Want Vs Need- An Interview with Brady Putzke

The multi-talented Brady Putzke talks writing and more with the irrepressible Vanya Bagaev

Yee, you should judge this book by its cover.

Happy New Month!

As promised we are launching the new Soaring Twenties Social Club Substack format with a bang. Today it is my great pleasure to bring you this in-depth interview with STSC mainstay Brady (

Think On These Things

) to celebrate the launch of his debut novel Dream House.

This is a great writer-on-writer chat as the interviewer Vanya (

Nova Nevedoma

) is an outstanding storywriter, essayist and translator in his own right. What you have here is two practioners, two capital W Writers talking about their craft, about life, about music, pulp, morality and everything in between.

This is exactly the kind of real talk, the kind of authentic, witty, playful but substantive kind of work that the STSC is dedicated to championing and sharing.

So enjoy and be sure to check out both Brady and Vanya’s work, and of course don’t forget to pick up a copy of Dream House!

And now on with the show…

~ TJB

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Dear wanderer,

Today, here, in my first guest post on the Soaring Twenties’ substack, and my first-ever publication as an interviewer, I would like to introduce to you my friend and fellow STSC member Brady Putzke, a novelist, who who has recently published his excellent debut book Dream House. Many of you might already know who Brady is and what to expect, but for those of you who don’t know, this discussion is a great chance to learn more about him and his work. Here’s his short bio:

Brady Putzke is a professional musician who has always had a deep love of the written word. Coupled with a passion for storytelling and an obsession with mastering the craft of fiction, he took to writing novels. Dream House is his debut. When he is not reading or writing for hours on end, you can usually find him listening to baroque music or some obscure death metal band. Brady lives in Arizona with his wife and daughter.

Please, enjoy the answers!

~

Vanya Bаgаev

---

Vanya: How and when did you decide to become a writer?

Brady: It’s been a sort of circuitous journey. I am a musician by trade and training and was not a big reader, and certainly not a writer, in my teens and early twenties. I got into reading a lot of philosophy in my twenties though, and some “literary” fiction, and found that I really loved the musicality in language. Rhythm and cadence, assonance and alliteration, etc. I saw a lecture probably 9 years ago by Ray Bradbury talking about writing fiction and I think that was the seed. It was appealing to me how he spoke about it but I still thought it was a lofty, near-impossible undertaking to write prolifically in the fiction idiom. There’s a myth to that end in the popular mind I think. So I bought that myth and procrastinated and sort of buried the desire. Fast forward to 2021, I joined the Soaring Twenties Social Club and got known fairly quickly for writing long, pontificating (in my now, I hope, wiser eyes) posts about metaphysics and such. Maybe that’s a little cringe but some people liked it and encouraged me to go long form on Substack. So I started writing essays. I think they are decent in retrospect and the interested reader can check them out, but I got bored relatively fast with non-fiction writing. I think there is a very human hunger for stories and narrative, and so I tried my hand at short fiction in early 2022. I think those stories are mostly junk at this point, but I caught the bug and spent the summer devouring books on fiction craft and reading tons of short stories and novels. I decided in about June to undertake writing a novel myself. And now of course it’s out and that’s very exciting. Pretty much all I do these days outside family and my day job is read and write fiction (and talk too much about the craft, I’m sure, to anyone who will listen). 

V: Has that hunger for stories also affected your reading list as well as writing preferences? Was there a single moment when you thought “YES THIS IS IT”?

