What to do when your dreams don’t come true

How to Be Stephen King

Or What To Do When Your Dreams Don’t Come True

No one prepares you for what to do when your dreams don’t come true. Stephen King grew up wanting nothing more than to be a writer. But as he grew up — got married, had a family, and found a “real” job — he ended up writing less and less. His desire to be a writer wasn’t dwindling, but the time that he had to pursue his dream was. What used to be done for hours was now reduced to minutes. But even though he was busy, broke, and tired, King kept typing, and as the pages piled up, so did the rejection letters. After his fourth novel failed to find a publisher, he began having long talks with himself about whether or not he was chasing a fool’s dream.

“Most of my fears turned out to be completely justified. We were living in a trailer, and my study was the furnace room. I wrote with Tabby’s Olivetti typewriter on a child’s desk. My writing-time shrank to an hour or an hour-and-a-half a day, and even that time was curiously vitiated by six periods of teaching and the thought of the stacks of themes that had to be corrected later on. We had a second child, and money was very, very tight. I was making $6,400 a year.” – Stephen King, 1984

Pursuing your dreams when you’re young and hungry is romantic. Chasing those dreams when you’re older can feel irresponsible. When you have bills to pay and mouths to feed, the wise decision is to find surer ways of making money than telling stories. If your dreams don’t come true by the time you’re a “grown up,” you have two options: You can either accept it, roll over and let them die, or you can do the irresponsible thing and keep showing up. Stephen King kept showing up.

When you tell someone you’re writing a book they never ask you how long you worked on it today, they ask you how long you’ve been writing it. Pursuing your dreams isn’t measured by how much time you spent today; it’s measured by how many days you’ve done it in a row. Stephen King had a full-time job as a teacher, stacks of papers to grade every night, and a family to take care of, but he still found the time to write. He didn’t have much, but he took what he could get. The amount of time you put in is flexible; whether or not you show up at all isn’t.

Sharpen the Knife

With over 350 million copies sold, it’s easy to draw the conclusion that he would have become successful no matter what because he’s STEPHEN KING, one of the most talented writers to ever live. But talent alone did not turn Steve King into STEPHEN KING. Talent gets you a ticket for the lottery, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to win. There are more talented people who didn’t make it than untalented people who did. What stops talented people from succeeding is they think that because they were blessed with natural ability, they’ll be blessed with the win as well. Stephen King didn’t believe that.

He knew he was good. In college, he told one of his classmates that when (not if) he made it, he was going to buy himself a purple Cadillac. But he also knew that just because he had raw talent didn’t mean that someone was going to show up to his trailer in rural Maine and hand him the keys to his dream car. If he wanted his Cadillac, he was going to have to refine his talent until it was something palatable for others. The reason you know his name is because he possessed both the skill and the discipline required to hone it.

“I think that writers are made, not born or created out of dreams or childhood trauma—that becoming a writer (or a painter, actor, director, dancer, and so on) is a direct result of conscious will. Of course there has to be some talent involved, but talent is a dreadfully cheap commodity, cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work and study; a constant process of honing.” – Stephen King, 1981

Talent is refined through rejection. It is by having your flaws and deficiencies pointed out to you that you learn how to improve them — whether or not you make the change is up to you. Showing up every day matters, but it won’t get you anywhere unless you’re putting in the intentional work to get better. If you ignore the feedback that comes with rejection and repeat yourself, you will get the same results. You won’t make it if you keep doing what didn’t make you successful last time. No one comes out of the box as a professional writer; they develop into one. Stephen King was no exception.

The book that made Stephen King a professional writer was Carrie, but just like the novels he had written before it, Carrie wasn’t good enough either. When his editor Bill Thompson first read the manuscript, he wrote to King saying that in its current form they couldn’t publish the book. It had promise, but the final quarter would need to be completely rewritten. Instead of taking his ball and going home, King welcomed Thompson’s feedback. It was because he was receptive to his notes that he was able to improve Carrie and get it published. If King wasn’t open to feedback, if he refused to improve… his dreams wouldn’t have come true.

All Time Loser

Acknowledging that rejection is how you get better doesn’t make going through it any easier. It’s hard to keep showing up when every time you do, you get knocked down. Eventually, it becomes tempting to stay down and not show up at all. If no one ever sees your art, no one will ever tell you it isn’t good enough. So instead of sharing your art with the world, you keep it to yourself and tuck it neatly into a box under your bed and leave it there as if it were Schrödinger’s cat.

