When I was eight years old, I got my own library card, which felt like my very own key to a treasure trove.  That was the year I held a children’s book in my hands and knew what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.  I don’t remember the book or the author, but I remember how the author described herself.  She said, “I drive a station wagon full of kids, and I write books.”

I remember thinking, I want to do that someday.

The urge to write was something I was born with, like my DNA.  Holding that book in my hands gave me a framework for the desire, a mold to pour my writing talent into.

Ever since then, I’ve always known that I wanted (no needed!) to write and publish fiction for children. And though I postponed the dream, dilly-dallying around for many years, first to earn a living and secondly because I was scared, I did eventually dive in and publish my first set of children’s books… and have many more on the way.

I believe that each of us has something we are born to do, something unique, something we can do better than anyone else in the world because we were born to do it.

Do you know what your dream is?  Something that won’t go away, something that just itches at you, wanting to be done? 

If you have a dream that just won’t let go of you, and are looking for a way to get started, here are some simple tips that helped me:

• Find the courage to begin.  For myself, what it finally came down to was that the pain of not going after my dream was greater than the pain caused by my fears. As Elizabeth George says in Write Away: One Novelist’s Approach to Fiction and the Writing Life, “I was faced with the simplest life question I’ve ever had to answer. I asked myself whether, on my deathbed, I wanted to sigh and say ‘I could have written a novel’ or ‘I wrote a novel’.”

• Accept the gremlin on your shoulder, but don’t let it silence you.  The gremlin is that negative part of ourselves that we all have, that little creature who perches on your shoulder and says “What you’re doing really sucks. You will fail at this. Other people are far more talented than you are.”

• Do something you care passionately about. I love children’s books and I love writing for children. I love the way children are so honest and open, how easily they tell you how they feel, and how they feel no guilt at all about dropping a book halfway through if they don’t like it. I am passionate about giving children stories that are fun and that also give them some emotional and spiritual vitamins along the way.

• Make a list of what has to be done, from start to finish, to get the dream done.  List every task you can think of.  Put them all in one file, or in one notebook.

• Break each task down into tiny pieces.

• Do one tiny piece at a time.

 

• Put in the time. Apply “bum glue”. In the book I referred to earlier, Elizabeth George quotes a best-selling Australian writer (Bryce Courtenay) as saying what is necessary to success is “bum glue.”  (“Bum” is Australian for butt.) What Courtenay is saying is that success comes to the writer with the most “bum glue,” that is, who stays in the chair in front of the typewriter or PC for the longest time. So, keep it at. Persevere. Do something to advance your dream, day in, and day out.

• Last and most importantly, understand that fear is a constant companion when we create. Feel the fear and do it anyway.  Dreams are very scary things. They call us out of our comfort zones.  They involve deep fears: fear of rejection, fear of failure, and what can be even more terrifying, fear of success. I was terrified that going after my dream would destroy the beautiful life I had, and that ultimately my family would resent the time I spent away from them. In reality, the opposite turned out to be true.  The joy of finally doing what I was born to do enriched my life, and my family were happy for me, that I had made my dream come true.

I let my fear stop me for far too long.  Don’t wait as long as I did, to start advancing on the path of your dream. 

You’ll be glad you did.

To quote Elizabeth George one more time: “The biggest benefit, the one I treasure the most, has been gaining the relative peace of knowing I’m doing what I was meant to do. That outweighs all the rest, believe me.”