B: Absolutely, yes, and a series of moments, respectively. It’s a funny thing because in music I outgrew my snobbishness pretty early on. I studied western art music, aka Classical music, and Jazz in school but I was also a big metalhead in college and liked a good smattering of Top 40 pop, so I couldn’t claim to live in the ivory tower that some people did. But with books I think I was lost in the image of what a Great BookTM and “serious” literature had to be. One of the early catalysts for the change in reading for me was a few of the STSC members recommending (harassing me, really) that I read Monster Hunter International by Larry Correia. I was skeptical but I try to check out things people like when I’m building new friendships. Take an interest in other people’s interests, you know? So I read the first two books in that series back to back and very much enjoyed them, but I still had them (wrongly and stupidly) slotted away as sort of “junk food” for the mind. Something like that. The big shift came when I read Dune in January of 2022. I can’t say the revelation I had was entirely pleasant. There’s a pain that comes with revising your worldview in a given domain essentially from the ground up. So, I read that book and thought, “Wow. This is my favourite novel ever. What now?” The “what now?” is a question that came from snobbery, in that I had to deal with the fact that this science fiction “genre” novel (spoken as a dirty word among the literati) was the best piece of fiction I’d ever read. That began a process of me really figuring out what it is that comprises a story and for what purpose people read them. Until then I had largely read non fiction books. Not the airport store/twitter variety self-help books but more “Western Canon” stuff. Which I still like, Aristotle is still awesome etc. But I could no longer hide behind anything pretentious. The nail in the coffin, so to speak, was when I read a little pamphlet writing guide by a popular fiction teacher that said something to the effect of “if you think writers like James Patterson and Clive Cussler are bad writers, you don’t understand why people read novels and you’re kind of an asshole”. That smacked me across the face. So I read both of them. And look, I won’t praise the prose of either for its aesthetic value. However, I’m a big believer in “looking past the words” now to the story that’s going on, because that is what people most love in a book and they will forgive mountains of technical errors or clumsiness if the “yarn” being spun is good. I can’t say either writer is my favourite but I really enjoyed their books. Fun, fast-paced, expertly plotted. They have weaknesses, but what book doesn’t? This is a long way of saying that I care most now about storytelling and what that means to me and readers of fiction. Now if you nail the storytelling and are a tremendous technician you can really amplify the effect. So they are not qualities divorced from each other. Frank Herbert is a case in point. Also people like Terry Pratchett or John D. MacDonald or Mickey Spillane. All excellent stylists as well as storytellers. I’ll leave this issue for now and let you pick up wherever you’d like to go next.

V: My thoughts on that are similar and a bit different at the same time. I think being open-minded and omnivorous in what you read or watch is important—it expands the ways you think and helps with bringing different ideas together, mixing them, subverting, etc. You can pretty much watch Tarkovsky and Marvel on the same day and genuinely enjoy both. You yourself, do you watch movies? Or enjoy any other media, e.g. graphic novels? Plays?

B: I do, but I’m not well versed in any of the others. As far as movies, I’ve not seen too many outside my childhood favorites and I don’t have the knowledge or vocabulary to speak about it technically. However, your comment about Marvel and Tarkovsky is spot on for me. I’ve not seen the latter filmmaker yet and I personally don’t like Marvel but the principle holds in terms of being “omnivorous” as you say. Among my favorite films would be Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes, Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, Lost in Translation, and 17 Again. Eclectic by any standard. With television my favorites would be The Sopranos, Frasier, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (inclusive of Angel), and The Mentalist. So same sort of deal there, tastes being broad and not too picky about whether the films or shows are “art”, if you take my meaning without rabbit trailing into discussion of the ontology of art. Plays I know little about, though I love Shakespeare, King Lear and MacBeth especially, and I like to see him performed when I can. Speaking of film, Ralph Fiennes did a modern setting version of Coriolanus that is stellar. I think it’s a shame most are put off of Shakespeare in school. He was the popular entertainment of the time and once you get a feel for the language, he’s endlessly enjoyable. So, I agree with your idea of taking in a broad range of stories and styles and media, and I do that. But still heavily weighted toward the written word for me. As somewhat of an afterthought, the only graphic novel I’ve read is Watchmen and I liked it quite a bit. Made me curious to look into more Moore (hah). I think I read some of Sin City and Miller’s Batman stuff too and maybe a few isolated comic books. That’d be the medium I know least about though.

V: How’s what you’re reading and what you’re writing interact with each other? Do you read things as an inspiration for your writing?

B: Well, as I touched on above, what I’m looking at mostly these days is what makes a really compelling story, the proverbial “page turner”. There are a few books I’ve read recently that have gripped me to the point where I read them in a sitting or at least in one day, late into the night. So as a writer essentially looking to break into the popular market, I want to know how they are doing that. So, I’ll pay attention to the rhythm of their prose, the pacing of the novel overall, what they put in scene or in sequel, how the dialogue is structured etc. So I do get fairly analytic in cases where I think there is something to be learned. But I am mostly just reading for pleasure and I think a lot of it happens by osmosis. I don’t consciously seek out things to get inspiration, I’m just picking up the next book that looks fun to read. But I do read almost exclusively on recommendation or in some cases sales records. I understand that popular does not automatically mean good, but I think it does mean there’s at least something you can learn from it. And further on the inspiration topic, I’ve got this nascent theory that it’s good to read in different genres than the one you are currently working in. I don’t know how legitimate this idea is, but my fear is of producing pastiche unintentionally. I also think there can be some helpful cross pollination go on. So if you’re writing sci-fi for instance, read fantasy or crime or adventure or quotidian literary something or other, so that you avoid tropes and also can bring some of what makes these other genres great to what you’re doing in another. I’m a big fan of genre bending and blending anyway. This is just a theory at this point, but I’ve found it fruitful personally.

