What Does a Dream Cost?
By Rachel Toalson | March 12, 2025 |
For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to be a writer. I know that’s not every writer’s journey. Some come to it a little later. Some much later. But as soon as I had my first taste of a book, I wanted to write. I wanted to create in others what I felt when I read a book. Joy. Wonder. Hope.
When children dream, they don’t know to doubt themselves. (I also wanted to be an Avon lady, because I helped my mom hang Avon books on the neighbors’ doors.)
The dream of being a writer never wavered, although I grew up in a low-income household and I soon learned what people thought of the “poor” desiring creative careers. We were supposed to be working people, not people who dream of writing books. What kind of living was that?
Pursuing that dream got more complicated in college, where I was on full scholarship. A well-meaning academic advisor suggested I choose something like journalism, which would have a steadier income than creative writing. I wouldn’t know until later that this suggestion was likely because I was a scholarship and federal grant student. I didn’t come from money.
I worked in journalism for a while, but the writing dream never left me. I wanted to write books. Fiction books. For everyone, but especially kids and teens.
It took me more than a decade—when a lay-off finally cut off my steady income—for me to decide I’d ignore all those voices that told me writing books wasn’t what I was supposed to do or allowed to do or even qualified to do…and do it anyway.
What does a dream cost? Pursuing one is complicated. Sometimes incredibly disappointing. Maddening. Discouraging. And yet some moments it’s so very beautiful I think, My gosh, I’m glad I kept going.
The dream we have will cost us. It will cost us time and energy and sometimes people or a certain kind of life we imagined for ourselves. Hope, too. But there will be glimpses of beauty so breathtaking we’ll think, How incredibly lucky I am. I’m so glad I get to do this.
As we go about chasing this beautiful, ridiculous dream, here’s what I want us to remember:
The dream will take time
It may take much, much longer than we expected or wanted or maybe even longer than we can comprehend.
I’m not always a patient person, especially when it comes to waiting on a dream. Sometimes it will feel or seem like it’s right around the corner, but here’s the honest truth: things sometimes appear closer than they really are. It’s like when I’m out on one of my long runs and I set my sights on something in the near distance—or seemingly near distance—except it never seems to get closer.
The nearness is a mirage. Dreams like to be seen—but they’re not always as close as they appear. We have to make sure we exercise patience, so we don’t settle for a mirage instead of the real thing.
Maybe it helps to remember that part of the dream is its anticipation. And the journey toward it.
The dream will likely cost something “good”
It will cost time or energy or something we like or love. We don’t have unlimited amounts of time and energy and brain power. Which means at some point we have to choose. This or that. The good or the better. The better or the best.
I used to sew a lot. I made cool things for my kids. They’d bring me their stuffed animals and pants and bags when they needed split seams fixed. But I needed more time to write, and that sewing time was what I took. My kids would still bring me their stuffed animals with torn backs, legs, tails, and I’d lay them in my closet on my sewing table, with every intention of fixing them when there was time. Only I never got around to it.
My closet became the place where my kids’ stuffed animals came to die. A stuffed animal graveyard.
Do I still feel a teensy bit of guilt that I didn’t take the time to fix those busted seams? Yes. But it was the difference between writing a book and never finishing it. Or maybe I would have found other moments to claim. It was the decision I made at the time.
We’ll all have to make hard decisions. We’ll have to decide what’s worth keeping and what’s worth giving up. This or that. Some things we’ll give up permanently, some only temporarily. But a dream is high stakes, and something will have to give. Our Tuesday night viewing of The Good Place. Playing Call of Duty or Minecraft for a couple hours on the weekend. My kids’ bath time, which was another block I sacrificed as my husband watched over them instead.
The dream will sometimes disappoint
The picture we have in our heads of what our dream looks like will likely be different than what it looks like when it shows up in real life. Maybe the dream is less glamorous than we expected it to be. Or it’s more demanding. Or we realize we should have had a bigger one because this one doesn’t quite cut it, or we learn we don’t want it anymore because it stayed out of our reach for so long we’re different people now.
So maybe the dream changes.
We’re familiar with all these hypotheticals, because it’s exactly what we do with our characters in our stories. Just when we think we know what we want, life says, “But I am what you really need.” And sometimes it’s not our dream at all. Sometimes we have to go back to the beginning and build the dream all over again.
