On writing, and dreaming

Is publishing a book a 'dream', an 'ambition' or something else?

A friend once gently scolded me for saying publishing a book is ‘a dream’. She said dreams are unsubstantial and ask from us no commitment or grit. Books, meanwhile, are formed by hours heaped upon hours of thinking, writing, rewriting, lurching from certainty to crushing doubt and back again, while hunched over laptops and notebooks, on long rain-lashed walks, folding laundry and cooking meals, as your mind wanders through the world you’re creating on the page.

As much as we love it, writing is hard.

‘When you describe publishing a book as ‘a dream’ she said, ‘it’s as though it just happens, like… dreams do.’

I nodded in agreement and listened carefully as she asserted that publishing a book should be described as ‘an ambition’ - a solid, concrete word appropriately reflecting the labour required to write a book, in stark contrast to the flimsy tissue of a ‘dream’ that dissolves when soaked in daylight.

I resolved to apply this rigour to myself, even wondering if it was an act of self-preservation to describe publishing a book as a dream: perhaps it made it seem comfortably impossible, my inevitable failure therefore easier to accept.

Despite my attempts to mind-set myself into this new ambitious place, I continued to worry at a small knot of resistance nestled amongst my bones. My friend’s insistence that writers who have published a book should never stand, cradling it’s hard covers between two gentle hands, and declare it ‘a dream’, rang in my ears while I tilted my head as though I couldn’t quite hear her.

As a child, I wrote prodigiously, had poems printed in the local paper, hand-wrote long stories on slanted hand-drawn lines for fun. I was praised for my efforts and flew high at school. At one point I entered a ‘National Young Science Writer’ competition, hosted by a broadsheet newspaper. When I made it through to the final ten I assumed they must have struggled for entries.

At no point did anyone ever, not even once, suggest I might be interested in becoming ‘a writer’. Not once did I consider this path for myself. I was born and raised in a city with a proud history of a dead industry. It was not a place books were written in, or about.

Writing such a paragraph sets the scene for a slide into a sob story, so I want to make it clear that I’ve been fortunate to have many people in my life who have wanted the best for me. The only way in which they ‘failed’ me was in not having a model of a creative life to follow themselves, or to recommend to others. How many of them are home to secret untapped talents, left unrealised because people like us don’t do things like that?

There are, and will continue to be, people who do not need this model - such unicorns imagine themselves into a life no one around them has ever lived - but the endeavour becomes far more plausible and feels entirely possible when an example has been set.

From there, it makes perfect sense to advocate for ‘ambition’ over ‘dreams’ while neglecting to understand that a ‘dream’ is progress when you’re starting from an absence of anything.

These days, a decade into the self-examination and identity shifts motherhood has necessitated, and seven years into slowly developing my own writing practise, I don’t think I’d like to be a full-time writer after all. I love it too much to risk it becoming stale, or a chore. When I write my entire body feels lighter, and I’d hate to turn it into a burden.

I’m still working towards publishing a book and my friend will be pleased to hear I’ve moved on from referring to it as a ‘dream’, not least because writing makes me feel real, and alive, in a way that little else does.

She may be less pleased to hear that ‘ambition’ is still too unshakeable a word for me to use.

Instead, I imagine the possibility of ever publishing a book as a kite: fragile, still flying high and out of reach. But now, in my fists, I clutch strings that tether it to me. Like all kites, it will be buffeted and blown by powerful forces outside my control, but the only way it can escape is if I let it go.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash