Meg Dowell Writes

For many people, writing feels like a far-off dream — something they desperately want to happen, but fear they’ll never see come true. Even talented writers who are working to refine their skills and become successful often struggle to figure out how to take their dreams and make them happen.

There are a few potential reasons you might be feeling stuck in this way. And it likely has nothing to do with how capable you are of doing what you’ve set out to do, or even how good of a writer you are. It probably has everything to do with how you’re approaching your writing process. Here are the top reasons you’re not where you want to be as a writer yet — and a few things you can do to get un-stuck and write your way to the career you’ve always wanted.

You’re Setting Unrealistic Goals for the Present You

The truth is, you may WANT to be [insert your end goal here] — a published author; a journalist; making a living off your Substack. The dream itself doesn’t matter. What does matter is that the future version of you as a writer can — and will! — achieve that end goal if you set and follow through on your goals. But you are not the future version of you, the successful version, yet.

Which just means that you can’t hold yourself to standards you aren’t skilled or practiced enough to meet yet. You can’t write 500 words a day if you can’t first effortlessly write 100. You can’t write a full draft of a novel unless you’ve first written a chapter. There’s nothing wrong with setting high expectations for yourself if that’s what motivates you to keep pushing forward. But you have to start with goals you can actually achieve before you can level up to more challenging ones, so to speak.

You Have a Dream, But Not a Plan

So you want to be — for our purposes, let’s say you want to publish a novel. That’s a good dream to have, and a good place to start — you at least know your ideal endgame. When it comes to writing, though, you can’t have an end goal without a plan. Not if you actually want to see your project through to completion.

So you have to ask yourself this: How are you going to get your novel published? You first have to write a first draft. How are you going to write a first draft? That’s potentially a harder question to answer. You need a plan. Are you going to set a weekly word count? Outline first? Go chapter by chapter, week by week? Even if you’re not typically a planner in the “I know how much writing I’m able to get done this week” kind of way, it’s never too late to become one. Without some kind of plan, you’ll eventually lose momentum and stall out. Plans are how success is made.

You’re Still Treating Writing As a Hobby

Most importantly, you should write because you both want to write and enjoy the process of writing. It does take a little more than treating writing strictly as a hobby, though, to take it to the next level — if that’s really what you’re set on doing. You should never write if you aren’t fulfilled by the process. It should always remain an important means of enriching your soul no matter what.

But to turn a dream into a reality requires a slightly different mindset. You can still have your writing time that’s “just for you.” But when it’s time to work on your book or your blog, or whatever project you’re taking on at the moment, you’re no longer engaging in a hobby. You’re working. There are going to be days you don’t want to do the work! But guess what? The work has to get done, because that’s how goals become proud achievements.