Sarah Rhea Werner (00:00):
This is the Write Now Podcast with Sarah Werner, episode 156: When Your Writing Dreams Change.

(00:29):
Welcome to Write Now, the podcast that helps all writers — aspiring, professional, and otherwise — to find the time, energy, and courage you need to pursue your passion and write. I’m your host, Sarah Werner, and today I want to talk about your writing dreams.

Now, perhaps controversially, I am going to be talking about your dreams as a writer in a way that is interchangeable with your goals as a writer, and I know dreams and goals are two extremely different things. A dream is something that you feel it’s often intangible. It’s something that you are seeking without really 100% being able to define what it is, whereas a goal is tangible. So perhaps your dream would be, I want to be a successful writer. Whereas your goal would be, I want to publish three books by the time I’m 55, because that is what success is for me as a writer.

(01:40):
I also want to say that every writer is different and every different writer is going to have different goals and dreams. Not everybody wants the same thing out of writing because not everyone writes for the same reason. I have a writer friend who I talk to on a regular basis, and their goal slash dream as a writer is to make it big, to be discovered, to have their work read and enjoyed and loved by audiences all around the world. That’s their dream and their goal would be whatever the next step toward achieving that dream would be the next tangible step. But that is not my dream as a writer for me, the reason that I write is quite honestly, so that I don’t go insane.

(02:43):
I laugh, but it’s true. The reason I write, the reason that I go to the page is so that I can understand and process the world around me. I write because if I don’t write, I get sick. I’ve talked about this on the show before, but if I ever go through a phase or a season where I am simply not writing, if maybe there’s a lot going on in life because that’s life, or if there’s some other reason that I don’t write regularly, I start to, this is going to sound really me dramatic, but I start to fade. I start to become less of myself because in order to live into myself, I need to be writing. And honestly, it doesn’t matter what I’m writing because I’m a huge narcissist. Everything is about me. No, I’m kidding. But also, I’m not kidding whether I am working on a novel or writing blog posts or simply journaling for myself doing my morning pages, it’s all autobiographical.

(03:58):
It’s all a different way for me to process what is going on in my life, whether literally or metaphorically. So I write to keep a grasp on myself and my friend writes so that they can find worth and validation in what they publish. And you might write for a completely different reason, and that’s okay. Different writers write for different reasons. Different writers therefore have different goals and different dreams. I’ve talked with some writers who say, I have dreamed of being an author since I was a small child. Or they’ll say, ever since I read this particular book, I’ve wanted to be a writer. Other people come to it a little bit later in life. They discover that they have a talent for writing or that it scratches a particular itch that they didn’t know they needed to scratch. Both of these are extremely valid, whether you start out as a small child who dreams of being a writer or an author, or whether you come to it a little bit later and realize, Hey, I think there’s something here, no matter how old you are or what else you’ve done in your life, people of all ages and in all stages of life can have dreams, different dreams of being a writer.

(05:30):
But what happens when those dreams change? I’m asking this today because this is a topic that can cause a lot of writers to question or second guess what it is they really want out of life. I remember, gosh, more than 10 years ago now, when I was working for a marketing agency and part of our annual, and I think even quarterly reviews was filling out, okay, here is my one year goal at this company. Here’s my three year goal. Here’s my five year goal. I even remember I was part of a women’s leadership program back in 2014 that wanted us to establish not only a two year plan, but a five year and a 10-year plan. And I remember thinking at the time, I don’t even know where I’m going to be in six months.

(06:34):
My life could completely change. But what they wanted us to do, the point of this exercise was to visualize what we wanted. In the case of the company I was working for to visualize how we could grow within that company and lead the company to greater success, how we could envision ourselves fitting within the fabric of that company. And for the Women’s Leadership program, it was to get a clear idea of who we wanted to be and the steps that we would need to take to get there to make those dreams a reality. I remember at the time not knowing what I wanted, this is something that maybe you can identify with too, or maybe this is something that sounds completely foreign to you, but I grew up sort of making do with what I had. I learned to be resourceful because my family didn’t have a lot of money, and so often when people asked me what I wanted, I would say, well, what are my options and how can I find something within those options that I can be satisfied with?

(07:47):
So when people asked me, Sarah, what do you want? Later in life, I got a little overwhelmed because they would say, you can have literally anything. And I kind of didn’t believe them. I would say anything. And the places that I worked at and the people with whom I surrounded myself were very empowering in a great way, and they would say, yes, if you want to be a millionaire by the time you’re 30 because I wasn’t 30 yet at that point, then you can make that happen. You just have to put your mind to it. And I was like, okay, but realistically, how am I going to get a million dollars?