V: Your Dream House definitely follows all that. How did you come up with the idea for the novel? I recall we were discussing multiple things you were writing at that time but your final choice was Dream House. What makes it special for you?

B: First off, thank you for reading my book and thank you to any of you reading this interview who decide to. It means a lot to me. I’ll try to unpack this as best I can without revealing too much about the book, but perhaps I’ll give an obligatory little “spoiler alert” here for anyone who’d like to read it without the following information.

Basically, I think all good works of fiction have a moral center to them. Now I don’t mean like what Joyce called “didactic art”. I’m not writing moral allegory or trying to teach you anything or get you to change your mind about anything. What I do mean is that I think it’s impossible to act without morality, in the sense that you’re trying to achieve some end by what you do. The idea in practical philosophy is to align that with what is Good or what corresponds most closely to reality, which is the same thing in many ways. So a good story shows people behaving as they would realistically behave based on how they see the world and the consequences of what they do are causal within a universe governed by Moral Law, as I believe it to be. Now this again doesn’t mean they need to be good people or that the content of the story must be nice and palatable to pious people. It’s not a secret that I’m an open Christian but you’ll find plenty of sex and violence and the like in this novel I’ve written. My only threshold is that these things should not be gratuitous, but rather for the development of the story and the characters in it. Something written purely to arouse, whether sexually or otherwise is what Joyce called “pornographic” art. I think this sort of thing is to be resolutely avoided. That doesn’t mean a piece can’t be risqué. People have sex, that part isn’t a spoiler. What matters in a story is how this affects their relationships and the story in general. The question is always what is the realistic consequence of the characters’ behavior, whether the setting is physically possible or not. This is what makes characters and a world feel “real” in the common sense. 

So with all that in mind, I’m fascinated by ideas around lust and anger and betrayal and really the whole host of sins people commit against themselves and others. And consequently what that does to human beings and also how they might be redeemed, both immediately and cosmically. I think the idea that evil is fundamental and that sad, dismal endings are the most “real” is not only wrong but is itself evil. And it’s a totally modern conceit based on a rejection of the tradition of storytelling. Again this doesn’t mean Hollywood happy endings. I’d say Dream House is a thoroughly dark book. 

Anyway, I used to deal with all this abstractly in the non fiction essay format,  but I think story and narrative are the superior medium for getting at these things. If you abstract them you get that old neckbeard saw about the “trolley problem”. Well, that sort of thing isn’t complicated. If you want the definitive answer for something like that, play the brilliant video game The Last of Us, which I think is one of the most moving and masterfully told stories in a good long while in any medium. The ending of that game is how any healthy soul would answer the trolly problem and it’s sublime.

Back to my book, what makes it special to me ultimately, like any book you would be interested in, is the people and how they respond to situation they are in. The situation itself is loosely about “what if you got what you think you wanted?” How the story progresses and how the people behave has to do with their own unique worldviews. And so the people are what make it interesting and truth be told, I miss the people I created now that it’s done. It’s a self contained story so there’s no call to revisit it in the future but I get now why writers do series characters. As to the specific people in Dream House, I think there are lots of narratival/technical reasons the main character had to be David, but the most important character in my opinion and the one I care about and miss the most is Cass. I won’t say more so that nothing is given away. 

The tl;dr of the above is that I think fiction is the superior path for telling the truth about life. That’s what I tried to do and what I will always try to do. The setting and stories are vehicles for doing that. 

Oh and the other projects are still very much on the table. For some reason I can’t fully explain, this story called to me to be the first novel I did.

V: This is a great answer, thank you. I wonder, what would have been your “dream” in the Dream House if you were one of the characters?

B: I don’t know if I should answer that! Haha. My humorous answer as a dad working full time as well as writing novels in the early morning is “some days off to just sit and read with a coffee or a good scotch”.

In my twenties (light spoilers ahead, sort of) it would have been something like David’s. We aren’t similar people beyond that but I’m sure there’s some smidge of overlap in that character. Not much anymore. I really do crave quiet these days.

