How often do you think about death?
I think about it often. The end of things. The ephemerality of life. My own mortality.
That may sound dark. But facing that darkness, facing the fact that your life will inevitably come to an end one day, is one of the most important practices we can have. Especially as writers.
The Ancient Romans had a phrase for this: memento mori. Just two words, but they held a deeper power.
Memento mori means remember death. Remember you must die. It was whispered into the ears of great leaders as they rode in triumphal parades through Rome. At the apotheosis of their careers, these two words would serve as a reminder. This moment will pass. For all the glory you gain, you can never escape the grave. All must perish.
Awareness of our own mortality puts everything in perspective. It illuminates what matters, and what doesn’t.
At the end of our lives, it won’t be the awards and accolades that matter. It won’t be the reviews or rejections. It won’t be the number of books we sold, or the number of followers we gained. And yet those things can seem so important in the present. We obsess over them to the point of forgetting about what truly matters.
We’re writers. We’re here to tell stories that mean something. We’re here to create. To be artists, not machines.
Memento mori reminds us of the end to come. I’ve added my own twist on the phrase, two words as a reminder of how I intend to live before that end.
Memento mori, memento creare.
Remember you will die, remember to create.
The very fact that any one of us is here is nothing short of miraculous. Life is a creative act, a recursive cycle of birth and death and birth and death across eons. As writers, we pour that creative energy back into the world, inventing universes and imagining characters and sharing stories never heard before.
For many of us, it feels like a calling. A necessity. A survival mechanism. A way of life. A lens through which we can see and begin to understand the world.
We only have so long to tell stories. How long, we cannot know. If we forget the finitude of our lives, we can slip into a fantasy of invincibility. Put off our dreams indefinitely. Wait to start writing that book until tomorrow, which becomes next week, which becomes next month, which becomes next year, until there’s no more next.
Taking the future for granted is sometimes pragmatic. But it’s an illusion of a guarantee. Hope masquerading as truth.
The truth is that no one knows when their life will end. Try as we might, humans have never been very good at predicting the future. Tomorrow is never promised. As Marcus Aurelius wrote in Meditations, “You could leave life right now. Let that determine what you do and say and think.” Let that guide how you spend your time. Let that show you what to create.
There’s a good chance you won’t know when you’ve started to write your last story. It could be the one you’re writing now. Literary history is littered with unfinished manuscripts, cut short by the end of the writer’s time on earth. Read one, and you’ll be reminded that no writer, however great, can ever say all there is to say within a single lifetime.
But that’s not the point.
Because our lives are finite, the choice of what we create becomes infinitely more important. We can never encompass the entire human experience in our writing. We can never transpose every idea we have onto the page. We have a limited amount of time to write what matters most. Put those projects above all others.
I’ve been asked by many writers if they should write this plot or that genre. But there’s no story you should write. Remember you must die, and then ask yourself: what story matters most to me? What adventure would I regret not going on? What story would be the most fulfilling use of my limited time alive?
Then write it.
Some see creating art as leaving a legacy. Making a mark. Taking a shot at artistic immortality. That doesn’t interest me much. Because spending my time creating things will have been worth it even if nothing I make is remembered. Writing is a way of making sense of a strange world. Stories can make us more empathetic and understanding. Art is beautiful even if you’re the only one to witness it. In the act of creation, we connect with the world in a new way.
In a hundred thousand years, none of us will be remembered. Death, and its partner time, will see to that. But right now, in this fleeting sliver of existence, we have a chance to contribute to a much greater legacy than any individual’s. We have a chance to add our voices to the millennia-long song of human creativity. Before your hourglass runs empty, you can participate in the ongoing conversation between all art and artists. It’s an invitation that shouldn’t be ignored.
Anyone seeking to live a creative life will face obstacles. The easiest way to lose sight of what matters, to forget the clarity of memento mori, is to fall prey to distraction.
The world is full of distractions. Work and entertainment that drain the one resource no one can ever get back—time. You’re free to spend your life on them. No one will stop you. But we have the opportunity, while we’re still here, to create something that matters. Every day, we have the choice to consume something meaningless or create something meaningful. When time is infinite, that choice hardly matters. There’s always tomorrow. Recognize that there won’t always be a tomorrow, and the choice becomes clear, the opportunity impossible to ignore. Mortality, stared in the face, compels action. For writers, creation is that action.
As with all things, there is a balance to be found. We can’t, nor should we, spend every waking minute creating things. We must experience life to have something to say about it. But at the end of the day, we must make time to write. Time to turn our experiences and feelings and questions into art. Knowing all the while that our time may run out at any moment.
Death can be frightening. An uncomfortable reality we ignore most days. But reckon with it, and it can point us toward a deeper and more creative life. When we recognize how very short our time here is, we realize we have every reason to make the most of it.
Memento mori, memento creare.
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