How To Keep Your Creative Dreams Alive
What I've Learnt From 14 Years Of Writing My First Book
Introduction
It has taken me 14 years to write and finish my first book. Looking back, I’m not bothered by the fact that I’ve spent over half of my life working on it in some capacity. What terrifies me far more is that, many times, I came close to giving up altogether. My book almost never existed. My dream of finishing my novel almost died with me. I worry this happens with a lot of people’s creative dreams these days. It is as if these dreams, and the creative people that hold them, are brought to an unnecessary, early death in a way.
“Anything worthwhile takes a long time,” Debbie Millman said in her talk at 99U.
But it’s not just the crazy length of time that can test our dedication to expressing ourselves in our highest forms. Many of us have to take breaks from being creative to go to work and make money, tend to family responsibilities, and face the throws of life’s random personal challenges. The corporate world, our families and even some of our closest friends can distract us and lead us astray without meaning to. In turn, we deprioritize the dreams that at one point were helping us express ourselves, that helped us feel that we were truly becoming alive.
So, how do you keep your creative dreams from dying? How do you work on something without getting bored of the thing, and yourself? Or more realistically, how do you claw back the bones of broken dreams, before they slip into their shallow graves, as we inevitably will also?
I don’t have all the answers, but I wanted to share a couple things I’ve learnt here in this last half of my life.
Embrace Your Own Evolutions.
I started writing my book in the summer of 2009. I remember sitting down with a large orange notebook in my friend’s house in Normandie, France. My first scene was symbolically crap, about a candle that gradually floats closer through the darkness. The story was about a young girl in London, who is stalked by a dementor, creepy style dude, who in later versions turned into a jolly old man character and a figment of her imagination, who was later, at the request of my developmental editor, removed from the story completely. For much of those early years, I was still learning how to type and learning how to write at all.
If you’re curious, you can see some god-awful Facebook pictures from that time.
My book is like the Ship of Theseus at this point. The Greek story begs a deeper philosophical question about identity and time: if you replace every part of a ship over time, is it still the same ship?
I still ask this question with my book today. I am still the same person, and yet it took me until only last year to be able to write the masturbation and sex scenes that occur in it. I could not have written those scenes when I was 14, because I had no experience of those things. In this way, I have to accept and embrace just how much it takes to bring out a piece of work in its fullest form, and the variations of self that it takes to get there over a really, really long time.
You, as you are today, may not be able to give your project all that it needs. It may take the iteration of yourself in 1000 days from now to put the cherry on top and finish the piece. That is more than fine. In fact, that is human and okay. And if it gets to the point where you have built the Ship of Theseus, and none of the original parts of your project remain, or can even be recognized, that is also human and okay. It’s maybe a good thing, even.
Use The Words Of People Who Don’t Believe In You As Fuel.
I’ve met many creatives who had an idea for a clothing line, or a comic book for children, but then they were hit over the head by the discouraging words of family members and friends. In “The Artist’s Way”, Julia Cameron talks about how we shouldn’t listen to these people, because they themselves are creatively blocked.
I’ve found that listening to these people actually helps a lot, but not in the way you might imagine. I remember being at a barbecue one summer, sitting around the table with family friends. One of my family friends, a man in his late 50s, had been a partner at a Big 4 Accounting firm in Los Angeles for a decade at that point. Word had gotten around our little summer gathering that I would soon be attending The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, one of the institutions most typical for generating bankers and consultants of all sorts.
“Mark my words,” my family friend said to me, “By this time next year, you’ll be an investment banker like the rest of them.”
To this day, his words are still clear to me in my mind. That day, I made a promise to myself: I would never work in investment banking. No matter what happened, no matter if I ended up losing my god-damn mind, I would never do it.
Of course it’s nice to get encouragement for your creative work. But I have found that the disparaging words of the people that don’t believe in you, who put you in a corporate box and who put you down, are often the most inspiring people of them all. They inspire you to do the opposite of them, that is.
Similarly, you can use the shittiness of the corporate world to inspire you. If you hate the idea of becoming your boss, use that as fuel to set yourself a deadline for when you’re going to chart a different course in your life and get the hell out of there.
Whatever You Hope To Do In Retirement, Do It Now.
As I entered the corporate world, I buried my dream in the common, classical sense. I told myself,
“I’ll become a writer once I make lots of money in the corporate world and retire!”
As a silver lining, the trauma I experienced knocked that thinking out of me real quick. Our lives are evolving in front of us constantly, and yet, we are not promised tomorrow. That’s a bleak thing to say, but it’s the truth. We must guard our time like there is no tomorrow because, well, there might not be.
Leaving your creative dreams until retirement is basically saying that you’re resigning yourself to living a lot of your life in a state of subdued, stunted happiness. You’re okay with denying yourself the potential joy of fully expressing yourself in whatever way you choose. And You’re also accepting that you might die with your dreams still inside of you. Just so you know what you’re getting yourself into…
You (or I) might not even make it to retirement. We must not forget that.
