Larry M. Coleman

Full many a gem of purest ray serene,
         The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flow'r is born to blush unseen,
         And waste its sweetness on the desert air. 
—Thomas Gray, "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard"

Ride On was up for the Kirkus Indie Prize. This week, the finalists were selected, and it was not one of them. Am I disappointed?

Nope.

Would I have liked it to make it to the finals? Of course: everyone wants to go as far as they can. But, to be honest, I looked at several of the books that made it and, well, I’m happy Ride On isn’t in that group. Most of them look the same, and I don’t want Ride On to be the same old thing that publishers keep cranking out over and over. It’s a book I had to write because it was a book I wanted to read, and there aren’t a lot of those coming out of the publishing world these days.

I don’t write award bait, art house novels. I write things like The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy pulled from space and dropped onto Route 66 and then mashed up with Ready Player One and the niche world of cycling. Not a single one of the finalists can say anything near that because they’re all too busy trying to be like each other.

It doesn’t win awards, but here’s the important thing: neither did The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy when it came out. It won zero literary prizes (and still hasn’t), but it sold over a million copies and is now considered one of the top 100 books of its time. It is still being read by a now-third generation of readers. It has remained while 99.9% of books have been forgotten. The big reason for that is precisely because it wasn’t like anything that had come before it. It didn’t try to be popular, it tried to be good.

This is my message for you this week. Don’t try to write to trend. A million people are already doing that, and all you’ll do is end up being 1,000,001. Write something good and it might stand out, but as Gray’s poem laments, that’s not a given.

Originality is what will save you in the age of generative AI. Generative AI can already write mediocre, unoriginal slop that sounds like everything else. It doesn’t need you to do that, and the world doesn’t need more of it. What we need is what you need: your own voice, your own thought, your own uniqueness.

If it doesn’t win you awards, who cares? People hated Madame Bovary when it first came out, and it was a masterpiece so large it influenced all literature that followed it. People loved the Twilight series when it came out, but no one has talked about Stephenie Meyer in years. I once had a comment in a workshop on one of my pieces that said, and I quote, “I hate this. Get rid of it.” The thing is, it was a working of a passage by Shakespeare. So no matter who you are (even Shakespeare) not everyone is going to like it, and just because everyone likes it (for a time) doesn’t mean it’s good.

So be the only writer you can be: you. You may end up as a gem hidden in a cave or a flower blooming by itself in the desert, but even if that’s how it turns out, you will end up smelling sweet.