Writing Inspirational Quote #amwriting #writingtips

“If your dreams do not scare you, they are not big enough” – Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Africa’s First Female President

Writing a novel was my dream.  Getting started was the hardest part, because with a dream that–at the time, with my schedule and inexperience–would certainly take me years of work (two and a half to finish the first draft, to be exact), then take years to edit, submit, wait, revise, resubmit, wait more (one very long year), and might possibly never even succeed in terms of getting contracted, the list of reasons to NOT begin such an overwhelming task stack up quickly. Because it’s scary.

A printed out first draft -
that's a lot of red pen!

But it was my dream, and I told myself if I didn’t even try, I certainly wouldn’t achieve it.  And then I finally typed up those first pages (which are long gone from the final novel, but apparently still exist, as I discovered when I cleaned out a desk in the basement), then I had started, and when I start something, I rarely stop until I’m finished.  Even if it takes years.

So embrace those scary dreams.  The time will pass anyway, whether you are going after your goals or not.  That first novel of mine, SILVER LAKE, was eventually acquired by a bigger publisher, and recently hit the #1 Bestseller ranking in Ghost Mysteries on Amazon, almost four years after the original publication.  That’s a dream I never even entertained when I began this journey!  So dream big, push the fear down, and go for it!