Turning your writing dreams into reality
For many writers, the thought of writing and being an author is a dream long before it becomes a reality. Sometimes it can be years between the initial desire to put pen to paper and it actually happening.
And, when it does happen, we are often disappointed when the reality of things doesn’t quite match up to how we saw them in our dreams. I think this goes a long way to explaining just why it can be so difficult to go about turning writing dreams into writing reality.
After all, when you only have the dream of being an author, nothing can go wrong. That novel you dream of writing will always be just how you imagine it, because that’s the only way it exists. It stops you from making all those mistakes we all naturally make once we actually start getting down to the business of writing – but it also stops those ideas from properly existing in the first place.
The trick here is to utilise those dreams to help you when it comes to putting ideas into practice. This isn’t always easy; in dreams, your ideas can be whatever you want them to be, whereas in reality, they can only ever be what you make of them. But you could still make them stinking good.
If you start to see those ideas and dreams as an aim and a guide rather than something that you absolutely must achieve, they start to become more helpful – and more achievable. You’ve already got your desired end result in mind, so now is the time to start taking practical steps towards it: setting definable goals and making progress one step at a time.
Along the way, think about what your aim is. What are you trying to achieve or say through your writing? The end result might not entirely match what you originally imagined, but it could achieve the same effect – or it could be even better. Dreams are great; they give us ideas and they give us something to strive for. But if all we have are dreams of writing, we’ll never know what we can actually achieve, and that could be so much better than what we imagine.
So keep those writing dreams and nurture them – and don’t forget that while the reality of them is often different, it can also be better.
