Our dreams provide a lot of services to the dreamer. They give us hope. They can give us purpose. They can give us a community. Our dreams can also challenge us in ways we never expected or even considered. Our dreams have the wonderful ability to stretch out our horizons and skill sets in a way few things can.
Last week I talked about the group of people around me in Georgia, and how they helped to foster a new dream for me. At the time writing of any kind was not something I actively sought out, doing what I do now was simply thought to be an impossibility. Why? Well to answer that we need to go back a bit further in time. A time of rectangular pizzas, gigantic book-bags and awkward first dates. Yes, it’s time to go back to high school.
For the vast majority of my education writing was a painful thing. Conjugating verbs, diagramming sentences, using proper punctuation, these were all things that I simply never cared about or understood. They were also things I thought being a writer was all about. Turning in a five page report seemed like drudgery. Until my senior year of high school writing was a dull boring place that I simply did not understand.
That all changed for a brief moment my senior year. I was looking for a class to fill in one of my time slots and my girlfriend at the time suggested I take Mrs. Roth’s Creative Writing Class. I like to read, I liked to make little comic books, so why not? A poem was shorter than a five page essay after all. I don’t remember the exact number of projects we had assigned to us but I remember thinking that I should drop the class. I am glad I didn’t. Through out the semester I discovered that writing was so much more than boring, dry mechanics. It was exciting. It was challenging. It allowed me to express myself in new ways. Then it was over. I was forced back to the drudgery of English class essays and sentence structure.
That is where my opinion of writing stayed for many years afterwards; in the gutter. I would dabble here and there with a screen play or a story throughout college. But there was no place for it in my daily life or in my future. Considering my grades in English I apparently wasn’t very good at the subject either.
Fast forward a few years to that night with my friend telling me to write this stuff down. I can say that I was less than enthused at the idea. That night I came home and put rough ideas down on paper, over the next few nights I refined them into something resembling a usable story and then had my friends read it. My new passion and my new dream was born then.
Today I have written three manuscripts, each one longer than the last, and each one several times longer than anything I ever wrote at school. I have several short stories under my belt and I write this blog every week! All of this I would never have imagined doing when I graduated high school, or college for that matter. If you told me I would be trying to write books when I grew up I would have laughed in your face. Yet here I am. I wasn’t trained to do this, I didn’t have a famous mentor take me as his pupil. All I had was the dream, the desire and the passion to take this path. When you dream, dream big! You never know what roads they will take you down. You never know what direction your life will take because of them.