If only you’d seen me, in high school, desperately trying to make my mother understand why I needed a regular exception to my strict midnight curfew to attend the weekend midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

We were an ordinary middle-class suburban family in a small conservative Georgia town. Mom raised us hands-on, on her own, while working multiple jobs at all hours, including nights and weekends.

So did we kids—money wasn’t bountiful for our family. Besides babysitting and working in a country club nursery, my main job was at a restaurant: one of the original T. J. Applebees, which stayed ruthlessly open till two a.m. or the last customer unhurriedly deigned to leave, and work was my only allotted exception to Mom’s curfew.

Back then you couldn’t pull up info or photos or video clips on the internet (as there wasn’t one) but Mom was no dummy, and I’m sure she found information about the movie somewhere. A bunch of people going out late at night, dressing up in often racy outfits, screaming and throwing things at the screen while watching a movie with bloody murder and cannibalism and incest and lots and lots of sex, all led by an unapologetically sex-forward self-proclaimed Sweet Transvestite.

It was a hard sell to my traditional mom. And it was a hard no.

So—and I’m sure you all see this coming, though to my enduring surprise my mom never did—I told her I was working the late shift at the restaurant and I went anyway.

A lot, over the years—most recently last week at a fiftieth-anniversary screening at a crowded 2,500-seat theater in Austin, where cast member Patricia Quinn (Magenta, darlings! of course the marvelous Magenta!) made an in-person appearance for the occasion.

The Impact of Art

How can I explain to you why I go to see this movie over and over, when I couldn’t really explain it to my mom in a way that made her understand it? I’m not sure I can fully explain it to myself. Rocky Horror, I suspect, is one of those IYKYK situations—you either get its appeal on a visceral cellular level or you just don’t. If you’re in the latter camp…well, to paraphrase Frank-N-Furter, they didn’t make it for you.

It’s an acquired particular taste—as evidenced by the fact that it was roundly predicted to be a flop as both a stage show and a film, and initially the movie was. Yet in both cases it wildly exceeded expectations by becoming a massive cult hit.

Mainstream it ain’t. The movie got made because the theater production was so unexpectedly successful, but the studios showed their true opinion in its microbudget and ridiculously rushed five-week shooting schedule.

When I analyze it now from a storytelling perspective, honestly the thing falls so short in so many different areas that it ought to drive my editor’s soul crazy. Yet every time I see it, and there have been so, so many, I watch it with a smile on my face the entire time.

It hits a chord in me the same way it seems to for so many people, and it certainly did when I was younger: Raised in an environment where I felt one of these things was not like the other and it was me, I suddenly happened upon a whole boisterous, flamboyantly different group of people ostentatiously being exactly who they were, and everything goes. Where being a misfit meant you fit. Where you could simply be yourself.

Given the film’s vintage, I expected the crowd at the recent screening (at a nice, respectable eight p.m., thanks—even Rocky likes an earlier bedtime these days) to be a little older, more toward my own Gen X demographic, but we were gratified to see a wide spread of ages in the audience.

On the way home my husband and I marveled about that—and about the staying power of this movie. Imagine if you were the creators who had dreamed this sucker up, worked tirelessly on it, against all odds triumphed, even when it first it may have looked like you wouldn’t: It flopped hard right after its release, and flopped hard again as a Broadway production before theaters started showing it as a midnight movie and it steadily gained a rabid following.

And fifty years later—fifty years! half a century!—people still show up for you and your work. They still create and sport extravagant costumes based on your creation. They know—and quote along with—every word, as well as an unofficial bonus script of callbacks to the screen, which haven’t changed since I first went all those years ago.

Fifty years later it still resonates deeply with so many. You still get to see the phenomenal ripples your work has had in the world and in people’s lives.

Rocky Horror and Your Writing

This week I spoke with an author I’m working with on an extremely personal story that deals with fairly heavy emotional issues. We talked about how she wants to handle them in the story, and the risks of the topic she’s exploring regarding its marketability from a major publisher standpoint.

She knew that and had extensively considered it. But this story is especially meaningful and important to her, and she’s already decided that if she can’t find a publisher for it because of the difficult subject matter, she still wants the experience of writing it and making it what she wants it to be, and she still wants to share it with people no matter the terms.

What if someone out there needs to hear her story? she wonders. What if reading it helps someone deal with some of the traumas and challenges she’s faced in her own life and is drawing on for her story? What if it offers them solace or strength, or just the knowledge that they’re not alone?

She wasn’t so grandiose as to take it even farther, but I will: What if it hits just the right chord for the right person and it changes their life? I assure you that Rocky Horror positively shaped a lot of people’s lives, including mine.

I talk a lot about knowing what you want in this business as one of the most important factors in creating a writing career that is meaningful to you, where you are the one at the helm of the ship, not just perpetually waiting to be chosen or desperately trying to follow the market and fit into it.

