On the Benefits of Failure

If you’ve been around this space for any length of time at all, you know I’ve talked quite a bit in this space about my struggles with depression, and how it often centers itself around my lack of success as a writer.  Often I’ll become overwhelmed by an obsession with my own failures that sucks me into a spiral of darkness and self-loathing.

And the truth is I have had a fair number of “failures” in my life, particularly in my efforts as a writer. But in my days of calm when the clouds of depression aren’t casting their black shadows on my life, I can say that there is a great deal to be thankful for in failure.

Of course it goes without saying that no one wants to fail. No one wants to send out a manuscript and have it rejected. In our minds the perfect world would be filled with one success after another, triumph upon triumph, world without end. But the truth is there are real benefits to failure and defeat.

Failure builds…well most people would say character. Which is probably true, except “character” is a pretty difficult thing to pin down under one definition. So I’ll use my own squiffy words if its all the same to you. Failure builds thickness. Thickness of heart. Thickness of soul. Thickness of skin.

Cuts and scabs and blisters aren’t things anyone would wish for, but when they’ve healed, they leave behind tissue that is tougher and more resilient than it ever could have been before. Failure does the same for the soul. It thickens us up, gives us strength we didn’t have before.

But more than that, failure can be catalyst for innovation and creativity. Consider the plight of the failed writer for a moment. He’s written any number of stories that went nowhere commercially. Over and over he’s read the rejection form letters in his email inbox with a sinking heart. And yet, for some reason, he won’t give up. Maybe he can’t give up. Who can say?

Now consider his successful counterpart. She is the one who sold the first novel she ever wrote, hurtled to meteoric stardom in the matter of a few short months and raked in millions from the sales of her books.

Of these two, who is the one most likely to grow as a writer? Who is the one most likely to take risks, to try new things, to stretch their limits beyond what they’re fully comfortable with? Our successful example may very well find herself confined to the genre and style of fiction that won her stardom. She may consider branching out, trying new things, but before she does she must stop and consider: “What will my fans think?” “How will my public react?” “What if I fail?”

The failure on the other hand is unfettered by these worries. He knows exactly what will happen if he fails. He’s been there. He’s done that. He’s got the kitschy coffee mug.

Out of a hundred failures, what’s one more? Why not try something bold and original? Why not do something no one thinks will work? If falls flat on his face, who will be surprised?

And this, I believe, is the true grace of failure. As an “aspiring” writer, you literally have nothing to lose. Your maybe ten Twitter friends (Oh, sure, you’ve got lots more “followers” than that, but in my experience it’s only ten or so that really care) aren’t going to turn on you like ravenous piranha if you drop of a dud of a door-stopper on them. No one is going to stop you in the supermarket to eviscerate you for writing an entire novel in second-person future-tense.

And that makes you the most important thing in the literary community today. Because who’s going to be the one to break out with something inventive and groundbreaking, a book that through caution to the wind, pulls out all the stops, and charges ahead with wanton enthusiam?

A failure, that’s who. Someone who’s tried everything twice, and couldn’t quite make it work. Someone with absolutely nothing to lose.

This isn’t a call to flip the middle finger to the mainstream. This isn’t a screed against successful fiction writers. But it is a call to stop trying to do what’s cool and popular. It is an appeal to start writing freely and without fear.

Only when you learn to embrace the benefits of failure can you unlock your true potential for success. Only then can you become the writer you were meant to be.

HOW TO GET A BAZILLION FOLLOWERS ON TWITTER WITHOUT REALLY TRYING!!!

Writers, we need to talk. I know you’ve been told that social media is the holy grail of indie marketing, but I think some of you may have gotten the wrong idea.

Here’s what happens. You’re on Twitter right? And you look around you and say, “I need more followers to hawk my wares at. How else am I ever going to make it as a writer?”

Well I am here to tell you exactly how you get bunches and bunches of people following you. Are you ready? Here goes:

Find a bunch of people who’s “follower” to “following” ratio indicates that they follow back, and then follow them. And if they don’t follow you back within a week or so, unfollow those ungrateful jerks and look for more accounts that are ripe for the picking. And when you hit Twitter’s limit on the number of people you’re allowed to follow, gripe and whine about it like the shameless leech that you are.

