Shaken Dreams – How to Keep Motivated when Knocked Back

After meeting up with a fellow author the other day, I felt shaken…

No, no I’m not giving up on my dream of being an author, I was just simply given a reality check. And this reality hit me hard.

So what happened? Well I’ve been in touch with this woman who’s an author of several books, books of which she’s sold thousands more than I have. She wanted to finally meet up because she said that she had some marketing advice for me.

Now during our meeting I wrote and wrote everything that she said, which filled 7 pages of my notebook! It was all good stuff that I’d considered but not ventured properly or had never heard of.

However, with every new thing that she said, I found myself feeling anxious. I started to feel sick. I was overwhelmed with information and I looked at her like she’s got this…but I don’t.

Because you see, being an author isn’t about writing books. It’s way more than that. It’s a business. It takes a lot of tenacious marketing to succeed. But I’m not so sure that I’m much of a business woman.

And so now I’m terrified. I feel knocked back. I feel like no matter how many books I write and publish, I’ll never make a dent in the book world and or be able to make a living from it.

All of a sudden, my dream was shaken.

Now this is utterly awful when you’ve wanted to be an author since you were 8 years old. When you don’t want to pursue anything else.

And so I panicked. Like a good anxiety prone person, I started to worry about my future. And about what I could do. But it was all silly. It took a long talk with myself, and then my brother, and then myself again, to realise that nothing has changed. Never was I ever under the delusion that being a best selling author would come easy. I always knew that it would take a lot of hard work. The only difference now is that I’ve been given more tools that could help me make my dream a reality.

If anything, my dream should feel more attainable!! But when I’m honest with myself, and I always encourage myself to be, I was scared. I was sat there looking at a person who’s worked harder than I have and I was intimidated. And rightly so! She worked for the knowledge and position that she has.

The thing is, dreams too often are deemed unachievable. We get scared by competition, especially competitions that we’re not really a part of! And we look at all the hard work that we’ll need to do and we get scared. And so instead we run.

But I can’t run. As I said before, there’s nothing else that I want to be. I want my stories to reach people in different forms and so I must work hard to get them heard.

So, my dreams have been shaken, but so have I. Not in a bad way, in a good one. I’ve now been shaken and brought back to reality. I’ve been made to wake up and realise that I’ve got work to do! We can achieve our dreams, just as long as we have the fight inside us to get us there.

~ Damsel