Thou Art the King of Glory

“How do you define success in terms of writing? When you finish a writing assignment and call it good? When you are evaluated in a positive way by a reader? When you are published? When the writing goes smoothly, painlessly, even though no one else has ever read what you’ve written?”

To answer the question of success is to ask the question of purpose. Why do you do what you do with your words? Why do you write? It might seem obvious to observe such a correlation but I will ask it again lest we slip into the cynical suspicion that any meaning beyond the practical and immediate is merely existential, self-absorbed dramaticism.

Purpose goes beyond the productive. It begins under the skin and returns only when it has found a place to rest. It sees truly and brutally into the void and does not turn its gaze until it finds its name in the darkness. It is naturally and rightfully existential. Then again so are we. One cannot ignore the call to satisfy it and are tormented by its lack, even if unacknowledged. It is deeply right and true to own a purpose and to pursue it with one’s soul.

However, it is not always deeply practical. The practical is the necessary and is often more acknowledged than the vocational, though arguably less significant. It is necessary to pay the bills and make money to buy food and clothes and go to school and get a degree and flex the heart muscle to pump blood to the body. However, that is not WHY one breathes. The practical is only a means toward the purposeful and is secondary in its nature (now that was existential).

To focus back toward writing, one must first acknowledge that purpose is fundamental to the success, or excellence, of any writing. Purpose is the judge of any piece and the reason for the existence of the revelation or insight it bears. Only the individual knows how to respond to this sense and create something well. The value of exposure and publicity depends on the purpose; the reaction of the audience depends on the purpose. If one owes their writing to purpose rather than to the practical, it must then answer only to purpose and not the secondary components of the reasonably productive. If writing is aligned properly to its source, it will find rightful excellence, and find its rightful place among things.

An existential piece of advice.