Don’t worry about silly things like “connecting” with people or “making friends.” Don’t try to learn anything except how to expand your Twitter empire. And definitely don’t make an effort to be interesting in any way.

Okay, since it was theoretically possible that some of you didn’t get it, THAT WAS SARCASM!

Over the months that I’ve been on Twitter I have come to hate this practice with a purple burning rage. It’s part of the reason I’ve stopped automatically following people back. It’s not that I’m not grateful for the people who really are interested in me and what I have to say, but there are just so many people out there engaging in this practice that now I only follow back people who engage me in actual conversation.

But the thing that really tipped me over the edge enough to post about this, was that recently I read a blog post recommending in all seriousness exactly the kind of follow trolling I just described as a legitimate way of building your platform.

[Head Explodes Here]

Here’s the thing. I get it. I know you want to be the one with thousands of followers and a massive Klout score. But instead of follow trolling, I have a better idea.

Try having something to say.

Be funny. Be interesting. Be informative. Be just plain weird if you want to.

And I’m not saying you can’t give up your humanity, and only tweet something that’s interesting or witty. Talking about your normal boring life is fine too from time to time.

But whatever you do stop playing the numbers game. Because I can promise you the thousands of people who are following you back just because you followed them, aren’t going to have nearly the same level of involvement with you as the people who are following you because they want to hear what you have to say.

I’m not saying quantity doesn’t matter. I’m just saying quality matters more.

So stop looking at Twitter like a marketing platform, and start looking at it as a digital world filled with amazing people, with insights to share, jokes to tell, and advice to give. Because that’s what it is.

Twitter is made out of people.

And that is it’s power.

[No, you’re not getting a Soylent Green reference. Seriously, have you people even seen that movie?]

Lady Gaga and the Zen of Weird

Lady Gaga is ugly.

Which is an okay thing. Really, it is. Not everyone was born beautiful. In fact, in a way, it’s inspiring. Because if you think about the rest of the women in the music industry you’re going to come up with a whole pile of gals whose talent is riding on the coattails of their sex appeal.

That isn’t to say that Lady Gaga doesn’t have sex appeal. But it’s a different kind of sex appeal. She draws people in by being completely and inscrutably weird.

And the thing is, I’m not even sure its real. Every time I hear about this woman making some bizzare fashion statement, wearing a dress made out of the bodies of still-living iguanas (give it time; it’ll happen) I think to myself, “That woman is a genius,” not because I think that she’s making a brilliant fashion move, but because I understand she’s making a brilliant career move.

Weird sells.

And since I’ve got a certain vested interest in what sells, I sit up, pay attention, and start taking notes.

Which brings me to the topic at hand. A few days back Chuck Wendig made a post about how writers should try to be more like rock stars. And then, less than a week later, he issued a disclaimer which basically said, “Ha, ha, just kidding guys, maybe don’t take things so seriously, yeah?”

And while I understand what he was doing with the disclaimer, I have to say, I’m a little disappointed. I think he was right the first time. Writers should be more like rock stars.

Why?

Because there are eleventy-six billion of us on Twitter alone. We’re drowning in a sea of #amwriting hashtags and “Got my wordcount goal today. Hooray for me!” Tweets. There’s nothing wrong with that, per say, but if we’re going to make an impact we have to do something to stand out.

And yes, before you say it, I know that writing a good book is the most important thing. But it isn’t the only thing.

Because writing a book is about telling a story. But turning yourself into a rock star is about becoming a story.

People want to know an author’s story. They want to know that J. K. Rowling wrote the first Harry Potter in some coffee shop. They want to know that Stephen King threw out his first draft of Carrie and only kept working on it because his wife liked it. They want to know that Stephanie Meyers is really an alien from Raxacoricofallapatorius cloaked in human flesh.

So get out there and be at least a little weird. Make some crop circles. Do some graffiti. Make a drunken death threat against your mayor.

Get noticed. Give people a reason to care. Become your own rock star.

