Choosing what to do in life is not easy. Some people grow up knowing they are going to be a pilot or a cricket player or a dancer. 20 years later they are doing that very thing. Some people aren’t too worried about what they do at work – if it pays the bills and keeps them occupied from nine to five, that’s good enough. For others of us, like me, finding your way through the wilderness of life decisions is a struggle.
I’m now at a place where I am happy. It has been a long long detour across rocky ground with lots of back paths. I work as a designer and I am also a freelance writer. It’s not quite perfect but I am moving steadily to a place where I am comfortable and fulfilled with what I do.
Somehow you need to figure out how to transcribe whatever is in your head or your heart to the world around you. The world is not always a kind or encouraging place. Your journey, especially as a creative person, may require years of effort, long months with insufficient finances and uncertainty.
For me, as a writer, when the going gets tough one of the best things I can do is look to those who have gone before me and succeeded.
Stephen King is one of the world’s most renowned writers. His books have sold more than 350 million copies, many of which have been adapted into feature films, miniseries, television shows, and comic books.
Let Stephen King cheer up your inner creative on its journey to purpose.
1. “Drive away and try to keep smiling. Get a little rock and roll on the radio and go toward all the life there is with all the courage you can find and all the belief you can muster. Be true, be brave, stand.”
2. “Books are a uniquely portable magic.”
3. “The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of because words diminish them – words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they’re brought out. But it’s more than that, isn’t it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you’ve said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That’s the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within, not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.”
4. “Remember, hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.”
5. “When asked, ‘How do you write?’ I invariably answer, ‘One word at a time,’ and the answer is invariably dismissed. But that is all it is. It sounds too simple to be true, but consider the Great Wall of China, if you will: one stone at a time, man. That’s all. One stone at a time.”
6. “Life isn’t a support-system for art. It’s the other way around.”
7. “Writing is not life, but I think that sometimes it can be a way back to life.”
8. “And people who don’t dream, who don’t have any kind of imaginative life, they must… they must go nuts. I can’t imagine that.”
9. “Writing is a lonely job. Having someone who believes in you makes a lot of difference. They don’t have to makes speeches. Just believing is usually enough.”
10. “It always comes down to just two choices: Get busy living, or get busy dying.”
11. “We fool ourselves so much we could do it for a living.”
12. “If a fear cannot be articulated, it can’t be conquered.”
13. “Love didn’t grow very well in a place where there was only fear.”