(Actual spoilers here:) Ultimately I think the “dreams” reflect the characters’ level of spiritual development and so I’d like to say mine would be something very sort of holy and wise but the truth is I don’t know. I do not think that people are basically good. And even within my faith, after getting right with God, a good deal of corruption remains. Part of the horror element in the book is you don’t really know. Maybe you think you’re a good person and in reality you’re not.

V: So this is pretty much similar to Want vs Need conflict (sorry I love bringing it up), the characters get what they want but then realise it’s not what they need, which is how it often goes in life, it’s a bittersweet feeling, I’d say. Regarding your Dream House, how did you “cast” the characters with their desires? Was it character-driven or desire-driven? Their desires are surely important plot devices but did you have any sort of plan on what human conditions you want to show, an outline of sorts, or they all appeared organically during the process? There’s definitely chemistry between the characters, there must be some rigorous planning ha-ha. Take this as a compliment, please!

B: Well I think the reason that Want vs Need conflict plays such a big role in composing fiction is it is essentially the story of how everyone grows, “irl” as the kids say. So we like to read about it. 

V: Could you elaborate, please?

B: Of course I will elaborate. In my view, a comedy, in the old sense of a “positive” ending, the characters realize what they needed in time, and come to even want it in the happier cases. It can be made a bittersweet thing if that’s the emotional tone of what you want to tell. And then a tragedy is where they either never find out what they need, or learn it too late or reject it outright, and their lives are consumed by wants to the point of suffering and death of self and others. Steinbeck’s The Pearl is a heartwrenching example of this latter case. But it’s something like that. So I think in a compelling story that is always going on multiple levels and with multiple characters weaving in and out. And of course I think the way you sort of define an antagonist, whether a villain per se or not, is by making potentially both the wants and needs of your protagonist and their opposition a zero sum, mutually exclusive thing. And in some way we all play antagonist to each other even if we’re friends or lovers or spouses etc. People are constantly running up against desire-based conflicts. Honestly, I don’t know that I think it’s possible to separate a character from their desires. Or a real person. In terms of something being “character-driven” or “desire-driven”. There are many ways in which we are inseparable from our desires and we’d have to get off in the philosophical weeds about what desires are and where they function and are “located” in the human person. Perhaps another time! Anyway, that’s some story theory for your readers if they like, you probably know this haha.

In terms of the people in Dream House, I don’t plan too much or outline. There’s great debate in the writing world over the “right” way. I call bullshit. My favourite writers happen to not do much planning at all, some like Koontz have shifted to that over the years, and some have been zero planning from the beginning of their careers. Then again, there are meticulous outliners who also write great books. All that stuff is ultimately a means to an end of writing books. So I’m for whatever works for each writer. And I think people who love to write should try different ways.

I digressed there, no surprise, but that was to say that I only had vague ideas of the broader strokes of who these people were and they grew out of their interactions with each other. I had a notion of their backstories and things but I don’t write that up beforehand. I think even in real life we develop out of our social interactions and so my opinion is that one must let that develop organically in the writing. It’s thinking “what would this unique person do or say regarding or in relationship to this unique person?” Then, for lack of a better term, you sort of “watch” what they do on their own. It’s a strange concept perhaps and story theorists disagree over whether you should do this or make your characters' actions fit into a story in a more structured way. But I sort of just watched the people interact with each other and they kind of took on a life of their own. It’s odd to say and even odder to participate in. But as to the characters, I really grew to care about them a good deal. It’s been fascinating and motivating in terms of continuing to write novels. I hope the reader relates to and cares about the characters like I did in creating them. That would be the ultimate goal, and biggest compliment as well. For the reader to feel like they really “know” these people I made up haha.

V: I like this “unique person” approach, that makes your characters distinct and interesting. Did you use any character-building techniques, archetypes or not? 

B: Not particularly. I suppose they could fit into some “types”, if not archetypes, but I just watched what they did and then incorporated their behavior into their personalities as I went, if that makes sense. I don’t think much about theory when I write. Music is inevitably my analogy for everything. But I played jazz for many years. When you are improvising you just play with what you already know well, but you are not thinking about theory. I hate this term now but you’re in the “flow state”. Ideally there is no discursive thought going on. Near impossible to have none, but that’s ideal and I think also with writing. You learn theory when you are not in the creative act and then you apply almost unconsciously what you’ve learned to the next draft. That is my opinion.

V: Personally, I need to do a ton of thinking to at least clearly see the ending and the main plot canvas before starting, but you mentioned a lot in our private discussions that you on contrary often “write into the dark”. How much of the story did you actually have before you started writing the first chapter? Or let me put it as a prompt for writing advice, how much of a story does one actually need to start?