People will say, “Oh yeah, that’s that book by Joe Schmoe. He’s the guy who lit himself on fire and swan dived off Niagra falls last year.”

People will also say, “You mean there’s actually some dude named Joe Schmoe? Far out, man. Far out.”

And no, I’m not kidding.

(Except maybe about the death threat thing. Don’t do that.)

The Musical Fruit

I’ve never been good at tooting my own horn. And don’t get me wrong, I try. My parents even had me taking lessons for a while. Maybe its the fact that my lips get tired after a while, or maybe emptying my spit valve is just too disgusting for me to think about. I don’t know what it is, but after years of trying I’ve decided that becoming a professional trumpet player just wasn’t in the cards.

So I decided, “Hey, I’ll become a writer. No tooting of horns required there.” Only I was wrong. The horn of need follows me, it HAUNTS me. It lives in my dreams, and I am forever falling into the darkness of its terrifyingly smooth and circular mouth.

That’s right. Because as a writer, I have to do a little something called, (gulp), self-promotion.

I have to get out there and tell people, “You know that money you were planning on spending a deep-tissue massage for your gerbil? Well maybe you should take some of that money and spend it on my book instead.”

And it terrifies me.

Why? Well for one thing there’s that tiny nagging fear at the back of my mind whispering that I’m really not that good. It doesn’t matter that I’ve had a number people who are not my mother read my story and generally conclude that it is of acceptable and even admirable quality. I still can’t help thinking of myself as a hack. A wannabe.

And that’s a terrible place to be. Because what self-promotion is saying is, “There are people out there who would love to read what I’ve written, and it’s my job to make sure they know about it.”

Wow. Just writing that sentence was hard. In fact, you know what? Writing this whole blog post has been difficult for me. I’ve been dithering away the morning by doing chores and finishing a book I’ve been reading all because it’s become increasingly apparent to me that I’m not good at this self-promotion thing.

That has to change.

It’s not that I need to become some egotistical windbag, constantly spamming my Twitter feed with how great my work is, but there’s no point in putting the work into writing the book if no one ever reads it. Otherwise I might as well stuff it in a trunk somewhere.

Because the truth is, if I’m going to have the balls to sell my work at all that means I have to believe that you want my story more than you want your dollar. That you will, in fact, find my writing to be worth more than many of the other things your dollar might have bought you.

Still, it isn’t easy. This isn’t an instruction guide. It’s not me telling you that I’ve solved the problem and here’s how you can too. But maybe just recognizing that I’ve got some issues is a good place to start.

If you’ve got some advice to share I’d love to hear it.

In the mean time, this might be the proper place to announce that I’m giving one of my short stories a nice official roll-out announcement on this blog tomorrow. I’ll be wincing at my keyboard as I try to say nice things about my own writing. So stay tuned for that.

A Cure for Exploding Head Syndrome

Dear Twitter,

We need to talk. See, there’s this thing you do, not all the time mind you, but on specific occasions that is getting really irritating.

I’m talking, of course, about your practice of trying to be humorous about current events. This is on the whole, not a terrible thing. But two things cause it to become tedious in the extreme.

First, most tweeters aren’t that different.

Second, most tweeters aren’t that funny.

So what you end up with is a tweet stream filled with people making the same exact joke over and over and over again.

Let us take for example the recent non-event that was “The Rapture.” It might behoove us to ask why such a ridiculous notion gained such widespread interest in the first place, but such questions are beyond the scope of this letter. Instead, let me just say that if I had seen one more, “Well, I’m still here guys, hur, hur, hur” tweet on the twenty-first, my head very well may have exploded.

Can you imagine the mess that would have made, Twitter? Can you imagine the look of shock on my wife’s face if she had walked into the room and found my body crumpled on the floor amid the shattered wreckage of what had once been my shapely and brilliant head? Not so funny now is it?

I suppose that in some ways this phenomenon is an inevitable part of developing an ecosystem of information between individuals that all live on the same planet, but it is irritating all the same. This is why I’m send out a call to you to do your part to prevent head explosions.

And just how can you do this? Why, by using the Double Bass Test of course.

