We never know what life will throw our way next. Be it a brilliant moment of inspiration, a wall of adversity or something in between, one thing remains the same, our desire to see our dreams completed. In good times or bad it is the dreamer that decides to press forward. It is the dreamer who must take up their tools and create progress. Without us our dreams would wither and fade back into the ethereal shadows.
As you know from earlier posts or just by looking at my prose, I am not the most elegant or technically accomplished of writers. It was because of this my earlier works are hesitant and prone to stop and explain things. Those first stories are terrible, if I want to ever show them to the world I would basically need to keep the core story elements and scrap everything else (I call this burning the leaves off the tree). Today my work is improved and continues to get better. This is because I am committed to my craft. Even though I have no formal education in writing, nor a teacher or mentor, my dreams inch closer with each new story or revision.
Lacking an education and training of a writer I set about learning as much as I could about my craft. Books are a writers best friends and there is certainly no shortage of books about writing. Add the internet to the mix and there is almost nothing that can’t be researched. It is a fantastic thing! Just because we are naive about our dreams doesn’t mean we should stay that way. We cannot claim ignorance as a reason why your dreams remain unfinished. I have seen people in their late forties go back to school to take on a new career. You can learn almost anything today if you are willing too. This is why with a book in one hand and a story journal in the other I pressed onwards. I spent those early days learning from others and applying it directly to the page.
At times I have thought that perhaps writing is not the right path for me. There are certainly easier ways to spend my time after all. There are movies to watch, games to play, outsides to run around in. For some reason I never stopped writing. I stuck with it. When my first manuscripts were returned to me with pages of red notes, I considered each criticism to see where it was valid. When my readers stopped to tell me that they could not understand what was going on helped me to learn how to weave a story together (as opposed to just having blocks of information). My stories cannot write themselves. There was only one person that could write them down and that one person had to learn from experience how to tell a better story.
My characters these days are more natural and less predictable. My story mechanics are stronger and my writing has improved. That does not mean that I have mastered a single thing about this craft. I still have mountains to learn about grammar. The art of story crafting is a well that goes deeper than I will ever know. I will always have an area (or several) that will need improvement. All of our dreams are similar in this aspect. No matter what it is you are trying to do there will always be resources you can learn from. There will always be experiences you can build from. Always keep striving to learn more. To improve. To be more efficient. To reach for our dreams is the same as taking a step towards a life of learning. Each new experience, every new thing you learn, is another brick on the road towards your dreams.