But just like our first drafts can be disappointing, so, too, can the first drafts of our dreams. Our revisions get us closer and closer to the real dream.
The dream will be hard
There will be times in our pursuit when we will want to give up. Especially when we chase a writing dream. Wow, there’s so much rejection and criticism. If part of our dream is publishing, that puts us at the mercy of other people.
And that road will be rocky. It will hurt our feet. (And probably our ego at times). And at some point, we will very likely ask, Do I want to keep going?
Do we?
And more importantly, will we?
The truth is, we are more than capable of walking down the rockiest of roads. We may just have to put on different shoes or get used to falling on our faces and peeling ourselves back off the ground. Eventually, our feet gets used to the rocks. Or maybe not. Maybe they will always hurt—but the destination, we know, is worth the pain and discomfort.
The dream will sometimes ask too much
Suppose we do ask ourselves if we want to keep going, and the honest answer is no. Because the dream asks too much. And it’s simply too painful.
There is no shame in revising the dream or making it a little bit smaller or turning around completely. Sometimes it does ask too much. Sometimes the sacrifice a dream requires is giving up—at least the act of giving up the dream exactly the way it looks in our minds. Sometimes it’s asking too much and we really can’t give what it asks.
It’s perfectly okay to re-evaluate and recalibrate.
But.
We also learn the deepest lessons of persistence when it feels like the dream is asking too much and yet we keep going. Tenacity is forged in the places that ask too much, when despair makes us say, I can’t do this anymore.
One step, one hour, one day at a time. We keep going into the unknown.
The dream will be so much better than we think
We’re in the imagination business, but we still can’t imagine how extraordinary that dream will be when we reach it.
Which leads me to…
The dream will be worth all of it
I have these words written on sticky notes throughout my house and etched into my brain. Because chasing a dream is a relentless, difficult journey. But all our hard work will be worth it. All our tears, our disappointment, our frustration, our feeling-invisible days, our fretting, our exhaustion, our hopelessness, our rejection—all of it will be worth it.
I recently had the privilege of visiting a middle school that uses my very first published book, The Colors of the Rain, a middle grade novel in verse, as part of their poetry curriculum. They study the book for six weeks, analyzing my metaphors and symbols and all those things I carefully placed into the story but never imagined any readers would pay attention to.
Every year, more than five hundred eighth graders do.
It’s a dream I didn’t even know I had.
And as I stood on stage, talking to those eighth graders who had finished my book and marked all over its pages and underlined and highlighted poetic phrases, I thought, My gosh. I’m so glad I kept going.
That moment waits for all of us.
What is a writing-related dream you are pursuing? What are some things pursuing your dream might cost? How will you make the decision of which “this or that” you’ll pursue?
When you think of achieving your dream, how do you think it might look different from the picture you have in your head?
Wow, Rachel! Congratulations on the book becoming part of the curriculum. That is so cool. Knowing we’ve had an effect is certainly part of the dream, and it’s often unknowable. You’re an inspiration!
Thanks, Vaughn! Your support is always an encouragement.
And you’re right. We often can’t know just how much our books mean to someone!
I realize this is an extreme example, but, as inspiring as this post is, someone I know followed her dreams by abandoning her three children–twice–in the care of a mentally ill relative. The relative eventually killed herself, and the kids did not turn out well.
Sorry to be a downer, but I think we need to tread very, very carefully in the pursuit of dreams when children are involved.
You make a great point, Anmarie. I know people who left their families to pursue their dreams, and it’s always the children who suffer. It’s too high a cost. I used to volunteer at a nursing home and I never remember anybody saying they wished they’d worked more. The regrets were always about not spending time with their kids.
Hi Anmarie!
I’m certainly not saying someone should leave their children to follow a dream, and I confess I’ve never met someone who did. I’ve been pursuing my dream for close to a decade, and I have six kids and a husband whom I’ve never abandoned. There are some things I can’t do when it comes to my kids–volunteering for their field day, for example, or being a room mom–and I weigh those decisions every year as I continue pursuing my dream. Every individual has to do the same.
I’m not sure I’d say we have to tread carefully in pursuit of dreams (careful can become an excuse, at least in my experience). I’d say we have to tread responsibly. When we have families and kids, a dream will necessarily look different in service of our responsibility (like waiting to write more once they go to school–which is what I had to do).
