What if you spent your life writing: let’s say short stories, essays, and novels. And what if you seldom published any shorter works and never published a book? What if the success you achieved was very small compared to the time and effort you put into your works? What if you never “made it”—even posthumously?
Such writers and artists are the people who are permanently lost to artistic history. We hear a lot about those who were almost lost, but whose books or paintings or whatever finally gained recognition late in the artists’ lives or after their deaths, and so we get the impression that quality is usually recognized eventually.
I doubt that very much.
There are those who would say, “write for the love of it.” And perhaps this is the best motive, and the most creative motive for writing. It may well be best to have no eye to publication while in the midst of the creative act. And it may well be best that those who love writing but are not very good at it should not concern themselves much with publication.
But if, once the work is done, the writer has no interest in its publication regardless of the work’s quality—no interest in the work’s going out into the world to be read and do what good it can–is there not a contempt shown here for writing, a base abnegation of the dignity of the creative act, a gesture not of the writer’s humility but of lack of confidence?
Nobody tells any sort of professional, other than writers or artists, not to care about success.
And yet (this is my main question) is there value in writing books that in fact are never published despite all attempts to make them so? Is there some way in which God knows these works and ensures that they somehow, at the last day even if never before it, like their authors arise from the dead? books which, in a way, were never alive to begin with except in the minds of the authors and maybe a few beta readers?
“By their fruits ye shall know them.” If a writer writes excellent works which are published but fall into immediate obscurity or which are never published at all despite the writer’s efforts, has he or she borne fruit or not? And if not, then is that writer’s career therefor a failure?
This is not a rhetorical question.