(08:31):
And then the people would say like, oh, you’re just naysaying and you’re going to block the, okay, there is such thing as toxic positivity, which is something we’ll talk about another day because I don’t want to go off track here, but when people asked me what I wanted, what I dreamed of, it was so overwhelming. And perhaps more importantly, the things that I actually wanted were not the things that the people asking me what I wanted to hear, if that makes sense. At work, they would say, okay, what is your one year plan? Where do you want to be in this company within one year? And I would think to myself, well, I’d love to continue working on my book in the evenings and publish it and become an author, but that’s not what the company wanted to hear, so this is not what I told them.

(09:33):
So I would look at, okay, where are they wanting me to go? What are they wanting me to say? They want me to say something that will benefit them as a company. I would say, oh, in one year I see myself leading my content strategy UX UI team to 25% increase in revenue, et cetera, et cetera. I dunno, I’m just making this up at this point because it’s been years now and I really don’t remember how to set corporate goals. And they would say, yes, very good. Yes. And it was so hard because I had to actively hide the fact that at the time I was writing my own stuff in the evenings and at that time in the mornings, I was ghost writing, I was ghost writing books for other people. And so I would show up at a coffee shop at 5:00 AM get to my workplace by eight, do my workday at the marketing company, and then go home and write my own stuff.

(10:45):
But I couldn’t tell them this because it seemed actively in opposition to what they wanted and what they wanted to hear. I even remember at one point back when I started this podcast, I want to say 2015, they called me aside, I got called into hr and they said, Hey, we’re a little concerned that you’re really excited about this new podcast that you’ve started, and we’re worried that the energy that you are putting toward that podcast is energy that you really should be putting here into your job at work, into your career. And the reason they said this was because you know me, I get excited. I’d gotten really, really excited about launching the podcast, and I had a right now podcast mug that I brought to work, and I was making all of this merch and I was putting right now podcast magnets and stickers all over the office.

(11:49):
So perhaps understandably, they thought that my focus was more on this side project than on my work for the company, even though I was not working on the Write Now podcast on company time, I was just real, real, real excited about it. And this is tricky. It gets real complicated when other people want things for you that you don’t necessarily want for yourself when other people have dreams for you that you don’t have for yourself. Or if I want to be a little bit cynical, I could say, when other people want things out of you or they want things from you that benefit them and don’t benefit you. So at work, my goals became, oh, after one year I want to lead my team to do this. After two years, I would like to be the Director of Content or whatever it would be — Director of UX/UI, whatever the official title would be.

(12:52):
I wanted to be a director, and then, oh, in five years I’d like to be a VP, a Vice President. And they seemed to like this, but were these really my dreams? No, my dreams remained the same. I wanted to be a writer and a published author. The same thing was true at the Women’s Leadership Program. I could be a little bit more transparent here, but they still wanted me to commit to goals and dreams that I wasn’t a hundred percent locked into. Where do you want to be in five years? I don’t know. I guess I want to have some books published. Okay, will that make you financially successful? I don’t know. For me, there are just so many unknowns. And as for a 10 year plan, looking back what I said during those times, completely different from where I actually ended up 10 years ago, I had no idea that I would’ve written my own TV show. I had no idea that I was going to be podcasting. I had no idea that I’d have anything that I have now. And this is really at the core of what I want to speak about today, and that is, it is okay if your dreams and your goals change.

(14:26):
I know that a lot of people, especially the people who from a very early age have said, I want to be a writer. I want to be an author. It can feel bad, it can feel disloyal. It can feel like you’re betraying your younger self. If later on in life you say, huh, maybe I don’t want to write novels anymore. Maybe I want to start my own journal or magazine, et cetera, and write nonfiction pieces because wow, that’s really how I’ve grown. That’s how I’ve changed as a person. Sometimes our dreams and goals change because we change. And honestly, that is a good and healthy thing. We are meant to grow and learn and change and evolve as people. And it’s okay if you find yourself going from, I want to be a super rich author like Stephen King and churn out a book every year to, I’m going to live my life with my family, and maybe by the time I am 85, I’ll have written two or three books. Now, Sarah, some of you may be saying that sounds a whole lot like letting your dreams die.

(15:52):
And I would never, ever encourage you to let your dreams die. I’m just saying that as we grow and change and realize who we fully are, our dreams and our goals for who we continue to become may change. And that’s okay. I say this because sometimes we outgrow things that we wanted when we were younger or a different person, and sometimes we hold on to dreams and goals that are no longer a good fit for who we want to be or who we want to become. Sometimes people hold on to ideas and dreams and goals that actually prevent them from finding the kind of success that they’re actually dreaming of. Sometimes their devotion to a specific dream or goal makes them inflexible and unable to pivot to a new way of maybe attaining that goal or dream a k a getting in their own way.

