The Greatest Writers Know How to Die

In 1949, celebrated, Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper columnist Walter Wellesley "Red" Smith described writing in what would become one of the most oft-repeated quotes on the craft.

"You simply sit down at the typewriter, open your veins, and bleed…"

He wasn't wrong. There has to be a soul in everything you write for it to bear any meaning or any chance of success. Look at any writer who has ever made any mark for themselves. There's a piece of them, shreds of them, hanging off of every word that they write.

Bloody though the art of writing may be, it's arguable that bleeding isn't enough. The machine demands more.

Audiences grow hungry and industries grow stagnant. More and more, readers want to be consumed by what they're reading. Escapism isn't enough. Transformative qualities must exit from the moment of creation, from the second a sentence is breathed off the tip of the writer's tongue.

The best writing doesn't bleed anymore. It dies.

It offers itself up on an altar to be consumed, whole, and breathing. It opens the door to another world and in that birth, it welcomes a death.

The writers of these new stories die a vicious death with the words they write, succumbing to the machine or wiping themselves out in the process. Do you want to achieve greatness? Do you want your words to resonate through the ages? Then, learn how to die with the best of them.

The greatest writers know how to die.

"It can't be possible," you say. "I read a book last week and the writer isn't dead. They're very much alive and I've only just seen them on Twitter." The death writer's face isn't always a literal one. To make their work live, many authors and creators kill themselves on the inside, and the altar of other people's desires and ambitions.

The greatest writers know how to die. Literally. Figuratively. On the page and off it, in a burst of stars that captivate even the coldest and most skeptical of hearts.

Straight up, drop dead

The most obvious translation of this principle is the most obvious translation of this principle. There are some writers who literally drop dead, and it's that *literal* death that catapults them to greatness.

Consider Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, Edgar Allan Poe, John Keats, and Kate Chopin. Today, we consider these writers to be the creators of some of the greatest pieces of poetry, fiction, and prose that exist in the modern world. All of them were doggedly dedicated to their craft and all of them faced relative obscurity until *after* their deaths.

That's what it takes for some writers to break through the ceiling. They chip away at their vision, they "open their veins" and bleed in isolated silence, in worlds millions of miles away. They bleed until there is nothing left to give and leave their blood drying on the page.

Dry it does until they die and create a legend that lends itself to the great meaning of that vision they kept writing toward. They keep going, stubborn to the end, in dedication to that vision and it creates a slow-moving magic that (eventually) moves the world.

Maybe this is the death that will one day lend itself to your greatness. There's poetry in that too, knowing that your creativity will only be appreciated after you've sacrificed yourself to the gods of your craft.

Let them be fed

In long-gone days, becoming a "celebrity writer" was a matter of chipping away at the right trees. You would write, write, and re-write. You'd submit your short stories and excerpts to the right magazines, journals, and newspapers. From there it was a matter of building, year after year, end over end.

Those days are (mostly) gone.

The magazines and journals that once hosted the early stories of giants like Stephen King (by and large) don't exist anymore. The idea of building a career based on your writing alone is a pipe dream in some corners of the publishing and creative industries.

No. Now the primary means of becoming a "celebrity writer" is by becoming a celebrity in your own right. Specifically, by building large social followings of eager fans who come primed and ready to buy, buy, buy anything and everything that you write.

If you don't think this platform building is a death - think again.

To become popular on social media is to become consumed by it, to some extent. It's an unavoidable side effect of uploading your vision in the ether for large-scale consumption. Writers who are socially popular are writers who are shaped by their audiences. Never bite the hand that feeds, after all.

When a writer feeds themselves to the masses and lets their audience shape them into celebrity writer, they are changed. The writer who existed before must be killed, erased, and broken down so that something more widely consumable can take shape.

It's a kind of blood magic in a way. Kill the old writer to gain fans who hang off every word. Words that become less and less authentic to the person who was killed to be there. Writers with huge social followings become a reflection of their platforms and their writing is the same.

A bid for death

For the lucky few writers, they don't have to wait for a big social following or a death of any kind. They do the work, walk the path, and everything works out…for a while. The agent comes easily and so does a polished manuscript. Before this lucky writer knows it, there's a bidding war. A Big Five publisher wants their story.

This is where their death begins…

This story, this piece of their soul that they have carried into the world like a precious ember, is snuffed out. Picked and pulled apart, it is changed. Carefully crafted worlds, symbolic characters, and huge important pieces of plot vanish with a quick pass over a keyboard. When the writer gets their final proof, they hardly recognize themselves in the words.

This is a death of sorts, and it's one that many great writers have had to make.

