Purposeful Daydreaming: Part 3

Part 3: Daydreaming for Encouragement.

If daydreaming for ideas is the writer’s bread and butter, daydreaming for encouragement is the writer’s heartbeat. If a writer loses heart, the ideas won’t matter. The writer quits.

If you want to be a published writer, your daydreams for seeing your book on the shelves will have to sustain you for a very long time. Longer than you think. Longer than you think you can endure!

I give a lot of pep talks on this blog because I need them myself. So much of what we do, especially when unagented, is self-directed. In James Scott Bell’s The Art of War for Writers, Chapter 19 is titled “The fiction writer must rely on self-motivation.” Yes, very true. I sure don’t have a boss handing out assignments for this writing gig.

Have you heard the saying that you can’t teach passion? You might not be able to teach it, but I think you can encourage it. And if there is no one waving fanning the flames for you, you must do it yourself.

Last summer while on vacation in Canada I picked up a little book called The Maeve Binchy Writer’s Club in the back room of a little independent bookstore. The book is based on a twenty-week writing course. Week 9 is titled “Visualizing Success.”

…I realized that what had kept me going all the dark mornings when I got up at five-thirty to get three hours at the typewriter before going to work, was the thought of the launch party. I could visualise it, and did visualise it…Vain, nonsensical, childish—yes, certainly, but it worked. It kept me at it.

What encourages you in your writing? Seeing a book with your name on it?—Design a book cover and tape it where you work. Like Maeve Binchy, is it the launch party?—Start planning it.

If you don’t daydream for yourself, no one will. You start it off, keep it going, and one day, your readers will join you in your dreams.

Part 1:  Daydreaming for Ideas

Part 2: Daydreaming For the Future.