Keep writing

When The Vegetable (1923) failed terribly, F. Scott Fitzgerald declared to Maxwell Perkins, his editor at Charles Scribner’s Sons, “I doubt if, after all, I’ll ever write anything again worth putting in print.” 17 months after the play bombed, he published The Great Gatsby.

Long before Winston Churchill was the wartime prime minister, he was a war correspondent and author, publishing five books by the age of 26. When he lost his government position and his party lost the election, he kept writing. Writing gave him a direct distribution channel when he was cut off from the traditional government levers. As Ryan Holiday wrote:

When Winston Churchill was driven from power, he could have wallowed or retired. Instead, he became a one-man media company—publishing 11 books, 400 articles, and giving 350 speeches between 1931 and 1939. He became more famous in the U.S. than in Britain, delivering his message without intermediation. They tried to cancel him, but it didn’t work. That’s what I’ve built with The Daily Stoic. It’s not just an email list but also a YouTube Channel with 2M subscribers, an Instagram account with 3.4M followers, a Twitter account with 600K followers, a TikTok page with 800K followers, and a Facebook page with 1M followers. It’s Stoicism directly to the people.

Sometimes, it will feel like nobody understands you. You write and publish, but nobody reads or subscribes. But keep writing. In his letters to Miguel Serrano, Carl Jung wrote:

No matter how isolated you are and how lonely you feel, if you do your work truly and conscientiously, unknown friends will come and seek you.

Will we run out of things to write? Annie Dillard didn’t think so. In fact, she urged us to spend everything right away.

One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. The impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.

Keep writing.