I’ve been reading a lot of Annie Dillard’s writing lately, and I stumbled upon a collection of essays she wrote about the writing life. It’s really unlike anything about writing that I’ve ever read. Dillard’s argument, to put it plainly, is that nobody really gives a darn about what you write. And if they do, it’s certainly nowhere near what you, as the writer, care about the work.

That’s some pretty dark, awakening news for us romantic hopefuls that our work is going to really make a difference. But she’s right; people who sell shoes have a far more important role in the lives of people who need to get from point A to point B, especially if they are walking the route.

In one paragraph, Dillon writes:

Putting a book together is interesting and exhilarating. It is sufficiently difficult and complex that it engages all your intelligence. It is life at its most free. Your freedom as a writer is not freedom of expression in the sense of wild blurting; you may not let rip. It is life at its most free, if you are fortunate enough to be able to try it, because you select your materials, invent your task, and pace yourself.

I could not agree more with Dillon’s sentiment. In writing Fossil Five, I have experienced that exhilaration and freedom.

But! In the very next paragraph, Dillon takes a needle the size of the Seattle landmark and obliterates whatever air we had left in our little ego:

The obverse of this freedom, of course, is that your work is so meaningless, so fully for yourself alone, and so worthless to the world, that no one except you cares whether you do it well, or ever.

!

I’d like to think she is a little wrong here, but I don’t think she is. When Fossil Five releases, the people who have invested in the story will enjoy the swirl around it, and those close to them will like the peripheral swirl that touches them like the outer bands of a tired hurricane. If I am lucky, the story will resonate on some level, however briefly, and will bring some oxygen to the dying flame of old love. But I’m no fool. As much as I want the world to embrace this book and the message it sends, its blip on the radar will be brief, and I will already be immersed in that next exhilarating project in a world of freedom and wonderment.

Why? Because that is what I do. It’s really all I can do: share with the world a small snapshot of what I believe to be right, to be just, to be necessary in a world that is transforming to the antithetical, transverse image of everything I grew up to believe just a few decades ago.

And make no mistake: I know I am in the minority here, and I know some old fool was probably writing some mindless book back in the 80s, as desperately as I have written mine, to save the world from wild teens like myself.

What it really comes down to, in the end, is you. I write to feel attached to a world I am trying feverishly to hold on to and share with the younger generations. I cannot stop it. Even if, in the end, my handful of readers pat me on the back and buy me a beer, asking me about what’s next instead of what is, I know I did it because I had to.

So do you because you have to. Even if no one really notices, or cares, or celebrates. Do you. Because in the end, it really does…. come down to you.