The great writer had lived well past his appointed lifespan, not by years but decades, and now existed less as an ongoing contributor to the literate zeitgeist but as an icon of a past age.

He was a super-centenarian, just topping an unbelievable 110 and still appearing at literary conferences, when a current-generation novelist asked him for the secret of his longevity.

The great writer smiled at this, because the question was to both his work and his health, and there’s nothing a great writer appreciates more than getting more than a day’s value of any one given sentence.

He said, “Write your final story out of order.”

“What?”

“Produce the capstone to start. There are ways of telling your muse that it is the story destined to end your career. Get it on paper, or on the screen, whatever; just make sure it’s the final story, the one you normally would not have written until you’d acquired a layer of dust. Only then, should you produce your juvenilia, your place-holders, the work representative of your talent at its prime. Do it right, and you will never actually get to the point where you catch up to that valedictory final work, and write the actual final story that gives death a reason to notice you. For those of our profession, dear lad, it is a guarantee of genuine immortality.”

The young novelist left and wrote his final story, a little piece of fluff that did what such stories are supposed to do, wrap up and underline all his themes in a manner that put a rueful and ironic spin on all the work that normally would have come before it.

He then spent decades on all those stories from the middle.

He lived to age eighty. Then ninety. Then into his triple digits.

It was not eternal youth. He got old. He remained spry. He lived to see the careers of those he had inspired. He then lived to see the careers of those they had inspired. He saw his own resurgence in commemorative editions, and his excoriation by a younger generation to whom he was an icon of an ancient and unforgivable time, and then his obscurity and then his re-examination, all while continuing to add words to all the words that had come before.

It was at yet another literary conference, the first he had dragged his aged bones away from home to attend, that he ran into the great writer of his youth, gnomic and covered with dust, a copy of his latest opus resting beside him in a mound of reviews that he had been at this too long.

The acolyte who had asked the question of an already ancient man, over a century before, now hobbled toward him on a cane and said, “You were right about that trick giving me immortality! But you never told me the price!”

The older man, a mass of wrinkles and disappointment, replied,

“Perhaps if you share the secret with another, you will see fit to warn them how terrible it is to spend all of eternity watching your youthful promise fade.”