“In pursue of greatness, we find ourselves lost in the realm of vanity, amongst a sea of mediocrity.”
It’s hard to say if writing is a true art. No, that’s what I really meant, what I meant to ask, is that if art is truly a profitable art. Nowadays, we ask ourselves (those who write with their heart and soul, not those who write for fame, money, and glory) if we are curse to write and write until the ink we use turn into thick blood, constantly draining us and pulling us closer to our demise. We ask ourselves if it's all worth it, that, we write down our stories, poems, and histories in forgotten pieces of paper, only to be criticized and be left behind by the multitude amount of stories, poems, and essays that’s made by those that came before. And lastly, we ask ourselves if we could live with all of the sufferings and sacrifices we make, as writers who yearn for a future. Just a simple future. And as our audience increase we could see that world too, grows larger and larger, further slipping away from our grasps.
We all know that the world is constantly growing and changing and as human population increases, mediocrity too, increases. And alas, I find myself lost in this sea of mediocrity as I consider myself as one of them. Sadly enough, there is no avoiding this tide. Every writer will always find himself lost in one’s own works while trying to find reason in it all. The writer would have also questioned himself, that if one day, he is going to be found amongst the many works written down by those before him. He will find himself lost in his own mediocrity and realize that the only thing that keeps himself surviving is his own vanity, which is connected to his work and his ambitions, and yet the writer will keep on going until his final breath, in hopes to find little profit in a dying art. And just like any art (dying or flourishing) writing has its own form. But this form has changed throughout the years and sadly it has changed into something less of itself.
Now writing only aims to deliver emotions and story in a short amount of time with a given amount of words, as the audience only has a limited amount of attention span, before they lose their attention into something else in the background.No one could blame them, because today, we’re in a world filled by all kinds of entertainment that could satisfy many people’s needs, in a short period of time. With this, the art form of writing must change to cater with the demands of the readers. Shorter stories that invokes feelings; shorter stories with less characters and little depths, because content is not what truly matters, but rather, it’s the ending or the climax, that delivers to them the most. Give them a story about a girl dying of cancer and a her lover, and you will soon have a story that delivers all reader’s expectations, and there is nothing truly wrong with that because even the purest forms of art cannot be formed fully if it is not stained by the ideas of many, by the ideas of the mainstream.
So in this ever dying art, if one wants to succeed and become a profitable and “successful” writer, aim for the mainstream, aim for what the readers want and they yearn for, and that is: a short amount of high in limited amount of time with the illusion that it is them in the story. Soon enough, the writer will learn to aim for the reader’s vanity and the readers would soon believe that they are part of the writer's work, and that the writer fully intends to place them in his work. And if one follows all of these, people would then come flocking towards your work, only to find themselves lost in translation by what you are trying to fully convey with your given art form.
But if you truly want to write, if you truly want to deliver the art of writing in its blossoming features with its growth that will forever be timeless, you will have to write selfishly, you will have to write for yourself and no one else. It might never be the best of the best, true, but at least you will not sell yourself or your work for less than what they really cost. At least you will not succumb to that one single thing that all mortals fall for.