Two Things We Should All Do

The fall had come, and my wife was huddled in a warm green sweater, me in my winter jacket as we sat on our porch. Her long day had just ended and mine was about to begin. This had become our ritual since I'd started writing full-time four months earlier. A chance to catch up and spend some quality time together. By the time she got home at night, I'd usually finished my chores around the house and whatever shopping and cooking needed to be done. When she went to bed, I went to work, writing in the silence of the quiet hours late at night.

Our conversations ranged from work, both hers and mine, and other topics around the news and in our own life.

It was my favourite time of the day.

Tonight, we'd been talking about the personality test, a free test that copied the famous Myers-Brigg test that I'd taken in Seminary in my leadership course. Though we shared the same worldview (basically, we're both hippies) our personalities were very different.

"You know what I don't understand," she said, taking a sip of wine. "I don't understand how you can be so closed and private when it comes people coming over or visitors or anything in the physical world, and yet so open and vulnerable in your writing."

Bethany had been raised in Ethiopia, the daughter of missionaries, a country known for its hospitality. Her easy going nature had no issues with sudden visitors. But to write a blog this one? That would never happen.

"It's because I have to be." I said. "Writers need to be open and vulnerable to be interesting. The only experience that I can truly mine is my own, and I have to be willing to dig into it to write things that matter. In other words, if I'm not willing to look into the mirror and be honest about what I see, I can't be an artist."

I believe this is true for everyone who has goals and dreams, not just artists. Whatever it is you're trying to achieve, an inability to look in the mirror and be honest will cause you to fail.

There are, I think, two things we all need to do.

SEE CLEARLY

Get the Windex out, spray down the glass, wipe it, and take a good look. Do you want a new house? A better job? A book deal? What's it going to take to get there? How much money will you need? How many hours do you need to spend to get good enough to achieve it? Do you have the discipline to do it? If you hedge on any of these questions, you won't get there without simply getting lucky.

When I first started writing, it still held a kind of mystique for me. I wrote a little, dreamed about it, talked about it. But I was afraid to look in the mirror. My first characters were nothing more than cardboard cutouts, characters that I thought people would like because they were so generic. The more I read, the more I realized that I needed to go further. I needed to stop worrying about what my parents would think or my church would think or what my friends would think.

I needed to lay it bare.

I can tell you, as someone who has battled depression their whole life, this wasn't easy. I wanted to lock away the ugly parts of me. Not look at them. I wanted to lock away my beliefs that didn't make sense and not examine them. I wanted to see myself as the person I imagined that I was, instead of the person that I'd become.

It wasn't until I rid myself of these hangups and recognized that I was human, and that there were other people out there struggling like I was, that I found my voice. After that, the discipline became easier. Words flowed from my fingers. I wasn't writing to make people happy any more, to please certain segments of society, I was, as one writer put up, cutting my vein open and letting it bleed onto the page."

Nothing has been the same since.

RUN CLEANLY

We dreamers are often fed a lot of cliche stuff about how important the process is and that the journey matters more than the destination. That's hard to accept when you have two little kids, a job you hate, and you're frantically scribbling lines or practicing your latest song or taking a night course. Who the hell cares about the journey? It's all about the destination, because otherwise, what have you gained.

The temptation, then, is to take shortcuts. For a writer, that might mean self-publishing before your work is ready. (I'm not against self-publishing. Not at all. But you need more than your friend saying "it's good" before you publish your first novel.) For others, it could mean taking financial risks to get you the house sooner than you could afford it.

Whatever it is, understand this: there are no steroids for dreamers. You have to run the race. You have to cramp up and fall. You have to walk when your sides feel like someone is jamming a knife into them. You have to move when your legs are numb. This is the process. This is the discipline. This is what turns adequate writers into good ones. This is what turns so-so musicians into successful bands. This is what turns your professional life from mediocrity to success.

Running cleanly means accepting the pain that comes with it.

If there was a shortcut to achieving our dreams and goals, one that worked, i would advocate for it. Instead, as Malcolm Gladwell points out in Outliers, "talent" costs about ten thousand hours.

Look, to be a dreamer is a hard thing. We have to ignore what other say. We have to discipline ourselves to do things that many people are not doing. We have to keep our eyes focused on a distant horizon with no guarantee of what's to come.

That's what makes you so special. You can do it.

Now go get it.

The Battle of Every Day

Some days you don't feel it. Some days it's all you can do to get up in the morning, let alone push towards some far off dream that may or may not happen, one that numerous people have told you to forget about.

I know this because I'm having one of those days. I threw out my back a couple days ago (sleeping on my stomach). Every position is painful, and if I sit too long, I can barely stand.