In a business where authors have little control over many factors, this is where we have complete control, and exercising it is the foundation of creating a writing career that’s successful in the most important ways: that it’s deeply meaningful and rewarding to you. That may also include wide readership and financial success, but those are among the factors you don’t control, and basing your satisfaction on those is a recipe for unhappiness and powerlessness.

But writing the stories of your heart…the ones that mean the most to you…the ones where the writing of them perhaps changes you and your life…well, that’s a recipe for spending every day of your creative life doing something that matters—to you, and maybe to the people who need to hear your story.

Write to Your Passions, Not the Market

Last week I had the pleasure of interviewing author Jaysea Lynn, whose debut romantasy For Whom the Belle Tolls has just released and become an instant New York Times and USA Today bestseller. The staff at Book People, where her event was, seemed stunned by the turnout—not so much that it was a sold-out house, which of course they often see, but by the fervor and enthusiasm of her fans, many of whom came in costumes from Jaysea’s TikTok series that inspired the book.

When Jaysea came out they screamed like she was a rock star, because of course to them she is. Some of them were visibly teary, and at the signing afterward many told heartfelt, very personal stories of how her work has touched them or made them feel seen or validated.

Jaysea started out making her videos—about a help desk in hell—to express her frustration after dealing with difficult customers at her retail job. Four years later she’s made almost 700 of them, and they inspire the same kind of enthusiasm and cult fervor of Rocky Horror. Jaysea creates what she loves, what means something to her, and it’s hit a deep chord with people for whom it resonates. She found her people, and they have found theirs.

Most of us won’t have the level of instant success with our creative work that she’s enjoying with hers, but as we chatted before the interview and during it, it was clear that wasn’t the most meaningful part of it for Jaysea. She loves these characters, loves doing the work itself, and it’s apparent how much she loves connecting with other people over the world she’s created.

At the fiftieth-anniversary Rocky showing, Patricia Quinn sat out on that stage for about forty minutes telling stories about making the stage show and film, the interviewer asking literally only one question that launched her on a series of fond memories that the audience ate up. You could tell she was in her element. And why wouldn’t she be? In her seventies people are still celebrating her and her work, and she got two standing ovations.

Fiftieth-anniversary screenings have been happening all over the country, featuring some of the original stars: Quinn, Nell Campbell (Columbia!), Barry Bostwick (Brad!). They’ve all gone on to have lives and careers in the intervening decades.

But they come back—as have other stars and creators of the film in the past, including Tim Curry (Frank!)—to celebrate this little piece of art whose impact and endurance they couldn’t possibly have imagined. A low-budget spoof of schlock horror films with no big-name actors (at the time), shot on the fly for a little over $1 million. A production that stumbled right out of the gate, when it must have initially seemed as if it was all for nothing.

Yet here that creative work is, fifty years and more than $150 million later—the longest continually running film in history—still with a robust cult following.

I found my people the first time I went to a midnight showing of the movie, amid this costumed, confident, trash-talking crowd that welcomes newbies (“Virgins!) and celebrates them—more the more they allow themselves to be who they are and celebrate themselves, no matter what the world thinks of them. To express themselves freely and openly and proudly. Man, did high school me need that.

Man, do our creative souls need that same freedom and acceptance.

Richard O’Brien assuredly was not writing to the market with his fringy, edgy, weird movie. I doubt Tim Curry was mindful of leading-man marketability with his gender-bending, larger-than-life, in-your-face portrayal of Frank-N-Furter. Just the opposite: In this interview (gift link) he talks about how he made a deliberate choice to “explore all his contradictions”—in Rocky and everywhere in his life: “I learned not to limit myself — artistically, professionally, sexually or mentally.”

Jaysea wasn’t worried about marketing her story when she channeled her frustration and creative impulses into her videos, and later her book.

Writing to trends or the market might yield a short-term payoff, but I think it’s probably unlikely to inspire the same kind of resonance and devotion among readers. I suspect those works are unlikely to endure. (It’s not the copycats of literature that become classics.)

But what if your unique, highly personal stories had this kind of profound effect on someone who desperately needed to see themselves in the pages of your book? What if it gave someone the message that they were okay just as they were, that they weren’t alone, that they were worthy and that things could get better?

What if it became a thing that helped someone find their own confidence, their own voice, their own identity? What if it gave them hope—or a better life, a better world?

What if, regardless of any of that, writing it gave all that to you?

Authors! Speak to me. Obviously I want to hear your own Rocky Horror experience, if you have them. But I also want to hear what creative works meant this much to you: books, of course, but also movies, songs, poems, hell, TV shows—anything. What artworks have hit you on a profound level, influenced you, shaped you, maybe changed your life? Remembering how deeply meaningful creativity can be is a great way to remind ourselves why our work matters, when our confidence and drive may flag.