Hundreds of years ago, two brothers wrote their version of a traditional German folk tale about two young children walking through the woods. These children were clever, and always left a trail so that if they became lost in the great woods, they could simply follow the trail they’d left to find their way back home. Unfortunately, the children were only so clever, and one day used bread crumbs instead of stones or something more permanent to mark their trail. If you’re at all familiar with the story of Hansel and Gretel, you’ll recall that particular decision didn’t play out all that well for those two. At the same time, if you’re familiar with the story of Hansel and Gretel, you’re probably also familiar with the name Grimm. Wilhelm Grimm died in 1859, his brother Jacob in 1862 — but their stories live on, giving them an immortality of the sort that comes with never being forgotten.

Whenever I have the opportunity to question anyone who dares call themselves a “writer,” I find myself asking them to tell me their greatest fear. Other people have other fears, often involving death in some way or another, but writers (indeed, anyone who engages in the creation of any sort of tangible art) go further than that. They do not fear death — or if they do, that fear remains secondary to the fear of being forgotten. The will to create something that exists outside and independent from us is driven by the fear that we will be forgotten.

You will be forgotten.

I will be forgotten.

It brings chills. We writers claim many reasons for doing what we do, but all of those things are to some degree intended to make what we do seem far more beautiful and romantic than it actually is. The truth is much of writing is painful drudgery and those fleeting moments where you’re “in the zone” and platinum and gold threads are flying out of your fingertips to be woven into the next masterpiece with little effort on your part only barely compensate for those hours you spend slogging through shit.

Why do we do this? As cynical and jaded as you might be, as depressed and angry is you may feel, writing comes from a place of hope. Driven by the fear of being forgotten, we press words into stories in the hope that a piece of us will be carried forward. That piece will live on in the hearts and minds of others long after our molecular makeup dissipates back to the cosmos from whence it came, and we will not be forgotten. We seek, perhaps, to transmogrify our very souls into stories others will read — and through reading, relate. We write with the hope that someday our words will move a soul generations removed and that we will, through that movement, remain.

As we writers trek through the world’s woods, we too leave a trail to follow in case we become lost. These poems and stories are bread crumbs others may read and follow. Some of those bread crumbs may be washed or blown away, eaten, or tramped into the ground. But others will harden and stay, only to be found years later by an observant soul who will follow the trail, and we will achieve that immortality that comes from never being forgotten.

Who among us will be the next Fitzgerald, the next Hemingway, the next Bukowski, the next Poe? True, our stories may not last as long as those of Joseph and Wilhelm, but perhaps we’ll do better than Hansel and Gretel. Only time will tell, and time doesn’t tend to give away too many of its secrets. All we can do is leave our trail, and hope that our bread crumbs will last at least long enough to guide us and a few distant souls home. And for however brief that time might be, we will not only not be forgotten — we’ll be a little less lost, and a little less alone.