Authors should write for today or forever?

Authors should write for today or forever?

So I was browsing through some blogs and I stumbled upon a question that Anne Marie poses in one of her posts: “need a writer acquire some eternal value in order to be considered an author, or need he be simply/merely/only contextually relevant?”

I stopped after that question and thought. Does a writer need to be writing something with eternal value or can he just be writing something for the times to be considered an “author”?

My answer is this, it is a mixture of both. I think that a writer could/should write for the times, write about things that are relevant to him and to his audience. Now this doesn’t mean that it has to be about characters set in 2008, it could be a novel set years and years ago, but as long as the subject matter at its heart is relatable and relevant to today’s era, it can work. With that being said, with current relevancy helping a writer reach author status, I think that when a writer talks about things that matter, these things are ultimately universal and transcends time. So therefore, the subject matter is not only relevant to today’s generation but will be relevant in the generations to come. If it has a piece of truth that is good today, why wouldn’t it be good 200 years from now?