B: My opinion is next to nothing is needed to begin. My current work in progress is at about 35k words as of this discussion and I started with a title only. I created a character name and a setting and a problem she had next. Not a grand story problem, just an immediate conflict. It’s all grown from that with no prior planning. Vague notions of coming scenes and possible resolutions pop up inevitably, but I don’t know if I will use them until I get there. So to some people this is encouraging, to some it’s bunk and a sloppy amateurish process, to some it’s intimidating. All I can say is it works for me and for Dean Koontz and for Steven King and Ray Bradbury (the list goes on) and that’s good enough for me. But really I think you can compose a novel from only a word or a small phrase if you trust your ability to tell a story. 

V: Given you had minimal planning and it’s your first novel, was it difficult to write it? How would you describe the process? How much time did you actually spend on it from the blinking cursor to saying “Done”? Did you have those writer's blocks from horror stories for young writers?

B: The only difficulties are mental, which is to say in some ways not real. I used to romanticize the idea of the suffering artist laboring with great pain over every word, even until relatively recently (let’s say September 2022). But I’ve come now to viewing writing as a semi-mundane craft profession. Meaning that I think of it like a job, as I want it to fully be one day, and treat it accordingly. Our friend James had a tweet something to this effect. Like “imagine your sink breaks and the guy comes to fix it but looks at it and goes ‘you know, I just can’t today, I’ve got plumber’s block’”. Preposterous. You just show up for work, sit at the keyboard in this instance, and put in your hours. Something almost always comes to you if you have faith and you sit down to do it. 

So writer's block in my opinion is an ego driven myth. It’s to protect yourself from the possibility of failure. Which is real. But also not too harmful. You might write a shoddy book. Hell, I may have just done. That’s not for me to decide. I did my best work at my skill level at the time and it’s for the reader to judge. And what I want from the reader is to enjoy themselves. Now you’ll get criticism for that, like you’re peddling that dread bogeyman “escapism”. Well, excuse me, the world is often a very shitty place to live in and what is so bad about escaping it for a while? Now don’t get me wrong, I think the world is good and God made it that way and will redeem it fully at the end of history. But in the meantime it is filled with awful things and experiences. Stories take those and transmute them into something transcendent. Even “trashy” thrillers and such because even if everybody comes out with a lot of scars or even dead, the good guys win and that’s how I think reality works on a cosmic scale. Tolkien has a great longer discussion of “escapism” somewhere. But you want to whisk people away to another world for a while and ideally they return to this one better equipped to deal with it, having vicariously suffered the trials through the characters. I don’t say read novels for this purpose, you should not be looking for “lessons” you can bullet point. But the experience of a good story should have a redemptive function in your life and it’s not trivial. And it can be had in popular works that are not approved by the literati “elite”. Fuck those people. Read what you like.

I get heated on this subject nowadays haha. And I’m probably just shouting at my younger self. But to conclude this subject, GK Chesterton has a quote that I’ll paraphrase clumsily from memory. It’s like “fairytales don’t exist to show children that monsters exist. They already know that. They exist to show them that monsters can be defeated”. If we extrapolate I think this is the point of fiction and it is of utmost importance in human life. We all know that evil and monstrosity exist. Open your eyes. The world is a horror show. But within that we see that the human spirit can triumph over it, I think only with God’s help, of course. Or at least we can have a noble defeat, having done all we can do. That is what is best in stories, and stories that try to paint a different reality ring false in my opinion. This is the only case where I will call a story fundamentally bad. Which is no comment on technical prowess. There can be a beautifully written bad book. 

Oh. And Dream House took about 80 hours. Haha.

V: I liked your idea of improvisation in writing and its relation to jazz music. Do you see any other ways music and writing can be related? I remember when we were reading Gravity’s Rainbow in the club, you quite liked Pynchon’s prose for its “whirlwind musicality”—was what you said, as far as I remember. I wonder if you yourself being a professional musician affects your writing in any other unexpected ways... Do you see music in prose? Do you think a non-musician can see that as well?

B: That sounds like something I’d say about GR haha. But yes absolutely I think they are related domains and inform one another. As to Pynchon, I think that book is the most technically impressive thing I’ve ever read. He’s an unquestionable genius in his command of language and allusional density. However, I think in some ways that book fails as a novel because the plot is near impossible to follow and it doesn’t entertain per se, which I think is an important aspect of a novel. Some of his other work I’ve heard is less byzantine, so I won’t pass a judgement on his oeuvre. My inevitable music analogy is GR is like listening to the best guitar solo you’ve ever heard but it’s the entire hour-long album. 

