How The Fountainhead Made Me Rethink My Writing
Until yesterday, every word I wrote came with a price tag.
Every sentence, every subtle pitch, carried an intention — an ugly, transactional intention.
I had internalized the belief that all creative output must be productive in the capitalist sense. That everything I wrote had to be a performance. For reach, or clicks, or conversions, or revenue.
Writing wasn’t writing anymore. It was content. It was marketing. It was hustle. It was culture. It was me. It was my soul.
Of course, some part of me always knew this was not true, knew it was wrong.
And then — I met Howard Roark again.
A few weeks ago, I started re-reading Ayn Rand’s for the second time in my life. Strangely, I remember almost nothing from the first read. Maybe I was too young. Maybe I wasn’t yet in the middle of a mid-life crisis.
But meeting Howard Roark again — that unyielding architect, all conviction and defiance, a man who bends for no one and builds only for the sake of building — was unsettling in the most intimate way.
You’re not supposed to like him. He’s arrogant. Uncompromising. Borderline inhuman in his isolation. And yet — you do.
He’s designed to make you uncomfortable. But somehow, he also feels like a familiar friend. The kind you haven’t seen in years, but who still knows your deepest self. The one who shows up not to comfort you, but to drag you out of your deep slumber.
In case you haven’t met him yet on your reading journey, here’s what you should know about Roark: Roark didn’t build for others; he didn’t even build for himself. He built because he had to. Not in the sense of a tortured artist trope but in a quiet, deeply private, almost spiritual sense.
For Roark, creation wasn’t a means to an end.
It was the end.
The act justified itself.
He didn’t design to please a client, not even when he was broke, not even when he couldn’t make rent for his office, not even when the world told him to take what came his way and he was lucky to have any work at all.
He rebelled against that notion. He took a job breaking granite. Manual labor. The kind of work others thought beneath him. And still, he never compromised on the art and craft that mattered to him.
Because for Roark, building was truth.
And that made me see my writing differently.
Not as a means to reach, or revenue, or recognition — but as my own form of building. My own act of truth.
Before Roark, I’d been neck-deep in the transactional mindset for the last few years.
- How do I productize my writing?
- How do I get more followers?
- Should I launch a Substack, stick to Medium, dabble in LinkedIn, or microblog on Threads?
- Would this post make a good lead magnet?
None of these questions is wrong. They’re smart. Practical. Necessary, even.
If you’re a creator in today’s attention economy, this is the context in which you create. Algorithms. Optimization. Funnels.
We’re told to create (or in my case, write) with purpose. But what people mean is, write with a pitch.
Build an audience. Build a brand. Build a business.
But Roark doesn’t ask these kinds of questions. He doesn’t do what’s practical. He does what’s pure.
He creates because it’s the only honest thing he knows how to do.
Not to chase applause, not to attract clients, not even to prove a point.
And somehow — despite the world not understanding him, despite long, brutal silences between moments of recognition — he still finds one person at a time who sees it, who gets it, who connects with his work, because his work was uncompromising.
Encountering that kind of purism hit me hard. It jolted me awake, as if I’d been sleepwalking through my own craft.
Roark wasn’t just a character in a novel. He was a confrontation for me.
He stood there, asking me—
What happens to your art when the desire for expression is corrupted by the need for revenue?
Here’s what happens when you warp your reasons for writing:
- Your voice gets smothered by what others applaud.
- Your style gets shaped by the algorithm, not instinct or imagination.
- Your ideas shrink, bend, contort — trimmed to fit what’s shareable, clickable, palatable.
It stops being your writing. It becomes a performance. A product. A plea.
When someone asks you to break down your writing into something easily digestible, bite-sized, sanitized, optimized, they are really asking you to build for the lowest common denominator of attention span.
I now refuse to be that kind of writer who writes for someone’s half-scrolled moment between subway stops. Who writes for someone who is already detached and distracted.
Structure. Headers. Exits.
The moment I started writing for “content,” I learned to build escape routes for my readers.
Clear headings, bold sub-points, snappy CTAs at the end. It was all about making it easy for someone to skim. To scroll. To leave.
I started designing my writing with the intention of allowing people to walk in, look around, and not stay long, just like window shopping.
Take a freebie, maybe leave your email, and please exit quickly.
But that’s not what I ever wanted. I don’t want readers who pass through.
I want readers who burn with me. Who stay for the ache, the heat, the rhythm.
I want to write like a novelist. Because novelists don’t build exits.
They don’t carve little doorways into the side of a chapter and say, “If this is too much for you, you can leave here, and you would lose nothing in this story and gain everything.” Novelists write to trap you in their world, not to optimize your attention span.
Headers are for non-fiction. For businesses. For how-tos. For clarity. For utility.
But rhythm?
Rhythm doesn’t need structure.
Rhythm needs surrender.
And if you’re writing with rhythm, with pulse and pain and presence, you’re not writing for search engines. You’re writing for someone’s soul.
So I have decided to write without exits. I will build rooms you can sit in, sweat in, stay in.
Roark doesn’t pander. Doesn’t justify. Doesn’t dilute. He won’t cut corners. He won’t bend. He builds what no one else can — or dares to.
And that’s exactly why the world comes to him.
Not because he chases it, but because he doesn’t.
It’s a deeply seductive idea— that uncompromising integrity is its own form of marketing. Not performative. Not strategic.
Long ago, when I was still a student, unaware of what it meant to “adult,” oblivious to invoices and EMIs and LinkedIn portfolios, writing was sacred to me. It was a form of meditation. It was what I did to silence the storms within me. It’s how I screamed into the void.
I didn’t write for platforms or followers. I didn’t write for leads or likes. I wrote because something inside me needed to be articulated.
I wrote for the ache. For the quiet. For the strange alchemy that happens when chaos in your head turns into clarity on a page.
I wrote like it was a prayer. Like it was every part of my being—cells, atoms, soul—all finding an expression.
This shift isn’t without a cost of course.
Choosing integrity over virality comes with its own tax — one that’s often paid in obscurity.
Roark was fine with being unknown. Uncelebrated. Even despised. I, on the other hand, get anxious with the idea of being unread.
Because somewhere along the way, I started to believe that if a piece didn’t spread, it didn’t matter. That if no one clapped, it wasn’t worth saying. That visibility was value. That virality was validation.
But Roark taught me something deeply uncomfortable — something I wish weren’t true: You cannot serve two masters.
You can either create what you must, or you can create what you think the world wants. You can chase traction, or you can build something that outlives the trends. You can optimize for applause, or you can walk the lonelier road toward legacy.
Writing without monetization as the end goal feels freer.
Lighter.
More honest.
It feels like coming home to the reason I started writing in the first place—as a teenager, sitting cross-legged on the floor with a notebook balanced on my knee.
Because the world didn’t make sense until I wrote about it.
Because writing wasn’t content back then.
It was clarity. Catharsis. Communion.
It was how I breathed.
And maybe I don’t need to abandon structure or platforms or strategy entirely — those are tools, not shackles.
But I can choose what governs the work.
I can choose the reason I show up.
I can carry Roark’s ethos with me like a compass.
The belief that creation is enough.
That the work IS the reward.
That to build with integrity, even in solitude, is to leave behind something unmistakably yours.
And in this day and age — with readers everywhere, ideas everywhere, WiFi always on and my mind buzzing with a million ideas a minute — I’m standing at an intersection of infinite creation.
I must become one with my truth, with my purity, with my honesty.
Writing for the sake of writing is enough.
