Writing to the Sequel

Must everything we create be a series, a collection, merely a part of a body of work?

Can nothing simply stand proudly on its own?

A single, epic, awesome work, with a beginning, a middle, and most importantly, an END?

I definitely understand the need that the starving artist/author has to develop an audience, a body of believers, thirsty for every word they produce, like pilgrims three days lost in the desert.

But must this awful perspective corrupt and infect everything we do?

Believe me, I too have been both a victim and a perpetrator of this mindset, as I was sold on this idea as a methodology of achieving "success" as a writer.

But at what price?

No longer can we as artists simply do art, we must now build a legacy, constructing a house of cards with every work, offering our readers that first taste, but at the price of infecting them with the virus of repeatability.

There is no "formula" for art.

No "prescription" for success as a writer.

If you have talent, desire, skill, and a grand idea, you still will most likely fail to develop a great audience, at least while you yet live. History is littered with the bones of those "failed" writers who achieved "success" only years or decades after their "physical" death.

But this is the peculiar "gift" of our brand of art. It lives on, purposefully so, ages after we ourselves are not even memories.

So, I urge each and every one of you, readers and writers alike, to help us break these rusty chains that bind us to the "next" work in a series, the one that may never even be.

To focus only on that single work which is at hand, to craft it, carve it, even to bludgeon it into perfect existence if we must.

But please, please do not tell me that your work is "Book One" or "Part One" or any other fragment of a greater work. Make it the solo masterpiece that it deserves to be, that you are capable of, in and of itself, nothing more.

I and your audience will love you for it.