Sigh.

So the the thought of editing fifty pages and writing a blog and editing some other work (we're talking about seven or eight hours in a chair) makes my entire body want to groan. Aside from the that, it's also gloomy outside, and my normal energy and excitement to write just isn't there.

But as you can see, I'm writing anyway.

One thing I've learned over the years is that there's no correlation between how we feel and the work we produce. This isn't just true of writing. There can be a myriad of reasons why we feel the way we do on certain days, and it will have no impact on our work. If anything, these are the days that I know I should be writing because I'll be more likely to take a few chances and be more honest. Gloominess hides the censor button.

None of this matters if you don't get to work, though. And pretty soon, we start making excuses on other days. Suddenly what was a dream has become a hobby. And then, before you can blink, the hobby is gone, too, and you find yourself doing what everyone else is doing. Going to work at a job you can't stand and complaining about your boss to your co-workers.

Last year, I worked at a place that caused me nothing but stress, and by the end of the year, that's exactly what I was doing. I was sitting around with my co-workers complaining about my boss.

But I was still pursuing my dream. I still had this crazy idea that I could make it as a full-time writer. That meant coming home from my paying job only to spend hours more writing, doing the job I considered to be my REAL job.

And it made everything about my life different. Society wasn't going to dictate who or what I became. Yeah, I still had to pay the rent, but after that?

My life was my own.

It's not too late to try something new. Go for it! Maybe you wrote stories back in university but gave it up when you had kids. Or maybe you used to sing in a band, but stopped because work was too busy. Whatever it was that caused you to "be normal," (A Myth. I wrote about this last week.) why not let that go and move to something more exciting.

That's not to say every day will be all glory and sun-filled meadows. I love to write, but there are days like today when, quite frankly, I want to tell my keyboard to stuff it. These are also the days that provide the greatest reward, when you see what you've overcome to get the work done.

Remember, whatever you want to achieve in life, its mostly about "the every day." And on the days you don't feel it, when you're tired and sore and are fairly certain that your brain isn't working properly, just show up. Do what you can and see what happens. Dreamers like you and I persist through all seasons, not just the nice days.

Go run in the rain, and then get back to work. You can do it.

The Power of Ridiculous

The whole notion of making it as a writer, or any kind of artist, is ridiculous.

Look at the stats. Unless you know someone or meet a person at a conference,literary agents reject nearly 99% of all queries. (The number is actually higher than that) You may have written a perfectly good manuscript with a great hook after years of working on your craft. You send it out, hoping to draw interest, and... crickets.

The publishing industry is somewhat in chaos now, what with the advent of self-publishing. Some of these books are really good. Michael Sullivan got a deal based on his sales, and Hugh Howey got a seven figure deal that protected his digital rights, which is completely absurd.

More, writers are finding that they can earn a decent living by simply developing their brand, being prolific, and publishing their own work, which allows them a MUCH larger percentage of dollars from their books.

All of this is true, but a writer, an artist, must still be... ridiculous. They must believe in their work when no one else does. they must believe they're getting better even when it feels like they aren't. They must believe they have important things to say even when their family members or friends think such notions are silly or stupid or egotistical.

But the writer isn't wrong. They MUST be ridiculous to be successful. This is true of all dreamers. (Dreamers come in different categories, but the one truth that unites all of us is that at one time many people told us to stop. Told us that we weren't good enough. Told us that our dreams were foolish.) Whatever quirks we may possess (and we tend to have a lot of them. When my wife puts her cell phone down, I immediately move it to its "Spot" on the shelf by the kitchen.), the attitude of "whatever" needs to be dominant.

If you listen to successful actors and actresses, they often sound extremely vain, and their explanations for their success is simplistic. Of course it is. "Making it," in anything, but particularly the arts, requires luck.

Now, we artists don't like to talk about it much, because its out of our control, but it's always there. Hitting the agent at the right moment. Getting the editor who is looking for a book with your themes. Hell, they have stats that show people being prosecuted are as affected by the time they face the judge (just before lunch, late in the day) that matter as nearly as much as the evidence against them.

It is completely ridiculous (and arrogant) to assume that the world needs to hear what you're saying. But if you don't have this attitude, you'll never make it. Those stars I mentioned earlier? Most of them faced rejection over and over. Being RIDICULOUS allowed them to get through their failed auditions and helped them forge ahead.

All dreamers need to understand this. And if you develop a few quirks, a few neuroses, along the way, don't worry about it.

They're necessary.

Now get back to your dream and get to work.The world NEEDS to hear you.

Everything else is nonsense.

Even if you're being ridiculous.