What’s that? You’re not familiar with the Double Bass Test? Well then allow me to enlighten you with a quote from the best time-traveling romantic detective ghost story ever written, Douglas Adams’ Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency.

“I’m a private detective.”
“Oh?” said Kate in surprise, and then looked puzzled.
“Does that bother you?”
“It’s just that I have a friend who plays the double bass.”
“I see,” said Dirk.
“Whenever people meet him and he’s struggling around with it, they all say the same thing, and it drives him crazy. They all say, ‘I bet you wished you played the piccolo.’ Nobody ever works out that that’s what everybody else says. I was just trying to work out if there was something that everybody would always say to a private detective so that I could avoid saying it.”
“No. What happens is that everybody looks very shifty for a moment, and you got that very well.”

The essence of the Double Bass Test is in asking yourself, “Is this joke so obvious that thousands of other people may be making it even as we speak?” If the answer is yes then don’t make the joke.

The Double Bass Test can also be useful in everyday life as our quote illustrates. Of course there will be times when a Double Bass Joke slips through the cracks, but on the whole you will be well served by following this principle, and thousands of beautiful heads everywhere can be saved from an awful and gruesome demise.

Sincerely,

Albert Berg

P.S. My book is on sale in the Kindle store for 99 cents. I’m not very good at promoting these things, but if you were on the fence because of the price (and believe me I know what it’s like to balk at paying three dollars for a book because you just don’t have the expendable cash) then maybe this is a good time to snatch it up. I’ll probably keep this sale going until the end of the week. So there’s that.

P.P.S.

Yesterday was National Towel Day and nobody told me. This makes me sad.

A Short Story for the Long Tail

Tomorrow is the big day!

Those of you who read my blog and Twitter feed regularly know what I’m talking about. Yes ladies and gentlemen, tomorrow marks the midpoint of the series of “How Not To Be A Terrible Foster Parent” classes my wife and I are taking. And also, there’s some little thing about me publishing a book?

In all seriousness though, I’m super excited about this. Not really because I think this is going to be the magical day that changes everything and makes me rich, but it’s the start of something new, and in some ways, the end of something old.

See, for the longest time I looked down on the idea of self-publishing. My philosophy was basically this: if your work isn’t crap someone will publish it; if you’ve decided to self-publish it’s because your ego is too big to admit that your writing stinks.

I’ve…mellowed on that position quite a bit over the years. It’s true that there is a lot of garbage out there in the electronic publishing universe, but that only makes sense. If you create a system where anyone can publish their work, your really shouldn’t be surprised if when you get a fair amount of sub par submissions. But there are plenty of legitimately good authors who have put good work out there on the electronic marketplace, and when you get right down to it, it’s not that difficult to sort the good from the bad.

So I’m self-publishing. That doesn’t mean I’ve given up on the traditional marketplace altogether, but I’ve come to realize a couple of things that help me to understand the divide between traditional publishing and self-publishing that informed my decision to go the electronic route, at least for now.

First, traditional publishers are looking for traditional books. I know there are some rare exceptions out there. The fact that House of Leaves ever saw the light of day at all is  testament to the fact that some publishers are still willing to take a risk on something radical and different. But what people forget is that big publishers exist for one reason and one reason only. It’s not to promote young authors. It’s not to bring a new and exciting creative vision into the world. It’s to make money.

Some people look down on this, but these people are, frankly, stupid. If you’ve got a company, the whole point is making money. Which means that you focus on the things you know people are going to buy, like thrillers, mysteries and romances. And yes, I know that I’ve done my share of whining about genres, but the truth is the casual reader isn’t interested in experimental literature and ergodic fiction. They want to buy what they’ve always bought and big publishers would be fools not to deliver that kind of fiction to them.

The second and possible more important factor in my decision to self-pub my work was this: no one publishes novellas any more. Again, I know there are a few exceptions, but generally those exceptions are all from previously published authors with name recognition. There’s probably a fascinating discussion we could have as to why this is, but I’d imagine we’d find that the bottom line is money again.

My book fails both of the previously mentioned standards. First, it’s a story told through the voice of a dog who is facing the zombie apocalypse. I don’t even begin to know how to classify it as a genre. It’s got zombies in it, so you might say it’s horror, but the truth is there’s just as much humor woven in there as there is horror.