(17:13):
So here’s an example. Someone from a very young age dreams of being a published author, and they are committed to the process. So they finish up a draft of their novel and they begin looking for an agent because their dream is to be traditionally published by a traditional publisher. Now, perhaps this writer has written something very innovative or very different, and they have a lot of trouble finding an agent. Maybe there’s just no one out there who is willing to take a chance on them, or maybe they’re not even querying. Maybe they’ve written their novel and they’re hoping one day that the phone will ring and a publisher will be on the other end and they’ll say, I heard through the grapevine that you wrote a novel. You want to send that my way? Here’s my personal mailing address. I’ll put it on top of my slush pile and read it right away and we’ll have a contract out to you in one week. That’s a dream.

(18:29):
And here’s where I want to be really careful. I don’t want to stomp on your dreams. I don’t want to tread on your dreams, but I also want to say that it’s maybe a good idea to be a little realistic. And I think that here is where some people will kind of shut down or shut me out because their dream is of being discovered. But there’s a gap between how you actually get discovered in real life and how they imagine it will happen. But we’ll say that this person is at least a little bit more realistically grounded, and they understand that in order to publish, you have to kind of put your work out there. You have to query agents, you have to make contacts, et cetera. And so they’ve been querying agents and it’s very frustrating. It’s a very long and frustrating road filled with rejection and disappointment.

(19:33):
Now at this point, at this juncture, this writer has a few options. They can continue trying to find an agent for their novel. They can continue trying to find somebody else who will buy into the work that they’ve created, or they can start thinking about self-publishing. I know for a lot of aspiring writers, self-publishing is a sea of disappointment because it means that somebody else is not curating and validating your work. And when you self-publish the dream of getting a phone call, being discovered, receiving your check for whatever, that won’t happen, and instead, you’ll be finding a cover artist and finding a structural editor to go through your work and you’ll be hitting publish, and you might not receive a box of books that you open up and you pick out that book off the top, and you look at your cover and you look at your name on that cover, and you look on the side and there is a real publisher’s brand there.

(20:53):
What do you do with this? What do you do as you continue to push toward a dream that continually is not coming true? Do you consider self-publishing or would considering self-publishing mean that you’re giving up on your dream to be traditionally published? What is the difference between remaining flexible, being open, looking for new opportunities through side doors versus giving up? Because I don’t want you to give up ever. If you want to write, I want you to write. That is so important. But it gets really tricky when we start thinking about what do we need to hold onto and what do we need to let go of and why? What is it about your dream that is fulfilling?

(21:55):
I want you to really think about that. What is it about your dream that is fulfilling, and how else can you find that sense of fulfillment? I feel like some people might interpret this as kind of a bummer episode where Sarah says, give up on your dreams. They’re not going to happen. But that’s not what I’m saying here. I’m saying that as we grow and change, it’s okay if our goals and our dreams and our means of reaching them shift and change. If you are having trouble getting your book traditionally published, it’s time to think about how can I make this happen? How can I make it happen? And that’s when you start looking at your goals. What will get me to this feeling that I ultimately want? What will get me to a place where I can feel satisfied and fulfilled? If it is 100% traditional publishing, then it’s time to start asking some tough questions.

(23:04):
Why can I not find an agent? Why does my work keep getting rejected? And maybe it’s time to set new goals of finding a writing partner or working with somebody who can workshop your work, working with somebody who can workshop your work that’s not redundant. Maybe it’s time to hire a coach or a structural editor or work with somebody who can kind of coach you into getting traditionally published. Maybe it’s time to start attending or speaking at conferences. Maybe it’s time to move to New York City and camp out at so-and-so publishers headquarters. I do not advise doing that. By the way, please don’t move to New York because Sarah told you to. What I’m saying is there are a thousand things that will get in the way of you and your dream, and I want you to be flexible enough and willing to shift enough that you can work around those barriers and ultimately get what it is that you want.

(24:14):
Be willing to self-publish or be willing to change your work so that it is commercially marketable. And here’s the other thing. Often when we think about our dreams, we think about them as a smooth road and we think of them as uncompromising destinations. But often what we don’t imagine when we’re daydreaming, what we don’t think of is, is there something I’m going to have to give up or sacrifice for the sake of this dream? And I feel like that’s the other thing that is really uncomfortable to consider. You don’t want your dream to die, but maybe you’ll have to let go of something else in order to fulfill that dream. And that’s not something that you want to or are willing to do. So I want you to evaluate what is it you actually want? What is it you actually want to move toward? Are you moving toward a dream and you’re just holding onto it because it’s all you’ve ever known and you don’t want to think about alternatives that might get you the same thing?

