When Writers Die "Book ONE"

Must I Die For Fame

I'm a poet in my 20s, but when people ask me, I tend to call myself a writer—anything but a poet. Over the years, I've seen that although people enjoy poetry from time to time, the writers behind those works are often underappreciated.

I always wanted to write a poetic book of some sort, I imagined it as a small, pocket-sized book filled with chapters of poetry for everyone to enjoy. But publishers have never taken me seriously. It is often said that poetry isn't worth writing and that making it into a book just isn't enough.

About three years and many disappointments later, I decided to leave poetry for "actual" books. But even then, I'm still just a house writer, the one whose only readers are her loved ones.

Recently, I started questioning myself—why hasn't my work been noticed by anyone? Receiving no answers, I turned to the internet. There, I found answers I wasn’t expecting. After much pondering, I realized the quickest and easiest way to get noticed as a writer is a five-letter word: "dying"—or "death."

I read about famous novelists like Umberto Eco, who wrote *The Name of the Rose*, Italo Calvino, and many more, whose books became bestsellers literally weeks after their deaths. Books that had been written 15, 20, even 30 years before their deaths but were barely noticed.

The books didn't change genre, nor did the quality improve. The readers also didn’t suddenly change their preferences. But for some reason, the dead man’s book becomes more famous. Shall we then call it the “dead man's effect”?

In my experience, this is more of a psychologically fabricated, mixed emotion. Guilt is one of the emotions felt by readers who find themselves longing to read a dead man’s book. There’s a question we often ask ourselves after the writer's death. It’s not a verbal question, but an unspoken one: *Why didn’t we read their books when they were alive?* After reading it, the statement becomes verbal: *Oh, they were such good writers.* In this situation, guilt is the most subtle emotion.

Then there’s the sudden realization that for the writer's books to be this famous now, he must have been an amazing writer. Well, maybe he was, or maybe he wasn’t. We don’t know. All we know is you're reading because he’s dead.

Finally, there's the untrue subconscious belief that when a writer dies, their books become deeper, have more meaning, are more valuable and suddenly hold more knowledge. The valuable part, yes—but everything else is an emotionally bred thought, not fact.

Something to think about: scientists, philosophers, writers, pastors—in fact, everyone becomes famous for whatever they did after they die. Because at the end of the day, humans tend to only see the value in each other after death, never before...