Second, it’s short. About 20,000 words to be precise.

But in spite of these things, I think it can find an audience. Perhaps not an audience large enough to justify a publisher’s interest, but there are enough people out there on the long tail of readership who are looking for something fresh and interesting for me to believe that this little book might actually go somewhere.

If you think you might be one of these people then I invite you to join me tomorrow for the launch of A Prairie Home Apocalypse or: What the Dog Saw. Together we’ll see how far a strange little story like this can go.

[Oh, and please don’t comment and tell me how I’m using the terms “self-publishing” or “traditional publishing” incorrectly. I’ve read all the petty arguments about semantics, and…it just doesn’t matter people. Let it go.]

A Modest Proposal for the Preventing of Writer’s Block

No such thing as writer’s block.

You heard me. Don’t bother arguing. Chuck Wendig said it first, so you know it must be true.

But, but…well you’ve been there. I’ve been there too. You sit down at your computer, or with a clay tablet and chisel or whatever it is you happen to use to write an and…nothin’. Zip. Zero. Nada.

Diddly has moved into your brain and Squat is measuring for the new drapes. It’s not a pretty picture.

But you tell yourself it’s all in your head. Plumbers don’t get plumber’s block. Gas station attendants don’t get gas station attendant’s block. Carpenters don’t get carpenter’s block.

So what’s your problem?

Accountability.

See, there are days when I don’t feel like going into work. There are days when I get in my car and I hate the thought of staying so long inside that the sun will be long gone by the time I come back out again.

But I do it anyway. Because I like to eat. Because I like living in a house with air-conditioning and running water. Because I like the idea of my wife not dying from acute ketoacidosis due to lack of insulin. Because I have to.

Writing is the same way for me. Every day I get up and I write a new blog post. Some days I really honestly don’t feel like doing it. But in the back of my mind there is someone out there who is expecting this post. You’ve got my blog in your RSS feed on your phone and if it doesn’t show up before you take your lunch break at work you’re going to wonder what happened to me.

Maybe the person I just described doesn’t actually exist. But in my mind he does. And I’m accountable to him. I’m accountable to all of you. But my other writing? You don’t know about it. You don’t know if I wrote a hundred words today or a thousand. I’m not accountable to anyone for that writing.

Maybe you’re stronger than me. Maybe you’ve got the self-discipline to sit down and work whether you feel like it or not, day in and day out, rain or shine. If you are, congratulations. You will go far in life.

But for me it can be a struggle. There are so many distractions available out there and even though I’ve written about staying committed to your writing before I still struggle with it myself. A few days ago someone tweeted this quote:

“You teach best what you most need to learn.” – Richard Bach

And it’s true. I do my best to encourage you all, and give you a kick in the pants when I think you might need it, but the truth is I haven’t got it all sorted out either. I’m working on it though.

I think fellow blogger The Hack Novelist is onto something. He opens his blog posts every day with the phrase “I wrote x words today.” He makes himself accountable for the work that no one but him sees.

I’m not going to do the same thing exactly, but what I am going to do is find someone to be accountable to. Probably someone out there in Twitterland. Someone who I’ll go to every day and say, “I wrote x words today.”

You may not like that specific scheme, but I encourage you to try something similar for yourself. Make yourself accountable to someone else and see if it doesn’t help you be more consistent with your goals. Because somewhere in the back of your mind you’ll be thinking, “I don’t feel like writing today, but if I don’t I’m going to have to tell Steve that I wrote all of zero words. Guess I’ll pound out at least a few hundred so I won’t look like a total bum.”

I think we’ll all be better for it. Because even though writing often seems like a solitary process, the truth is that this is the place where we need each other more than ever.

Doing Battle with the Green-Eyed Monster of Wordcount Envy

Oh, Twitter. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

Let’s see…carry the one…adjust for inflation…taking the Kentucky windage into account…um…seventeen. No wait! Eighteen.

