Don’t Follow Your Dreams

My parents were none too happy with my insistence at a young age that I was going to grow up and be a writer. I was perfectly capable (they thought) of finding a “real” job. I got good grades in math and science. I was competent at organizational skills. Just about the only thing I was really bad at in high school was sports.

I was angry at my parents for a long time because of this. Looking back, I’m pretty sure that they never meant to suggest that I wasn’t *capable* of becoming a writer. Maybe they didn’t even mean to suggest that being a writer wasn’t real work or a worthy aspiration. And so when I had my own kids, as I struggled to develop my career as a writer, I was fiercely protective of their dreams.

One daughter wanted to be an opera singer. And then a pop star. I took her to competitions, got her the best teachers, drover her everywhere. Another daughter wanted to get into MIT, which I really wasn’t sure we could afford and wasn’t sure she could manage. Nonetheless, we paid for science fair projects, competitions, robotics league and equipment. We made sure she got an internship at a programming company. And so on.

Meanwhile, my career as a writer seemed to stall. I had some initial success, but hadn’t seemed to be able to follow it up for reasons that weren’t apparent to me at the time (and which I’m still unraveling, I think). I was frustrated as you sometimes get when you hit 20 years after high school. My ambitions seemed to have been larger than my abilities. And I wondered a lot of the time if maybe I should have had smaller dreams, if that would have made me happier, because I could have achieved those.

This year, I found myself saying out loud to my kids that the one piece of advice I had for them was not to follow their dreams. I had one of those appalling moments you sometimes have, when you realize that you have become your own parents, and not necessarily their best parts, either. I had become cynical about the world of commercial art and I wasn’t sure I much liked the bitter sound of my own voice.

So I have spent some time thinking about it and this is what I have decided:

Don’t Follow Your Dreams Unless …

1. You can’t do anything else with your life because this is the only thing that matters to you.

2. You find you are sabotaging yourself in any normal career because you don’t want to be there.

3. You have seen from the inside what it’s really like and you still want it.

4. You have a network of allies and friends who can help you get up when it gets tough in there.

5. You have a sensible plan for a back-up in case it doesn’t work out and you don’t want to starve.

6. You can take the unbearable heartbreak of rejection and get stronger from it.

7. You have a million ways to find success.

8. You are willing to completely reinvent yourself every other year.

9. You can laugh at yourself and the whole process now and again.

10. You are actually happy doing the work all by yourself, day after day, week after week, year after year.

When I am asked in conferences what I would say to writers who are starting out, I still tend to be cautious and say something like “Don’t quit your day job.” I can’t say I recommend writing as a career. It really isn’t for everyone, and I don’t mean that as a slam to non-writers. I think writers are a special kind of crazy.

But you know, after all these years and after all the knocks and the successes, I think I love writing even more than when I started out. And I admire all the writers out there who have all been through pretty much the same thing, more than I can say. While I mock them and tell them that they really should have listened to their parents and gotten a “real” job instead.