 INTRODUCTION
Wanting to be a writer blows. Wanting to be any type of artist sucks. There is this little, nagging need that some force of nature inserted into you, and it gives you this nigh-impossible benchmark for success that you will always aim for, rarely achieve, and continually compare yourself against. It’s no way to live a life. I love writing, and at gunpoint, I’d never give it up, but every once in a while, I’ll quietly wish that I could be happy doing anything else. Probably the unhappiest part of being an artist is the gradual acceptance that you are going to need to get a job. If you want to live a life of any sort of comfort, you need to pay the bills, and seeing as it’s not the 80s anymore, you can’t survive off the odd magazine article or dive-bar gig. So the question becomes: how do I keep the dream alive while the realities of life are tearing me down? Outside of bourbon, I’m going to go into a few ways to get after it. The methods may not be groundbreaking, but let me try and explain them in a way that will finally get through to you. REALISTIC WRITING GOALS I hear this little tidbit a lot. It’s a mainstay of every blog post I’ve seen that tries to help out the struggling writer. It is absolutely true. A writer needs to work with what they’ve got. We’d all love to tackle our stories for four hours a day, Stephen King style, but for most of us, that’s just not realistic. If you only have an hour a day to scribble something down, then you need to adjust your expectations. Knocking out a paragraph in a day is always better than knocking out nothing. What people don’t address about this piece of truth, however, is that it fucking sucks. This piece of advice suggests a realistic concept to a group of people with an unrealistic goal. We have a dream, we want to write books, and we want to be famous for a medium that fewer and fewer people are
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