to live.