At some point, you may have to allow your message, your "soul story" to be purchased and re-written until it is no longer the story you imagined (but it is commercially consumable). Does this advance your goal in the long run? Does it help you reach more readers? Help more people who need to see writers like you rise to the top.

Sometimes a bid for greatness, as a writer, is a bid for the death of what we envisioned creatively.

Offer to the gods

For many writers, the sacrifice they make is not so much themselves. The sacrifice is the lives around them. That's the reality of "writing what you know". The people you are closest to, your enemies and lovers, become threads in the tapestry of your story. Good and bad, your main characters reflect pieces of your life and the people who have been a part of it.

The best writers out there expose the shadows in their lives through the faces of characters who cloak the most fearsome elements of human personality. Alchemists to the end, learn to transmute the pain in their lives and turn it into positive momentum and meaning.

The best writers offer up the most important truths in their lives to the gods of creativity.

Books and screenplays become the stage on which these writers work out the complicated dynamics and inner workings of their pain, their sorrow, their love, and their joy. Make no mistake, it's a death.

Nothing can ever be the same once the curtain has been raised on reality. People walk away and the plates that form the foundation of the writer's life are forever shifted.

Grinding the wheel

Not all writers meet their greatness on the back of a best-selling novel or a revelatory memoir. For an even smaller, select few, the path to greatness is a digital one, paved by freelance journalism, content creation, digital writing, business, tech, and academic writing, ghostwriting, and television and film writing.

There is no one-size-fits-all way to be a great writer, but all forms demand that death, that self-sacrifice.

Those who wander down the digital trail must also accept a certain death to create their vision. These writers allow themselves to be ground beneath the wheel of their vision. They show up every day, meeting the crushing demands and battling their inner demons.

On the outside it can look empowering, even glamorous. Death resides on the inside for the writer who makes it here.

Nights. Weekends. Holidays. Birthdays. School trips. Funerals. Every day, in some way, becomes a blur of work. The demands are excessive. The machine demands constant tribute from the writer, who must keep feeding it to remain seen, to remain relevant, to remain earning a living wage.

The grinding of the wheel becomes a dance on a knife's edge. Should the writer drop, even for one second, they risk losing it all. So their inner peace dies and so does their vision of a more romantic life. Systems take the place of genuine inspiration, and dogged determination becomes the core and the key to success.

How to die (through your writing).

Ready to break through that glass ceiling? Ready to elevate your writing by getting that pesky writer out of the way? It's easy to die for your writing, all you have to do is hunt down your soul and nail it onto the page. Then climb up on the altar of your convictions and embrace the ego death of exposing your truth to the world.

It's as easy as 1…2…3….

1. Have a sense of conviction: Be passionate about your writing. Tell stories that matter, not because they will "change the world" but because they will help you and the reader understand themselves better.
2. Be aligned in the vision: Every great writer had a clear vision of what they were writing (and why). That vision was so tangible that they could taste it, feel it, smell it. You should be so aligned with your vision of the story you're writing.
3. Embrace a thousand ego deaths: You cannot hide behind the shield of your ego and hope to achieve greatness. Your ego makes you scared, too scared to do the work of lying beneath the wheels of your craft.

Where does your passion lie? What stokes the feeling of conviction in you? There's no dying for your craft without first raising your banner and carrying it into the battle. Every writer must have a deeper message in them to create stories that resonate. Figure out your sense of conviction and the momentum moves you forward.

Beyond that, there must be an alignment of vision. Writers can, and have, killed themselves on altars of the wrong ambition before. They, writing the stories of others, writing the wrong messages, burn out before they ever find themselves in the worlds they're creating.

Die on the altar of what matters to you and align yourself fully with that vision of who you want to be as a writer of meaning and effectiveness.

To die the death of a great writer, truly, one must die a thousand ego deaths.

Stop hiding behind the shield of your fears, shielding your light beneath a bush of imposter syndrome and self-defeat. To put yourself in a class with the greats you have to stop being afraid of the words that leap from the tip of your pen. Follow them and let the message speak itself into existence.

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The idea of dying for your writing is really a figurative one. When we write, we don't literally spill our life's blood on the page, but in many ways we do. To write is to expose yourself. It's to leap into the arms of faith - both for yourself and for the world at large. You are trusting them with what is most meaningful inside of you as a writer, and trusting that they will harbor it with love.

Whether that happens now, in ten years, or twenty years' time, that's not what matters. What matters is telling the stories that let people know they're not alone, that allow people to reconnect with what is most human and special inside of them.

Want to make great art? Words that change the world? Open up your heart and let the most human elements of your vulnerabilities out to breathe.

© E.B. Johnson 2024