Back in October, I followed a series on finding your calling. In one of those entries, the original authors put forth a series of questions to help us distinguish the "signal" of what we love to do from the "noise"
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| Writing (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
of what we think we should be doing.
I'm not going through them in any particular order, but the first one I'm going to tackle is:
What dream has nagged at you for as long as you can remember, the thing that always pops into your mind no matter how many times you dismiss it?
I think I've always wanted to be a writer. Even if I can't bring myself to put my fingers on the keyboard, whenever my mind wanders, it goes to a story I want to tell. Is Ryan losing his mind, or is the Wawa haunted? How is Nikolaos able to perform those miracles? Who killed Carola's father? Does Merrik have the right to resist the alien invasion when he's part of it? Can Nate trust her friends with the secret of her mutation? Is it prescience or just dumb luck that causes a writer to submit scripts identical to those just bought by studios?
And even when I get those stories written, they're not good enough. I mean, they're not supposed to be; that's what a first draft is. So I workshop them. But then I have to start all over, fixing all the problems, and it's so daunting. And I wonder, why wasn't it good enough the first time? What if it's never good enough? What if I completely rewrite it and it's still nothing more than a a bunch of pages sitting somewhere, but now I'm out hours of my life and a bunch of money?
And I can't let that stop me, I know that. I just need to believe in myself a bit more.
Because that's super-easy.
Got any advice?
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