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Don’t Just Dream It — Do It
To create is to do.
It’s to have the idea for a story and then actually write it. It’s to have a vision of a painting and then actually paint it. You can’t just wish art into existence; you have to make it.
I have close to a million (okay: slight exaggeration!) half-baked ideas on my computer’s hard drive. Stories I started and never finished. Lonely paragraphs of articles or blog posts begun and abandoned. I’m glad I had those ideas, but they’re doing nothing sitting incomplete on the hard drive. They’re not art. They’re not literature. They’re not anything. They haven’t been created… yet.
Like most authors, I’ve listened to someone say, “I have a great book in me, if I just could find the time to write it.” We know, of course, that it takes more than just time to write a book; but even more basically than that, this “great book” currently doesn’t exist. It hasn’t been made.
You create by working at your craft. If someone says they’re “learning their craft,” it means much more than just going to a class, memorizing some lines, thinking about dialogue. It means they’re learning how to be present, how to listen, how to access their emotions. Craft isn’t just what you do as a creative person; it’s also about organizing your personality to attain excellence.
