What’s a personal mantra or philosophy you live by?

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Truth over popularity. No exceptions.

I’ve used those words for years, and somewhere along the way they became more than something I could slap beneath my name and pretend sounded profound. Believe me, I have plenty of things I say simply because they sound cool.

This isn’t one of them.

Truth over popularity has become something of a measuring stick for everything I create.

When I write fiction, I spend a considerable amount of time trying to make the unbelievable believable. The town may not exist. The people may never have drawn breath. The circumstances might have been assembled somewhere between too much coffee, cigarette smoke, and whatever peculiar corner of my imagination decided to start making noise that morning. But the emotions have to be real.

The grief has to hurt.

Fear has to behave like fear.

Love cannot suddenly become convenient because I need it to rescue the plot.

People have to make bad decisions for reasons that make sense to them, even when those decisions make absolutely no sense to anyone watching.

That is the truth I’m after.

I want someone to encounter a character whose life looks nothing like their own and still recognize something. Maybe it is the anger. Maybe the loneliness. Maybe it’s the stubborn refusal to surrender when surrender would probably be considerably easier. Background shouldn’t matter at that moment. Race, geography, age, religion, politics, money—those things shape us, certainly, but underneath them are experiences that remain stubbornly human.

I don’t always hit the mark.

That’s important for me to admit.

Sometimes the metaphor gets there before the truth does. Sometimes I become too enamored with an image, a sentence, or an idea and forget that beautiful language isn’t worth much if nobody believes the person standing inside it. So I go back. I question it. I rewrite it. Occasionally, I murder a perfectly good sentence because the bastard was showing off.

The same philosophy follows me into my visual work.

I want an image to communicate before I explain it. The viewer shouldn’t need three paragraphs from me to understand that someone is grieving, isolated, defiant, frightened, powerful, or simply tired of whatever shit the world handed them that morning. Composition, posture, shadow, light, texture, negative space—those become another vocabulary.

The image should speak.

My words should speak.

And neither should require me standing beside them explaining what I meant.

Popularity is different. Popularity asks what people want. Truth asks what the work needs.

Those questions occasionally arrive at the same answer.

Sometimes they don’t.

I’ve learned to live with that.

I’d rather create something that ten people genuinely feel than something a thousand people briefly notice before scrolling to whatever comes next. That doesn’t mean I am indifferent to an audience. Quite the opposite. Respecting an audience means refusing to bullshit them simply because bullshit might perform better.

So, if I had to reduce my creative philosophy to three words, they would still be the same ones:

Truth over popularity.

And after all these years, I think I finally understand what they cost.