April 27, 2022

The Direction of Your Dreams

I was recently writing in a journal of prompts in response to the question of what I’d like to tell my younger self about my life right now. And what I remembered was how much possibility my younger self once found in the phrase attributed to Thoreau , “Go confidently in the direction of your dreams and live the life you imagine.” Inscribing it into all kinds of scrapbooks, perhaps purchasing a poster of a sunset with it quoted.

What I’d tell my younger self: “Look! I did it.”

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Two years after my first novel came out, I’d found myself in a creative jam. My publisher had rejected my next novel. I was proud of Mitzi Bytes, but its sales hadn’t set the world on fire, and I was feeling pretty despondent. Like this was my chance, and I’d blown it.

(Never mind that so much of things like book sales are outside an author’s control. Suspicions I’d long held were underlined in a really smart and candid recent post by novelist S.K. Ali, who wrote, “Your book sales are not yours to bear…if you love marketing, great! but a publisher has the greatest pull of all and can put a book on any list — NYT, Indie, USA Today etc — without you moving a finger. So, Sajidah, keep doing all of that stuff you do, giveaways, tiktoks, AMAs, but only because you love your readers. [Those things don’t move book sales. YOU don’t move book sales. Don’t bear that burden.]”)

It was late 2018, in response to that despondency, and feeling like I’d used up all my chances, that I decided to conjure some more. In 2019, I launched the #BacktotheBlog Movement, which led to Blog School, and also a wonderful bookselling project I’m still so proud of, the now-departed Briny Books. And then, in the midst of that summer, I signed a deal for my second novel, everything coming up Kerry after all.

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I wonder if any advice I have to impart about going in the direction of one’s dreams would be as relevant if I hadn’t ended up defying the odds and getting that book deal in the end? I think it probably would, because my happy ending was not the end, but just another chapter (hurrah!), but experience has shown me that an author is never set, never really arrives, that writing, like everything, is a process of becoming, and the next thing is never sure. That the advice about going in the direction of one’s dreams never stops being applicable.

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When I say, “Keep going! Don’t give up,” I’m not saying that you should keep beating your head against a brick wall. Sometimes “keep going” means doing something different, a shift, a pivot. I finished a novel in 2007 that nobody wanted to publish, and I’m glad I didn’t go to the ends of the earth in an attempt to find a publisher, because I might have found one if I’d tried hard enough, and that novel wasn’t very good.

What I’m saying is don’t stop creating things. Don’t stop being inspired. The wonderful thing about literature is that readers are so central to the form—there’s nothing passive about it. Keep reading. Keep engaging with ideas. Keep a notebook. Keep a blog. Maybe you have bigger dreams of projects you’d like to get to the end of, but in the meantime, a notebook, a blog. A quilt. A cake. A conversation. All these things are tangible and real. In keeping with the life you’ve imagined.

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(Keep on creating.)

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I started thinking about all of this in response to a recent post by Kelly Duran, whose kindness, generosity and candour as an author has been so refreshing to encounter. Her feelings about where she is two years out from her debut novel resonated with me for sure, and made think about the metrics we have to measure success. As well as the dangers on fixating where we’re going instead of noticing and appreciating where we are right now.

With writing, its always about the next thing. And while I understand that, but it’s not the way I want live my days, to measure out my life. I want to rest on my laurels. I want to breathe. I want to rest.

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I started thinking about all this in response to the book Creative Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto, by Ayun Halliday, whose comics I used to read in Bust Magazine back in the days when I was learning to call myself a feminist. I think I am the small potato I am because of Halliday’s influence, because of her example that it’s possible to live a creative life, to combine that life with motherhood. Blogging’s DIY ethos in line with her zines and off-off-Broadway plays. Her example of how exactly one goes about confidently in the direction of one’s dreams and lives the life she imagines.

Most of us are never going to hit the big time. But is that really the reason we’re doing it?

It’s not the dreams themselves, it’s the direction.

I’m thinking of yoga, and how much of a pose is about reaching for it instead of actually getting there, and how it’s really the reaching that makes the process worthwhile.

If you didn’t have to reach, what would be the point?

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I remember thinking about my goals when I was a little bit older, too old to be penning axioms by Thoreau into pretty notebooks, and I wasn’t actually thinking about Thoreau at all. But I was plotting out my life the way one might be plotting the trajectory of a line on a graph, and it occurred to me that if I tried to be a writer, to write, that even if I never achieved such goals as a published book (or two books, or three, or a bestseller, or a prestigious prize) that I’d end up in a very different and likely more interesting place than if I hadn’t tried at all.

That it’s actually impossible to lose this game.

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What Thoreau actually said, from Walden: “I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”