The Fringe Benefits of Apathy

How do you keep up the struggle after you realize that you don’t, technically, have to?

Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash

I love writing.

I love the characters that pop into my head, and the stories they bring with them. I love the act of digging deeper and deeper into their layers, finding out who they are, listening to them tell their stories. I love refining their stories more and more, having them correct me until my imperfect fingers somehow manage to do their stories as much justice as they possibly can.

I hate, however, looking back and realizing that I spent the better part of the last decade writing things that nobody’s ever going to read. That is, after all, the primary function of writing: we write to be read.

The story ceases to matter if I (and a few other mentors, editors, agents, and friends) am the only one to ever read the story; the only one to fall in love with it.

And sure, there’s an argument to be made that each book you write is a better book, and eventually, someday, maybe, if you keep writing, you’ll write a book that’s good enough to be published. But the opposite is just as true, too: you can spend your entire life writing books that you absolutely love, attaching yourself to characters that are physically and emotionally a part of you, only…