As far as, let’s call it “music in prose”, I think it's a wonderful thing that most people can learn to feel and to execute and I do think if I have any natural talent, as opposed to skill acquisition (both are fine things but the latter is best), it’s from music. There is a certain rhythm to prose that you can exploit for emotional and aesthetic purposes. For lack of more precise terms, there are cadences and flows to constructing sentences and paragraphs that “feel” right to you. Like anyone can tap out a little drumbeat on their desk, and you build off of that by listening to and practicing more music. So in writing if you read all the time and get a “feel” for what you like, that creeps into what you do as well. It can be a conscious effort also. Even something like grammar I “play by ear”. I would be hard pressed to formally diagram a sentence but I know what proper English sounds like, or at least English that I like. I also know how to manipulate things like SOV order in a poetic sense or to introduce an intentional archaism or something like that. You just end up getting an “ear” for the language the more you do it. I really think music and writing are closely related domains of expression. 

V: I would argue about how entertaining Gravity’s Rainbow is, but maybe that’s for another time. Regardless, would you like to play a solo like that yourself one day?

B: I can’t say. Perhaps. I sort of write whatever calls to me at the time, although if I start a piece I finish it before I go on to the next thing. I did a very short story that was a bit of a Pynchon pastiche. Playing with sounds and rhythm, and the web of allusions in it is extremely dense. It actually has narrative coherence, but you’d have to know everything I’m thinking of to make complete sense of it. And I’m at point where I don’t think you should need footnotes as a reader to grok a short story. 

V: What’s your favourite musical instrument? Not necessarily the one you play yourself.

B: Piano. I am a bassist by education, orchestral and jazz double bass. And my passion project has always been death metal guitar. I’m objectively quite good at those two instruments. Piano I’m a near beginner but it’s my favorite. One day when I’ve more time I’ll work on it more dedicatedly. Right now I can only play some basic Bach and some Celementi Sonatinas. I’d love to have the skill for the tougher Scarlatti and Mozart Sonatas one day.

V. What’s your favourite scale?

B: Fahrenheit. 

V: I prefer Celsius.

B: Oh, really? I find Fahrenheit easier to follow as an American.

V: Of course you do.

B: I do, yes. My serious answer, though, is Lydian Dominant for jazz and Phrygian Dominant for metal, if used properly.

V: To wrap up, whose opinion on your work do you value the most?

B: That would be “the reader”. Perhaps a simultaneously nebulous and cliched answer, but I’ve found it very fulfilling to have someone love a book I wrote. So if it gives them an afternoon or weeked of enjoyment or brings them some sort of enrichment, I am happy. I don’t especially care about scale, except that I want to make a living at this. But it is very nice to hear that someone enjoyed something so much that I created.

This is even to the point that if I think I wrote a garbage novel but it means a lot to a reader, I would never express my own opinion on the book in case I would insult them. I want to write books that people love, and lots of them for lots of people. It doesn’t really matter what I think of them or any critic. In the end, I think the novel should be for the reader, and all else be damned. 

V: I agree, and I think it’s even more for the reader than for the writer. Some authors never publish their work (some even hate it I believe or just feel like impostors) and then their family or friends publish it postmortem and the author becomes famous. A similar thing can happen even within the author’s lifetime—I know a couple of examples. Some people write things not even considering them as books for someone to read, but if their work gets into readers’ hands—they love it. So, it’s always the reader who decides if something is worth their time.

B: Absolutely. Could not agree more. This is part also of getting into a mindset of serving others. Yes, we want to be paid for our work, but we are providing something to the reader that they exchange their hard earned money for. It’s not about proclaiming our “grand artistic vision”. This is also part of viewing it from the craftsman/artisanal mentality. Yes, you want to do your best and provide something unique and valuable, but at the end of the day it isn’t about you. This goes as far as formal accolades for me now as well. Like if I win some award, who cares? Or make a bestseller list. I should clarify that I would graciously accept such a thing and probably put it on promotional material, I wouldn’t snub the organizations that dole those things out. I’m not being iconoclastic and it would be a great honor if that ever happens. I only mean that the utility of such things is to reach more readers and entice them to pick up a book you wrote. Nothing more. That would be great, but it’s silly to write for praise, save for that from the individual reader, and even that only being a reflection of serving well in your professional role.