Obstacles To Pursuing My Writing Dream
What obstacles have you overcome in your life to get where you are, and what obstacles do you foresee facing as you pursue your dream of writing? (100 to 250 words)
Like Holly, I gave up further schooling in favour of leaping head-first into life. At the ultra young age of just seventeen years I decided I wanted to have a baby and be a Mum for a living after a very short false start in retail. The day my daughter was born was a huge wake up call. Life was really real and now I was completely responsible for this little person I had created.
But life moved on. As a stay-at-home Mum I wrote a little here and there. It didn’t take me long to realise that I could eke out a modest and relatively pain-free existence writing non-fiction. And because I tinkered online creating websites I started getting asked to do that too. So I did. And the money was good. When my marriage ended that income was all I had but it wasn’t enough to support a mortgage and two children. So, after slugging for a few more years, I decided to give it up and go back to school to retrain on the governments dime.
Through it all, I’ve yearned to write fiction and I’ve tinkered at it with shifting degrees of conviction, but have found the anxiety and pain of fiction easier to run away from than combat. I foresee the urge to let life take other paths will continue to tempt me but I am hoping to learn how to put aside the fear and anguish and make a life and a future for myself and my family through my fiction writing.
This post is in response to one of Holly Lisle's workshop activities from Mugging The Muse. I highly recommend this short (and incredibly cheap! just 99 cents!) course for any writer interested in developing their writing passion and firing up their Muse.