Schrödinger’s cat is a thought experiment that says multiple realities can exist at once until one is observed. Once reality is confirmed, all other possible realities cease to exist. For example, if you put a cat in a closed box and leave it there, you won’t know if it’s alive or dead until you open it and see for yourself. Therefore, while the cat is in the closed box both possible realities exist — the cat is alive and dead at the same time.

By keeping your art to yourself, it remains unobserved, and its future remains undetermined. There’s a version of reality where it’s great, but there’s also one where it’s terrible. The only way to confirm which one is true is by putting your art into the world, but because the possibility of rejection exists, you’d rather assume the cat is alive and keep the box sealed. It’s easier to live in a dream world of “what if” than a reality that’s disappointing.

There’s a line in King’s second book, ‘Salem’s Lot, that addresses this idea. The book’s protagonist, who happens to be a writer, thinks “of a work in progress as a child, a weak child, that had to be protected and cradled” — that if you share the book with the world, it will die. When he was asked about overcoming this fear during a lecture, King didn’t provide much comfort, saying that “A lot of them die but it’s just a process of continuing on to try and get better and to breed stronger children… sooner or later something lives.”

It was just a few years before this lecture that the only thing King had ever heard from a publisher was “this isn’t good enough.” By the time he was working on his fifth manuscript, he felt like he was finally working on something different from everything he’d written before. His other books were good, but this one, he was sure, was “the world’s all time loser.” And even though he was confident the outcome would be the same, that he’d have to go through the pain of rejection once more, he kept showing up. Every night he’d park himself in his furnace room, balance a child’s desk on his lap, and work on the book for as long as he could. That book ended up being Carrie.

The only way to overcome rejection is to keep showing up. It’s hard to do that when it feels like nothing is going your way, but the paradox of progress is that it is made on the path but you only notice it at the destination. If you’re still showing up, you’re still making progress. If your dreams haven’t come true yet, even if it feels like they never will, your only option is to keep trying.

Act Out Your Dreams

It can feel unfair when you’ve been working towards your dreams for years and they haven’t come true. But the hard truth is that they may never come true, and you need to be okay with that. If your dreams were easily achieved, you’d have different dreams. Part of their appeal is that not everyone can achieve them. It is the difficulty with which they are obtained that makes them desirable. But just because the odds are against you doesn’t mean you give up.

If Carrie had been rejected like the books that came before it, King would have gone on and written something else. He would have continued writing because he was a writer. He didn’t start writing for money, he started writing because he loved to write. When people roll over and let their dreams die, it’s often because the reward becomes more important than the act. For King, it was the craft that he fell in love with, not the business. If your dreams never come true, you’d better make sure you still enjoy their pursuit.

If the idea of them never coming true is enough to make you stop, you’re not chasing the right thing. People pursue the wrong dreams because they chase the thing they’d love to be paid to do instead of looking for the thing that they couldn’t be paid to stop. What you go after is as important as how you go after it.

“[There were] 60 short story rejections and four complete novels before Carrie… I should point out that if you have talent and you genuinely love what you’re doing, if you love to play the piano then the time practicing and doing scales or whatever, it happens to be that time goes by fast. But if you’re a kid who doesn’t have any natural aptitude for the piano and your mother just says you’re going to play the piano, so you sit there and practice, you sit there and the minutes turn into hours... Whereas if you really like it, the time passes and instead of practicing for an hour you may practice an hour and a half.” – Stephen King, 1980

Unlike Father

When Stephen King was two years old, his father went to the store to buy milk and never came home. King would never see or speak to him again. One day, when he was 12 or 13, he was going through old family heirlooms in the attic above his aunt’s garage and stumbled onto a box of old horror novels from the ‘40s… they belonged to his father.

He found another box near the first and went through it. Inside were more of his dad’s old things: manuals from the Marines, old scrapbooks, and knickknacks he brought home from his time abroad. He dug a little deeper and found horror stories that his father had written and submitted to magazines. None of them ever got published, but a few were returned with rejection letters encouraging him to try again. Donald King never tried again. The same way he gave up on his family, he gave up on his writing. When King asked his mother about these old manuscripts, she told him his “father didn’t have a great deal of stick-to-it in his nature.”

While King and his father had a shared passion for horror tales, that is the extent of their similarities. When Donald King came up against adversity, he would go the other way. When his short stories didn’t get published, when his dreams didn’t come true, he rolled over and let them die. He stopped showing up. When Stephen King came up against the same adversity, he kept going. When the money was tight, the time was short, and the story wasn’t good enough, it didn’t stop him. No matter what, Stephen King kept showing up.

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