If you’re like me, you have trouble reigning in your ambition. Oh, I’m ambitious in almost every facet of my life—from gardening, to sewing projects, to home improvement, to career, and everything of any importance in-between—but I’m definitely most ambitious when it comes to my writing. At any given moment, you can count on me having several writing projects waiting in queue—sound like you? Are you also one of those people who dreams big but has trouble actually completing your many, many, many writing projects?
Yeah. Me too.
See, the thing is, ambition can be good—I mean, we would never accomplish anything if we didn’t get ambitious now and then, right?—but too much ambition can be as overwhelming as it is helpful. And being overwhelmed? That’s never good.
Why Ambition Is Helpful
Of course, I would never discourage ambition. I believe the difference between a successful writer and one who gives up before getting anywhere has more to do with ambition than talent. Ambition is what gets us in front of the computer when we could be doing any number of other things. Ambition is what pushes us to seek feedback, and to take that feedback seriously and not let our egos get in the way of cultivating our skills beyond any natural talent we may have. Ambition is what drives us to submit, and revise and submit again after we get rejected.
If I hadn’t been so dominated by ambition, I probably never would have kept working on the stories that ended up becoming my first short story collection, nor would I have spent the money to submit the manuscript to fiction contests (especially considering how broke I was at the time). Ambition served as the little devil on my shoulder. All logic and reason should have told me to save that $25 I sent to Autumn House Press so they would consider my manuscript for their annual fiction award, but I sent it in anyway, and good thing I did!
Why Ambition Can Be Harmful
But ambition isn’t all sunshine and roses. Ambition can make you feel like you’re drowning in unattainable goals; it can make you feel like a failure.
My summer plans this year, for example, included completing the stories for a new short story collection and writing the first draft of a zombie novel. I’m teaching this summer, by the way, and although my summer class only runs for eight weeks, I really only have a little less than two months off. I don’t say that to diminish how lucky I am to have the sort of job that affords me two months off in the summer—I’m very lucky, and I don’t want to take that time off for granted. I don't want to waste it. So, as is true of most summers, I made big plans as the spring semester was drawing to a close for what I would accomplish during my time off.
But before my summer class was even over, I began to realize I was not going to be able to finish two book-length manuscripts in the less-than-two months I had open. And here’s where that nasty, negative side of ambition comes in: instead of recognizing that the reason I couldn’t accomplish my summer goals was that I had bitten off more than I could chew, I decided that I’m lazy, a failure, that I might as well not do any of it because I’m clearly not gritty enough to do all of it.
Tempering Ambition with Realism
So ambition is good; ambition is beneficial, but there can be too much of a good thing. If you find that you tend to not follow through with your writing plans, you may need to prescribe yourself a dose of reality to balance your ambition. I’ve come up with an easy, four-step process that might help get you from aspirations to the concrete tasks you need to complete to accomplish them.
Step One: First, you need to have a sense of purpose. Purpose can keep us going even when our ambitions fail us. You can get there by figuring out your overarching goal. What is the real reason you write? What are you really trying to accomplish? Over time, I’ve changed my overarching goal from making a living off of my writing and becoming a best-selling author to the far more realistic (and, it turns out, meaningful) goal of continuing to write, indefinitely, because it adds meaning to my life and keeps me sane. The goal, then, really, is to avoid getting beaten into submission by my many other obligations and emotional obstacles and continue writing, regardless of publication and regardless of reception. The process of writing, the act of creation is what matters, not the product that results from it.
Step Two: Once you have that important sense of purpose, you should develop your current goal. What is it that you want to accomplish? This is where you really need to start offsetting your ambition with realism. Completing two books in less than two months sure sounds good, but it just isn’t doable—not for me, anyway, not as a parent of a four-year-old. What can you realistically accomplish in the amount of time you’re giving yourself to do it in?
While it’s nice to dream big, I’ve found that the worst mistake you can make as a writer is to convince yourself you can (and therefore should) do things that you simply can’t do. When you fail (and if you're being too ambitious, you will. You’ve set yourself up for failure), you’ll feel terrible about yourself as a writer, and these are the spiraling moments that cause the might-have-beens to give up and become the never-wases.
Step Three: Now, figure out what the next few tasks are going to be to set you on the path to that current goal. Not “write the first draft” or “revise the draft”—these are too vague and are, themselves, giant tasks. Focus on the small, manageable task(s) that you will need to do next. What are you going to do right now, that you will be able to complete by the end of the day and feel good about?
I replaced my impossibly ambitious goals of completing one book and writing the first draft of another in the not-quite two months I have off with the much more reasonable goal of drafting and revising three stories and reading a book that would help me research my zombie novel. So my next step went from finish one book, so I can write the next—honestly, I can’t even wrap my mind around where to start to accomplish that—to complete a particular plotting exercise to help me plot the next part of a particular story and look on my university's library database to find a book on the history of zombie legends and folklore. Phew! That I can handle.
Step Four: Actually do the next task you decided on in step three. I mean it. Right now. Get to it. Stop planning on writing and go write.
How to Make Your Ambition Work FOR You, Not Against You
May 31, 2016
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© Ashley Cowger