Make One Small Creative Step Every Day.
It’s the classic motivational shit: if you want to hike a mountain, take it one step at a time. But it’s the truth.
Back when I was working my corporate job, I knew I needed to quit and pursue my dreams of becoming an author. But I wasn’t ready. So, while I was still working, I made a small promise to myself instead: I had to work on my manuscript every day. Every. Single. Day. Even if I only edited one word, or one sentence. Any change to the manuscript counted. I kept the document on my desktop, and I did it. Over the next few months, I kept up my streak. By March 2022, about three months in, I had the next full draft of my manuscript completed.
You might not know how long it is going to take you to finish your creative project. But you will get a lot closer if you can keep up a small streak and make a small step of progress every day. I got the idea originally from James Clear. I don’t have a fancy habit tracker. All I had was a calendar where I marked each day that I made some progress with a “Y” and a number of how many words I wrote or edited from my piece. Yet it made a huge difference.
Resurrect Your Dreams If You Can.
You might have killed off your dreams early or left them dormant for a time. You might wonder whether you can even bring them back from the dead. I’m here to remind you that you can. And that returning to our early dreams is a completely respectable thing to do.
As I’ve mentioned before, when I was 20 years old, I put my creative dreams away and focused on becoming a “serious business lady”. Next followed a period of six years where I was completely cut off from working on my novel. I basically severed myself in two. I was still a writer, walking around in the world, but I had buried my dreams deep, deep down inside of me. It was only years later, through some very serious and unexpected trauma, that I even reconsidered working on my novel again. Those six years were an interesting process. I still wrote things, mostly about birth control, but something felt wrong. I wasn’t showing up as my full self in the world.
Our creative dreams are not dead until we make them so. During Christmas of 2019, I dug in my parents attic and retrieved the dusty, hand-written pages of what I could salvage of that manuscript. Over the next few years, I rewrote that manuscript until it was unrecognizable from what was written in those pages even. Yet that step of opening up those books, and interpreting my hand-written scribbles, was what my journey required of me at that moment to revive my creative self-back to life.
When it comes to your creative projects, you are God. You have the ability to sever limbs, to rebirth, to mould, to entangle, to shape-shift. Use your power wisely.
Get A Handle On How You Use The Internet.
Facebook, Instagram, TikTok etc, as we all know, are the new opiates of the people. I personally struggled with a YouTube addiction for years. It was the words of Marshall Goldsmith I read which pushed me over the edge. In 2015, Goldsmith had predicted that “media addiction” would surpass drug and alcohol addiction combined. Those words finally helped me realize I had a problem.
On August 2nd 2022, I finally sought help and started going to ITAA meetings (Internet and Technology Addicts Anonymous). I gave up reality TV, YouTube, Reddit, Ancestry.com and a bunch of other things on the internet that were problematic for me and that I had been using compulsively for years. My newfound “sobriety” has been no less than transformative for me on my creative journey.
When we’re not happy, we can easily numb ourselves with the internet to the point where we can’t even remember what our creative dreams were in the first place. We are breathing, we’re hopefully holding down a job, but we’re not really living. We’re not really alive in the full sense.
I felt shame and embarrassment about my addictions to reality TV for years, and yet the fact that I was angry at myself for wasting so much time only drove me to watch more shows. Now, on the other side and with more than nine months of sobriety under my belt, I understand that getting a handle on my internet addiction has been crucial to regaining control of my life, building my own little fortress of creative consciousness, and persevering with my plans to finish my book.
Decide to finish the thing.
If you want any sense of peace in this world, at some point you are going to want to finish the thing you’ve been working on. Maybe I’ll write a whole separate piece about this, but for now I just want to say that whether it’s the draft, the version, the file, it’s up to you to get it done.
It’s important, also, to know that each smaller creative project has its own lifespan. The lifespan is how long you’re willing to work on it, until you’re bored, and you want to give up. Each project has its own lifespan. The idea is that, hopefully, you will decide that you want to complete the project and actually do it before it completes you, and you lose momentum and give up.
I feel that way with my book just about now. It’s May, and the book is set to come out in September, and I am dreading the edits and the process of designing a cover. But I also know from the 14 years that I won’t feel that way for long. At some point in the next couple weeks, I’ll wake up in cold sweats and get that shit done.
You can fall out of love with something, and then want to get back together with it. That’s totally okay. But it's far easier to get something done when you want to finish it, and not when you’re bored and don’t want to work on it anymore.
Conclusion
That’s all I want to say about this for now. Wherever you are in your creative process, I encourage you to never stop honing and studying your craft. Silence those voices in your head that are saying “I’m not a writer” or “I’m not an artist” and just try something.
Don’t worry about whether a project is the exact right thing you could be focusing on at any given time. Just focus up the tiny next step in front of you. Just know that if you stick with it, you can’t guarantee anything, but your creative project will change you. You will be a different person on the other side once you’ve created it. Yet hopefully, you’ll be an iteration which is far closer to the current version of your truest self.
Good luck! 🤗