Dreams

From Menletter March 2010

By Tim Baehr

My jaw dropped this month when I read the following e-mail: I am happy to inform you that your fiction entry "Three Stories about a Diner" has been accepted for publication...

A small literary journal in Florida had actually accepted a short story from me.

When I was in ninth or tenth grade, I won an honorable mention for a short story in a national competition. I thought I was a pretty good writer, and I dreamed about becoming famous for short stories with O. Henry-like twists at the end.

Other stuff intervened - I think it's called "life" - and the dream became, by definition, unrealistic. I married young and had to make a living, and I had majored in a subject (linguistics) that didn't exactly have commercial potential unless I stayed in academia.

I did manage to land an editor's job in educational publishing, so I was at least connected to the world of words. From there, I became a dictionary editor, freelance textbook writer-for-hire, technical writer, programmer, and teacher of business writing. Although I was being paid to write, I was always doing the bidding of others: an actor in a series of plays that someone else wrote the scripts for.

A couple things happened over the years. I started helping friends out with various newsletters, sometimes writing editorials, and ended up writing over a hundred essays for Menletter, which will have its eighth anniversary next month.

I also retired and stumbled on the chance to take a couple of courses in fiction writing and join some writers' groups. I discovered a fascination with very short "flash" fiction - under 1,000 words - and wrote over 60 stories. (The diner story is actually three flashes glued together.) And a friend introduced me to a website that listed places to send manuscripts.

So now, some five decades after my honorable mention and my dream, I'm about to become a published short-story writer. I'll never make a living at it, and I'll never be famous, but in a big-picture sense the dream has been fulfilled.

There's a larger point to this; otherwise this essay would be just an extended brag (as in "Don't break your arm patting yourself on the back").

How many of us have had a youthful dream that turned out to be unrealistic or impractical? Many of us men, I suspect, have had a dream based on a spark of talent or desire for art, geology, exploration, poetry, cooking, music, inventing, sports, acting, your own business, antique car restoration - you get the idea. And some lucky few actually got to pursue and develop that dream.

Many more of us tripped over or backed into other areas of endeavor: ideally fulfilling, maybe even involving a lot of money. But not usually. And because we were responsible to other people for our continued employment, our youthful dreams faded and took on a certain unreality (that was then; this is now; it never would have worked out; I would have starved). And from time to time a great sadness would wash over us. Those dreams may be the closest we ever come to creating our own identity. As the dreams fade, we begin to doubt who we really are.

What can we do about all this? With the clarity of 20-20 hindsight, and admitting to having had a heap of good luck, I can offer the following:

Don't give up. If thinking about the fading of the dream is painful, use the pain as motivation to do something.

Do something related. Turn the dream into a hobby or volunteer your talent. Contribute to the company newsletter. Cook for friends. Start a garage band. Join a softball league. Teach in adult ed. Tutor. It's one way to keep your hand in, and it might even lead to a paying job someday.

Adjust expectations. It's okay to dream about being a Pulitzer-prize playwright, and with a lot of ambition, sacrifice, and luck a few people make it. Does frustration and bitterness have to be the lot of the rest of us? We need to ask, "Am I doing the best I can? Am I using my ability and talent to their fullest?" Notice that this is not a lowering of expectations (a defeatist notion) but a fine-tuning to the reality of who we are.

Keep learning. Even the best of the best in any given field find they must keep practicing, studying, and learning new techniques and tools. When I got back into fiction, I took a couple of courses in creative writing, and I'm now volunteering in a heavy-duty college course in grammar and rhetoric. It's amazing (though it shouldn't be!) how much I still don't know.

Be patient. Opportunity to follow the dream may pop up if you wait long enough.

Which leads to the final point:

Be alert. It's all too easy to stumble on an opportunity and focus only on the stumble. So we pick ourselves up and keep going, leaving opportunity in the dust.

Let's hang in there. Self-fulfillment may be only a stumble away.