Twitter is a great thing for writers. And I’m not just talking about the whole, “build your platform and get your name out there” kind of thing (though that’s on the list). Twitter is host to a whole community of writers. And I’m not just talking about the big names here. I talking regular people like me and you, people who are still struggling to be published. Maybe they’re even still working on their first book.

When you’re feeling down, they’re there to encourage you. When you feel like no one in the world understands what you’re going through as a writer, chances are someone in your Twitter stream does.

But sometimes Twitter is a double-edged sword. At least it can be for me.

Lately I’ve been struggling a bit with my novel. Actually struggling is probably too strong a word. I know where I want to go with the story, but because of the fact that I’m doing research as I go, added on to the fact that I’m writing a slightly different voice than normal, things just haven’t been moving as fast as I’d like them to.

And then I log on to Twitter and I see Chuck Wendig and Adam Christopher and Kristen Lamb talking about the thousands of words they’re writing each day, and I start to get a little discouraged about my measly 700 words.

Maybe you’ve been there too. But I’m here to tell you not to worry about it.

Why? Because no two writers and no two stories are the same. It may be you just don’t have time to churn out daily word counts in the thousands. Or maybe you’re like me and the story you’re writing requires you to be more painstaking than usual.

The details don’t matter. What matters is you. If you let wordcount envy get you down, the next thing you know you’ll be saying to yourself, “Well, if I can’t write as much as those guys maybe I don’t have any business writing at all.”

Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, WRONG.

Wow. That word looks weird when you repeat like that. Kind of like when you say a word over and over again and it starts to sound like…no wait. I was going somewhere. Yeah okay. You can only write as much as you can write.

Profound huh? But it’s true.

Terry Pratchett only wrote four or five hundred words at a time when he first started. Chuck Palahnuik wrote Fight Club in fifteen minute increments on his breaks at work.

It’s less important that you write a lot, and more important that you write consistently.

If you can only manage a couple of hundred words a day then commit yourself to those couple hundred words. No, you won’t be finished in a month. You may not be finished in a year.

Possibly the most important key to your success as a writer is that you make writing your habit. It should be something you do day in and day out, rain or shine, muse or no muse.

And I think you’ll find that if you keep going you’ll find yourself stretching the limits of what you’re capable of further and further. You’ll look back at those early days of writing and say, “I can remember when I thought a thousand words was a really good day. What was I thinking?”

That’s what we call growth my friend. And growth is what it’s all about.

***

I haven’t done this in a while, but I’ve got a reading assignment for you all today.

First up is a fantastic post by Jody Hedlund about why it’s so hard to be objective about your own work.

Second, go check out Chuck Wendig’s post about the closing of Border’s. It’s powerful stuff.

On the Imprisonment of Ideas

I knew what I was going to write this blog about. I swear I did. It was in my head clear as a bell yesterday afternoon. It was a good blog post too. Seriously, you have no idea what you’re missing.

But instead you’re reading this. Why? Because I woke up this morning and I couldn’t remember it. I sat around for a while waiting for it to come back. I read some other blogs thinking I might find some trigger for my messed up memory. But I ended up with nuthin’. Nada. Blog idea to the zeroth power.

I’m not the only one either. Some of you have commented here in the past and said, “So Albert, I’m trying to do this blog thing, and I have all these great ideas, only when I get back to my computer I can’t seem to remember any of them.” I think I had some advice for you at the time. Maybe it could help me out too. What was it again? Oh, yeah.

WRITE IT DOWN.

Ideas are everywhere. In the store, at your house, sometimes you’ll even hit one when you’re driving down the road. They make an awful splatter don’t they?

But ideas are visitors. They don’t tend to hang around forever. You need to capture them, drag them flapping and screaming out of your head and cage them up in a place where you can come back to them later.

For a long time I used a small notebook for this. It was something small that I could keep in my back pocket with a stub of a pencil and whenever I had an idea for a story or a blog post or whatever I could take a minute to jot it down.

Lately though I’ve been tinkering with a tool called Evernote. Evernote is a program that works just like a notebook, and the cool part about it is, it syncs to the internet from both my phone and my computer so I can access it wherever I’m at.

Of course it doesn’t work if I don’t use it.

