No matter how tight your planning, how deep your desire, sometimes in creative work you just have to be ready to shift. It’s not that you didn’t try, or that you didn’t have a great ideal; it’s just time and the universe pulling you in a different direction.
Most of the time, this kind of work can be a fight; a fight to be heard, and fight to find your voice, and a fight to be recognized. You also need to develop the skill of passivity as well. You need to know when the fight is no longer worth the effort. Your ‘big break’ is already happening, just not the way you thought it would.
Above all, don’t cry. And don’t get stressed out over it. This is a natural process of creativity. It’s bound to happen, over and over again. You are not a perfect snowflake forging ahead. Sometimes you are headed in the right direction and sometimes the wind is going to take you somewhere new. Know when to go with it.
The reality is that success is not planned for, it is as much luck as it is determination and talent. Right person, right voice, right place all must align. That kind of serendipity is hard to manufacture. So, when the wind takes you, sometimes it’s just best to go with the flow.
The kind of writing I am doing, as compared to the kind of writing I thought I would be doing, are quite different. What I focus on is that I am happy with the challenges and more than content with the work. Being ready to shift doesn’t mean giving up on your vision. It means being adaptable to success, to go where it takes you.
