I managed to steal a little bit of idiot-box time the other day (idiot-box being an old term for television but, nowadays, equally applicable to any form of screen-based stupidity) and came across a documentary about one Gordon Lightfoot, a Canadian folk musician who passed on a little while ago. I was really into his music at one stage, partly because I was fooling myself I could play guitar (and still do, the fooling bit that is) and felt his music was at least possible for me to manage. A stupid goal looking back, but that’s what being young and stupid’s about (and stupid goes with young without saying). As an aside, there’s a reference to Gordon Lightfoot in Death: Descent Book 2 for the eagle eyed, so buy it!

So, anyway, the documentary. One of Lightfoot’s longest (and well-known) songs is The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, a long, loping folk tune that can be played with just two chords and sounds absolutely magic late at night around a campfire if your audience is half-stoned (as does America’s Horse With No Name and The Church’s Under the Milky Way Tonight, although that’s got four). I’d always though that the Edmund Fitzgerald was a unique event, a 1975 sinking of a huge ore carrier in Lake Superior with the loss of all on board that warranted special attention, but I was wrong.

According to what I saw and heard, ore carrier wrecks in that part of the world around that time were nearly commonplace, perhaps one every two years, and with great loss of life, but nothing much had changed in how they operated, how the authorities and government coordinated shipping, even how weather forecasts were made. It was almost as if everyone thought it was collateral damage, a reasonable price to pay for iron ore that made its way to cars, refrigerators, toasters and bicycles. No one, apart from the families of the sailors that kept on dying as the shipwrecks kept on happening, seemed to care. Lake Superior had claimed over 550 ships over the years, the Edmund Fitzgerald was simply the latest one, not the last.

Until 1976 and Gordon Lightfoot’s Edmund Fitzgerald.

Not that it was a rage song, or a protest song, or even a classically great song. It just happened to capture people’s imagination in a way nothing before had about these ore carrier wrecks. Over the years and decades since it was written and performed it became a touchstone for change, change in shipping practices in Lake Superior, Coast Guard operations, boat safety, weather services and prediction, shipwreck law, and a lightning rod for public pressure and action. As a result, since 1975 only two ships have been wrecked in Lake Superior, neither of them bulk freighters like the Edmund Fitzgerald.

To Gordon Lightfoot the song was simply a song, a crafted narrative of a recent event set to an Irish folk-melody he had running through his head at the time. He didn’t set out to write a protest song, an action song, even a ‘hey look at this this happened’ song, just a good one.

So what’s that got to do with you, the writer?

Simple.

You don’t know what impact your work will have on anyone, can’t know who might read it, take a snippet into their minds, and change their lives because of it. It might become a world-changer while you live, or after you’re dead; it may sink without a trace, ten copies sold, but one copy may fall into the hands of our next Einstein, Callas, or Picasso and give them just that little push they need. You may never know what it truly means to the people it really reaches, and I’m not talking about Amazon reviews or YouTubers or Instagram influencers here, but the quiet ones out there who need it more than you’ll ever know or hear of.

And that’s how it has to be.

Write how you write, what you want to write, in the way you feel is your style, your words, your voice, and change nothing because it’s your uniqueness that has value and you never know where that will lead.

If Gordon Lightfoot wrote Edmund Fitzgerald as a protest song, it would’ve died in the charts within a year. But he wrote what he wanted to write, the way he wanted to write, to the tune he wanted it sung to, and it became more than he could’ve imagined.