This year I have set out to self publish one of my books. When I first thought of the idea for the story I thought it was brilliant. After I wrestled it onto the page and read it again I found it… lacking. I spent a year doing rewrites and working on dialogue and polishing the text up. Hard work. Tedious work. Yet I thought it was worth the effort, and eventually sent it around to agents and slush piles hoping to land an agent. All of that was in 2015, and that story stayed in a (metaphorical) drawer for the next four years as I undertook massive changes to my life. I came out as transgender, made a new life, got a new job, a new house, and was happy and content. Yet something kept bringing me back to my keyboard. There were always new ideas to explore and new stories to tell. I tell you all of this because that original story idea is the same one I dusted off earlier this year to self publish. I selected this one first because I had already put so much effort into it that I hoped it would just need some light editing and an amazing cover.
I was so very mistaken.
The years had not been kind to this story, I have moved personally and professionally and this story, once the height of my skills and creative power, was mired with mistakes. Reality can be harsh when it comes to our dreams. What we expect is often not what we receive. The perfect shining dream often comes out misshapen and deformed when exposed to the light of day. For artists and writers this is often due to our skill, the final tool that must be honed. Our dreams, still hot and malleable from the fire and the hammer are tempered by our skills. It is the final constraint to our dreams, after all the determination and grit, our skills will ultimately be the final mark we leave on a dream.
We all begin our chase with an idea, a vision of perfection and beauty that only we can understand fully. Our dreams, before they are born into this world, are perfect. Our passion see’s no flaws, our desire cannot bear them. Our skill is where expectation and reality clash and our dream becomes something solid, something we can actually touch. It can be very discouraging to have a dream you have worked hard on not meet the expectations you imagined. Yet, there is some good news in this. Our skills can be improved. They can be built upon, strengthened and honed. I was not born a writer, I had to work at it. My old manuscript is getting some serious rewrites right now only because I have worked to improve my writing skills. I see the errors on the page now because of that growth. I am sure I will read that story again in five years and see even more changes that could have been made.
Here’s the hard part. Accept the truth that nothing is perfect, not even our dreams. Write, create, build to the very best of your abilities, reach and stretch as far as you can, grow. Eventually, you will have to decide to do something with what your dreams produce. You can toss it away, your can put it in a drawer, or you can put it out there into the world and move on to another project, another dream. You have to learn to let a project end, to send it out into the world because no matter how much you toil on it there will always be some flaw, some mistake. Let it go. For me personally, I think it would be a shame for me to keep these tales only to myself. So I must let them go. I will put them out into the world to be seen and read and judged. Then I will sit at my keyboard and write a new tale, and then I will write another after that. Nothing is perfect but each time we reach for our dreams we grow, we improve, we move closer towards that ideal we hold in our heads. Each time we improve and grow we move just a little bit closer towards our dreams.