Dreaming of Being a Writer Beats Being a Writer

Why you love the dream and hate the practice

You wake up from a dreamy slumber and saddle into your chair to kick off the morning with four hours of writing.

You then have breakfast with your significant other, work out, and write a couple more hours before lunchtime.

After noon, you’re done for the day. You are a best selling author with many best-selling books. Everything you write is read by millions of people.

You can’t believe that this is an actual job.

You wake up, do what you love and spend the rest of the day doing what you want.

Your words have made their way to people’s hearts and souls all over the world. Your words are touching and transforming lives.

At month’s end, various publications, publishers and book sellers deposit your monthly earnings into your bank account.

What a life!

Writers are great at imagining being a writer

As you already know, writers are very creative people. We can imagine and create anything in our minds and make it come alive.

We are thinking and creating at all times of the day. When normal people see the world, they see the world for what it is. Writers on the other hand extrapolate, create, ponder, wander, opine and judge what’s happening around them.

We also are able to use the power of our creativity and imagination to imagine things like being a successful writer. We know what we would write, how we would write it, what our life would be like if we wrote that piece or book that we are capable of writing.

We know that we would be writing in the early morning hours, practicing every day and writing even if we didn’t see success. We see ourselves struggling, fighting through our resistance and getting our words out on paper.

We finally see ourselves on stage accepting a Pulitzer prize, we see the article going viral, and plenty of people appreciating our work. We see standing ovations in the future, letters of support from adoring fans around the world and get misty eyed by the overwhelming impact of our words.

The reality of being a writer

While every writer can see their future and the beauty of the dream, the reality is far removed from the writing dreams we are pursuing.

The reality of being a writer is constant self-sabotage, inner resistance and fear. We are paralyzed by what people will think. We get busy with our everyday lives and slowly give up on writing.

We buy into the excuses that get in our way instead of finding the reason to hit publish and share our work. We let procrastination consume us. We let our comparing minds make us believe that we are not as good as the next writer.

Why should we write when there are better writers around us? Why should we write when there are smarter writers around us? Why should we write when others are more eloquent and have a mastery of grammar or the English language?

The reality of being a writer is thinking that no one will read us and everyone will make fun of us. It’s believing that we don’t have anything to say and even if we did say it, it will garner crickets more than reads. It’s thinking that we are boring. It’s thinking we are failures. It’s thinking we will fall on our faces.

The reality of being a writer is trying to do just about everything else than write. It’s to get more training as a writer, it’s to read more about writing, it’s to read other authors all in the hopes that reading and doing more will help you become a great writer.

The reality of becoming a writer is simply ignoring the idea that becoming a good writer requires continued writing and practice.

How to turn your dream into a reality

“Be willing to be uncomfortable. Be comfortable being uncomfortable. It may get tough, but it’s a small price to pay for living a dream.” Peter McWilliams

The way to make your writing dreams a reality is to sit down and do the work.

You must sit down without thinking, contemplating or desiring the results. You must think of yourself solely as an artisan who is carrying out the practice of writing.

You are like a sculptor molding your thoughts and your words so it turns into a beautiful clay pot. Every page, every post and every work you create is helping you polish and refine your creation.

You are not attached to outcome or expectations of your writing. You don’t demand your writing produces certain results, earns you a certain amount of money or becomes popular.

Those things you can’t control. All you can do is keep writing, even if you write badly. The way to turn your dream into a reality is to keep producing bad quality writing, knowing that bad quality writing runs out over time and starts turning into good quality writing.

An editor or a coach can help you expedite the process of improvement. If you don’t have either, more writing can only help you improve over time.

The more you fail at writing and find out what doesn’t work, the closer you get to figuring out what does. The more you write and hear crickets, the closer you get to improvement and roaring fans.

Don’t let the next masterpiece disappear into the depth of the pitch-black night.

Writers should hold onto to their dreams of becoming writers but don’t simply ruminate on the dream.

Put pen to paper and put finger to keyboard.

There is a small and narrow bridge between a dreamer and a writer: one simply dreams of writing as the other turns their dreams into words.

Which kind of writer are you? A dreamy one or a writing one :) ?