Member-only story
Don’t You Dare Let Go of Your Dreams
If you allow practicality to override your passions what do you have left?
At the moment there is a plethora of people out there suggesting that writers should give up trying to find their passion and should, instead, attempt a more realistic approach to life. For realistic approach read ‘follow a course that makes more money’. Money has become the yardstick with which our society measures success. So insidious has this thinking become, the modern assumption is that provided you make money, happiness will automatically follow.
I am disappointed to see how much this mindset is creeping into this platform. There are dozens of writers out there who are subtly, or not so subtly, suggesting that we surrender all of those dreams that attracted us to creative work in the first place. Instead, they would have us take our writing in directions that assure the most chance of financial reward.
One needs to ask oneself where the world would be if every writer, artist or musician had followed this way of thinking.
I am not naive enough to suggest that writers need to abandon reality altogether, but I do believe that they need to cling to those dreams that initially brought them into this field. A chunk of my income is made from ghostwriting. Some of that work can be so…
