Letting go of the dream allows me to write

In response to #WriteHere’s ‘Dream Job’ prompt

Writers say that there’s a difference between wanting to write, and wanting to be a writer. It’s no great spoiler to say that they look down on people who want the latter without doing the work of writing. As a child, I played at writing often. Fractious starts of stories strewn across half-filled notebooks, documents I would write in everyday, then not at all. I didn’t do this to learn how to write. I did it to become one of them. To be worthy of the idea of a role which filled me with so much love and awe.

Sometimes, when you start to inch closer towards a dream, you realize how little you really want it. When I started my literature & creative writing degree, it made me cringe. My writing grades usually teetered below average — and though I knew in my heart of hearts that these marks were fair, considering my muddy grasp of plot, syntax, and purpose — they seemed to threaten my identity.

Throughout school I was presumed a writer just like most children quickly become matched up to their most obvious skills and interests. No one could suggest more than vague hints of what else was available for me, so I just assumed I’d grow into the label, somehow. There was no tangible notion of what jobs a love of literacy could lead to — and growing up in working class South Wales, my understanding didn’t go far beyond ‘shops or offices.’

Still, this question of identity didn’t grieve me for long, compared to people who are genuinely wedded to thankless vocations.

I started to find it easier to write, the less I cared about being a writer. When I pocketed part time jobs and volunteering gigs and started the messy business of living. I wrote ‘in the margins,’ about whatever I wanted to. Unafraid of looking ignorant, once I’d accepted that I did. I still didn’t write as regularly as most people in a writing degree should have. But when I did, I wrote exuberantly — because writing was free from the burden of being a fallen calling.

After graduation, I inched towards marketing and content writing. Sometimes the work made the absence of my old dream sting, where pragmatism brushed against idealism. But business writing was much easier to structure, to view as a problem-solving exercise without having to exercise creative demons.

When I started freelancing towards the end of 2020, I felt compelled to try and monetise my every skill. Occasionally, I’d take a break from chasing clients, and try out the old dream instead, writing new stories and editing old favourites, submitting them to journals I’d barely bothered to research.

Too thin skinned to become the writer in an anecdote about persistence, I’d not even sent off tens of submissions in two years. I risked it only every few months or so, when I’d sufficiently recovered from the previous rejection. I couldn’t accept rejections as part of the deal. Every one made me feel miserable, and I’d take weeks or months to coax myself back onto the keyboard. The few times where something I’d actually tried to craft met with disinterest, that feeling was honest.

But most of the time, rejections didn’t feel so crushing because of my writing itself. They just added to the exhaustion of seeing professional rejections — contracts not renewed, leads who stopped replying, stable jobs I didn’t get — pile up on me at the same time, and feeling unable to visualise a future where my best laid plans went right.

Having my professional life stabilise helped me to decide to attempt these #WriteHere challenges. Partly for functional reasons — I’ve always been awful at balancing hobbies, or indeed any of the minutia of life — with work — but also to take writing back for myself. To remind myself it’s now an action, an interest, rather than a dream. I wanted to put the power in my own hands — writing for the hell of it, and not for editors — and allow myself a proper inquiry about what place I really want writing to occupy in my life.

Because I know I can never renounce it entirely.