Quote: Umberto Eco on Heroes

Man is the animal that tells stories about himself to himself. — Salman Rushdie, Lecture at the University of Iowa (March 2004) It’s been years since I sat in that lecture hall, but Rushdie’s description of humans as storytelling creatures still gets me with it’s perfect simplicity.

The antidote I’ve found for this is to write for only two people. First, write for yourself, both your present self whose thinking will be clarified by distilling an idea through writing and editing, and your future self who will be able to look back on these words and be reminded of the context in which they were written.

Write the thing you wanna write. You can be strategic and whatever, you can and maybe even should try to figure out what people want to read and what publishers are willing to buy, but at the end of the day, a whole lot of people in and around this industry know almost nothing for certain.