Ideas are the most valuable things we have. Why? Because they’re unique and special to us. If we leave them lying around in our brains they’re liable to get lost.

So that story idea you had about the space alien who goes into business as a landscape artist? Write it down. That totally awesome title for a story you haven’t written yet? Write it down. That plan for vanquishing disease and solving world hunger? WRITE IT DOWN.

Otherwise one day you’ll end up like me, writing a blog post to remind yourself to write your blog post ideas down. And that’s just meta.

The Great Blog Swap: Featuring…The Hack Novelist!

[Today, something exciting is happening at the Unsanity Files blog. Well, I’m excited anyway. Today this blog has its very first guest post by blogging wonder The Hack Novelist. Also, today my very first guest post goes up on Hack’s blog. Funny how things just happened to work themselves out like that eh? I would go on talking about Hack and what a hoopy frood he is, but if I talk too much I’ll end up writing a post of my own, so instead I’m just going to get out of the way, and let his words speak for themselves. Because, you know, that’s what words do. Enjoy.]

I edited 3 pages today. That’s how I start all of my posts. It keeps me honest. Knowing that I have to account for my daily progress helps motivate me to get out of bed and to my computer every morning. Call it an accountability system with a built-in alarm clock.

Before I get into the meat of this post, I should probably cover a couple basics:

First of all, I am not Albert Berg. If you were expecting him this morning, I both understand your disappointment and sincerely apologize for any trauma his absence or my presence might cause. I promise he will be back tomorrow.

Secondly, I’m not an expert in anything, unless you count catching peanut M&Ms in my mouth thrown from great distances. What follows are simply ponderings that have helped me in my quest to make this very short life significant. Take them as you will.

I’ve been thinking a lot about dreams and goals lately. I think people often confuse the two.

“But Hack, aren’t dreams and goals synonymous?”

Yes, the words dream and goal are synonyms of one another. However, I would argue that they, although closely related, are two very distinct things, and knowing the difference between the two just might be the key to achieving both.

A goal is finite. It has a beginning and an end. For example, you might set a goal to lose twenty pounds in the next three months or to finish that novel you’ve been working on for the last five years. Whether or not you meet either goal is easily measured.

Dreams are different—less schematic and more sketch. I would define a dream as an abstract favorable condition in which you hope to someday find yourself.

Living a long, healthy life is a dream. Being free to write fiction full-time is a dream. Serving others overseas is a dream. When boiled down, most dreams deal with a longing for some form of freedom whether financial, temporal, or physical (usually a combination of the three).

So if I told you that I have a dream of winning the lottery, what I’m really saying is, “I have a dream of being free to do whatever I want, whenever I want for the rest of my life, and I believe having truckloads of money would allow me to do so.”

“Okay, Hack, we get it. Why is this important?”

Good question. Clearly defining our dreams is the first step in making them a reality. If you don’t know what the condition in which you hope to someday find yourself is, how will you know if and when you’re knee-deep in it?

“Okay, so where do goals come in?”

Goals are how you get from here, your starting point, to the horizon where your dreams live. Think of goals as road markers, destinations on a map that inch you closer and closer to that which you most desire.

Consider one of the examples I gave above: the dream to be free to write fiction full-time. Some reasonable goals to make that dream a reality might be: 1) write every single day, 2) network with agents, publishers and other writers, and 3) build an audience through a blog or other social media.

Within each of those goals, there will be sub-goals. For instance, you might commit to writing at least 500 words every time you sit down or to make at least one new publishing connection every week.

Your capacity for achieving your dreams is directly linked to your propensity for setting and meeting these goals, so BE DILIGENT. If you realize the goals you’ve set are physically, mentally, or emotionally out of your reach, then take a step back and reevaluate them. There’s no shame in that.

My final bit of advice is this: Don’t ever trade your dream for a goal. By definition, dreams are more about being than achieving. We as humans are achievers, which is why it is often tempting to abandon our dreams. Don’t settle. Once you meet a goal, set another one and then another and then another after that, until you wake up one day and find yourself in the condition you’ve always dreamed of. It will be well worth the journey.

You can read more from The Hack Novelist at www.thehacknovelist.com.