(25:31):
Or are you holding onto a dream that you actually don’t want anymore, but you’re just too scared to let it go? Because you’ve heard about what happens when you let dreams die. It’s okay to think of a new dream. It’s okay to realize that what you wanted when you were five years old is different from what you want. Now that you’re 35 and maybe you still want to be a traditionally published author, in which case I know you can do it. It just might be really, really hard. And you’ll have to face a lot of rejection on the way to get there. It can be tempting to think of yourself on an unchangeable trajectory toward X, Y, or Z, but you can always get off of that monorail. You can change, you can shift, you can pivot. You can reconsider what it is you actually want out of your writing. What is it that makes you feel fulfilled or excited or satisfied as a writer? If your dreams change as you grow and learn and evolve, you’re not betraying your former self, you’re growing, and that’s a good thing.

(26:58):
So I’m curious, what is your dream as a writer? And if it helps, I’d encourage you to think of it in stages. And by that I mean what is your pie in the sky dream as a writer? I’ll use myself as an example. I would love to have published 20 books by the time I’m 60. Well, that’s a great dream. However, we’ll put a little bit of realistic-ness in here, a little bit of realism, and I’ll realize that, oh, I’m going to be 60 in 20 years. Can I feasibly write a book every year until then? I mean, I could could if they’re rushed and terrible. Okay, what is it about the idea of publishing 20 books by the time I was 60? What about that is fulfilling the sense of accomplishment, the sense that I’ve made something out of my life, the sense that I’ve come full circle with what I originally wanted when I was a child?

(28:13):
What is it out of that that feels worthwhile, that feels like something you want to stick to? And is there a way to still get that feeling with the time and resources and energy that you have available to you? And there’s a lot of different ways to do this. Yes, I could write and publish a kind of crappy book every year for the next 20 years. If that is what is important to me about my goal is the number of books I can make that happen. Maybe in your case you’d have to quit your day job or abandon your family or something like that. But if that is what is important to you, then that is what you can make happen. It’ll just be at a great cost to other elements in your life. But maybe it’s only important to me that I write a new book every five years until I’m 60. Maybe that will feel just as satisfying. And because I’ll be able to devote the time to each of those books, I know that they’ll be good and that I will be proud of them. And that to me is what feels more satisfying than the sheer quantity of books. And maybe they don’t all need to be traditionally published. Maybe my first two or three will be self-published, and then I’ll work my way into finding an agent, a publishing house maybe if that’s what is important to me.

(29:51):
So I want you to think, what is it about your writing dream that is truly meaningful to you? What is at the core of that dream? What is it that you want out of your writing and out of your life? And if you feel like you’ve never been allowed to think about this before, if you’ve been living in a state of pure survival, if you’ve had the resources available to you, if you’ve never been encouraged by anyone else to dream, then I encourage you to start doing that now. You’re allowed to want things. You’re allowed and even encouraged to grow into a better and more full version of yourself.

(30:44):
Your writing goals and dreams will change as you change, and that is okay and even a good thing because what it ends up doing is highlighting who you truly are and what is important to you in your life. As always, I would love to hear your thoughts on this topic. Am I being unfair? Am I being cruel? Have I lost my sense of hope and idealism? I don’t know. But I would love to know your thoughts. If you’re interested in leaving me a comment, please do go out to the show notes for today’s episode — this is episode 156, and you can find the show notes over at sarahwerner.com — that’s S A R A H W E R N E R.com — and navigate to the Write Now podcast episodes and find episode number 156… It’s called When Your Writing Dreams Change. And scroll down to the bottom and there is a comment box beneath the full transcript for the episode.

(31:54):
Let me know your thoughts because they’re important and I want to know your particular insights and experience. I also want to say thank you to the wonderful people who support the Write Now podcast over on Patreon. Patreon, as always, is a secure third party donation platform that allows you to donate $1 per episode, $5 per episode, literally any amount of money you wish per episode to support the work that I’m doing here to help me pay for production and hosting costs, to help pay for transcripts, and to help keep the show ad free for people around the world. If you’re interested in becoming a patron of the show, head over to sarahwerner.com and go to where it says, support this podcast, and that will take you out to Patreon where you can make your pledge. Alternately, there are other ways of supporting the show, which you can find on my website over at sarahwerner.com.

(32:59):
Today, I would particularly like to thank patrons Laurie, Regina Calabrese, Amber Fratesi, Charmaine Ferrara, Dennis Martin, Mike Tefft, Poppy Brown, Summer, Tiffany Joyner, and Whitney McGruder. You are all amazing and incredible people, and I could not make this show without you. Thank you.

And with that, this has been episode 156 of the Write Now Podcast, the podcast that helps all writers, aspiring, professional, and otherwise, to find the time, energy, and courage you need to pursue your passion and your goals and your dreams… and write. I’m Sarah Werner, and my writing dreams have changed significantly over the years, and that’s okay.