Sometimes I Take My Own Advice

Years ago, I had a dream where I tried to be a writer. I mean a literal dream that occurred as I slept, not my lifelong dream of writing.

I stood in a white kitchen in a bright house with a vast, green backyard abutting a forest. The slant of sun said summer. Colorful stained-glass-style pieces of glasswork hung in front of the window, and my then-twenty-ish self reached out to touch one shaped like a corkscrew. On the counter was a pencil, inscribed with nonsense: “sentences-entences.” I asked the woman at the table what it meant, and turned to look at her.

The knowledge that she was older-me was, like most dream-knowing, immediate and had nothing to do with context clues. I guess she looked like me, but older. She wore ridiculously huge glasses, like old ladies in the 1970s, and she was surrounded by papers and books as she wrote.

“You can’t write a book until you’re 40,” she said. “You won’t have the life experience necessary before then.” It wasn’t unkind, but matter-of-fact. If I hadn’t known it was me, her delivery of this disappointing but logical fact would have been a huge clue. Young-me didn’t argue, but rather accepted it as fact and looked back out the window to the dragonflies darting in the sun. “Huh,” I breathed, pondering what she had said.

It was insight, not prophesy.

I knew it wasn’t a prophesy because if it had been, I would have challenged it. I challenged EVERYTHING back then. Especially if I thought they were criticizing me. So if it had felt like “You don’t have what it takes,” I would have woken up angry and ready to burn some shit down to prove her wrong.

Instead, it felt like solving a riddle: “Oh OKAY, I see it now.” Despite my tendency to assume the worst, I understood that it was a gift. I was giving myself time to experience things without feeling pressure to turn it into art, and time to practice my skills and read thousands of books and really build a base of knowledge and trials and errors.

Six months away from 40 and I’m 40,000 words into a story that will definitely end up novel length. And I fucking love it. I’m excited to write it, and doing so has taught me what works for me in terms of how to get my ass in the chair and put words on a page. Not only that, but I’m confident I can do this long term. I found my balance between inspiration and discipline, creativity and consistency.

I also feel pretty vindicated that old-me was correct and young-me was smart enough to listen. Not everything I dream ends up occurring, but, a troubling number of them do. Fingers crossed that the ones with alien invasions and my frequent, painful deaths stay fiction.