The stars may never align
A motivational message about writing with purpose and following through
Defining a vision
Do I have a vision for my work? Am I writing with purpose? What does my writing mean in the digital age of seemingly throwaway tweets (xeets?) and social media posts? How will my voice rise above the autogenerated regurgitation of AI text dumps?
The answers to those questions will be unique to each of us. And if they’re unanswerable, that’s okay, too. Sometimes, externalizing what’s in our mind is all the meaning there needs to be. The craft of writing is meditative, artistic, passionate, and, most of all, personal. Sharing this conscious experience with others is downright magical.
No matter how I approach it, at some stage, there exists an underlying purpose. A professional photographer seeks to catch that defining shot. Many hours go into developing a photo and the technique that produced it. Why wouldn’t the same expectations apply to my writing?
Each writer's purpose will differ. Figure out where you want to go. Is it short stories, essays, novels, serials, journalism, comics, or scriptwriting? Whatever it is, start doing that thing. For me, it’s creating a fictional world where others can escape. And, of course, publishing books.
You can pursue multiple end goals. The idea is to define success by having incremental wins along the way. I’m constantly trying to avoid hoping for the stars to align so I can become a writer; instead, I'm gripping with the fact that the stars may never align, yet despite this, I am a writer.
A vision orients one toward a reality in which we shape our own destiny. As the adage goes, you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. So what is it that you’re truly after? How do you want to be remembered? Who is your target audience?
Where dreams help manifest the destination in mind, a vision should be the transportation to get us there, and goals are the rest stops along the way. Defining our vision will help clarify the rest.
"Start telling the stories that only you can tell, because there'll always be better writers than you, and there'll always be smarter writers than you. There will always be people who are much better at doing this or doing that—but you are the only you."
— Neil Gaiman
Refining the Vision
Once a vision has been defined, it’s time to take steps to refine it. We don’t have to recreate the wheel. This means that to grow as writers, we should consider becoming lifelong learners and advocates for our field of interest. Attend conferences, join a writing group, read Stephen King’s On Writing—whatever it takes to learn more about the hobby. But also know that none of the aforementioned suggestions matters more to your success than your desire to improve yourself and work hard.
As we develop, our vision can change or fall by the wayside. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. Even if we can’t reinvigorate the vision, shelving it is sometimes the best choice. Maybe it isn’t the right time to pursue that trilogy, and instead, a book of short stories can suffice, teaching us more about the world we want to create. I’ve been there. It’s an integral part of my backstory as a writer. But before I leave you with the suggestion to shelve a project, I’d like to offer another potential nugget to motivate you to stick with it.
I’ve found that creating, for me, is at its best when using momentum. This doesn’t mean I must write every day or for a set amount of hours; while that does help for some people, the drive to cross a project’s finish line can originate from anything creative I commit myself to. Journaling, drawing, or my favorite method of solidifying an idea, trying to make it sound coherent to a non-writer friend or family member. Something about justifying a plot out loud forces me to discard many wacky, superfluous ideas to get the story's core in place.
Now that we’ve defined and refined our vision, let’s examine the best part below.
Embracing the Journey
Whatever your vision, enjoy the ride. Stressing about not making progress defeats the purpose of enjoying a particular thing. No project will be perfect, no piece so sublime that it’ll pristinely pour out of your fingertips in one go. It’s a series of failures that build upon one another until the final iteration is so complex that you wonder how it ever came to be.
Reflect on the valley beneath you as you climb, and be grateful for the missteps along the way. Each trip and fall forces us to reorient ourselves with the world around us. Resilience isn’t just about forging ahead when times are tough but the ability to bounce back when life brings us to our knees. Those pebbles pushing tiny divots into your kneecaps hurt! But when we stand, they fall away, and our body heals, the pain becoming an experience to reflect upon.
You know that feeling when you’re up super early? I mean early, early (or late, depending on your circumstance). No lights are on while you’re walking the dog, and only a few people are driving on the roads. It’s a strange feeling, like you’re all alone, going against the grain. Well, being a writer is the same way. Not everyone will want to write in their free time, not everyone will be good at it, and not everyone will stick with it long enough to see improvement.
This is why having a vision is so important. Perspective enables informed decision-making, and when we remember that we are writers at a fundamental level, the vision is no longer in our heads.
It’s our reality.
“So what is it that you’re truly after?” - no incremental wins for me, I guess, or not in terms of commercial success, only in terms of “another project completed”.
What I’m after: 1 enjoy the writing itself (putting off the instrumental decisions about publishing haha), and 2 be content that I’m doing the job to honour the bit of talent I was given. I felt a bit guilty many years, thinking, if you get a gift but you’re not putting it to use, you’re wasting it and showing disrespect. Honouring the gift does involve the whole job, of course, from ideation to writing to publishing, so I’m aware the final step needs to be there, too.
What a great reminder, Winston, to follow our creative urge wherever it may lead us.
This is my vision: I have 5 books in me that I’ve been sitting on for several years and in one case over a decade. I want to get these stories of my head and onto paper to the best of my ability.
All these stories were inspired by what is happening around us in this world and I plan to dive deep into the topics and themes that I explore with these stories.
It’s a double package of learning, exploring, forming new ideas and using them to write the stories that burn to be written.
I’m shaping my worldview and acquiring the tools and techniques to express it and share it with the world.
I’m happy to have people join me on this path but this is not the main motivation. Writing is too hard to be motivated only by growth. Breaking into the industry is too hard to be motivated only by the desire to ‘make it’.
Find something that burns you inside and make it your life’s work.