Of course, being responsible is the way to go. I understand my example is far from the norm, but I’ve seen the trauma close-up and couldn’t not mention it.
Rachel,
Thanks for this wonderfully vulnerable and real post. Just what I needed this morning. I came to writing later in life and yet, there was a lot I was naive about, as regards publishing, publicity, and trust. It has been hard. It has asked a lot. And I still want it. Thanks for sharing your struggle.
You are not alone in being naive, Liza. I’m still trying to learn, too.
I’m glad you still want it. You deserve to achieve it. So onward. :)
I’m in the same spot. I had heard the road to publication is hard, but I truly didn’t not realize how difficult it is! I had gotten to the point where the advice all suggested hiring an editor. How to find one? There are a lot of scam artists out there, and the cost was a concern! Serendipty hit, I guess–when my favorite published auther connected me with his editor, and I also won a raffle where the $5000 prize was almost enough to cover the cost of editing! I felt as though God was telling me my book is meant to be!
The editing absolutly was worth every penny, as the suggestions made the manuscript richer, merely by moving a few scenes around, and by emphasizing others. My alpha readers loved my story, but a professional editor with the certifiables to say my manuscript was publish-worthy–I rode that high for a month!
Now as the queries to agents go out, and rejections come in, that is not a great feeling. The silence of other agents is worse.
And I still want it.
Good luck to us both, Liza.
That’s so cool that those 8th graders study your book for so long! It must feel really special, and probably a little nerve wracking to have one’s work studied so closely. Maybe they will be inspired to chase their own literary dreams!
Definitely a little nerve-wracking! They’ve been studying it for a couple of years, and every time I go there I feel a little nervous that someone will find some inconsistency and call me on it! :) But it definitely feels special, too.
I hope they’re inspired to write!
Congrats, Rachel. As a former secondary level English teacher, having your book used in the classroom IS A VERY BIG DEAL. My department chair read every choice and was judicious in making sure that the book had value on many levels. Your success might inspire others to go the same route…or for you to write another, Beth
This means a lot, Beth. My inner voice is always telling me it’s not really a big deal. But it truly is!
I hope others will be inspired to write.
And I really hope I can write another. :)
I *love* the curriculum story, and I appreciate the sewing example–I used to sew more, too.
I am reminded of my own career change: late in graduate school, I realized that if I stayed in academia I would never find the time and energy to do my own writing. (Some can juggle both; not me.) And so I gave up on the dream of being a professor–to be fair, the odds were getting prohibitively long in that market–and found other day jobs to support my writing. A couple decades later, the dream is still a long road, but I agree: definitely worth it.
Keep going, Alisha!
Time is really a problem. So many times I wish I had more than one of me. But then things probably wouldn’t mean quite so much if we could do it all!
In act one scene two of Troilus and Cressida she speaks a line. Part of it is
. . . joy’s soul lies in the doing. I repeat her words to myself whenever I lose track of them while sitting at the keyboard.
I love that, Steve. Sounds like something we could all repeat to ourselves when the dream seems like too much.
Rachel, how amazing that your book is being used by 8th graders!!! Congratulations!!! Thank you for your important and inspiring essay. So often I let fear get in the way of following my dreams. I came to writing later in life, once I stayed home to raise my kids. I cut my writing teeth on work-for-hire, but now that my children are grown I am pursuing the stories God has placed upon my heart. If I don’t write them, who will? I’ve written and published one novel and have another that needs a lot more work before I can submit it. But a new idea is demanding my attention and haven’t figured out the art of the novel. I have a suspicion that the process for each new story will be different. But what a blessing to have this creative life.
Thank you, Vijaya! And I completely agree: the creative life is the best!
Also: I’ve written countless books, and I can tell you, I still haven’t quite figured out the art of the novel, because the process for every book IS different. The book those eighth graders study? It was written when my kids were tiny, in fifteen-minute increments every night. Now I have more hours, since they’re in school, and I’m still finding my way. Maybe we always do. We just have to keep trying!
I’ve been on a tough road lately. From 2017 through 2021 I was writing a six-volume biography series for middle schoolers that my publisher had pitched to me. It was the longest productive stretch I’ve ever had, and I’m really proud of the books I produced (three of which won awards). When I was done, my publisher pitched me a new idea that would have enabled me to quit my day-job as an engineer and write full-time. Something I’d wanted for twenty years, and there it was, just waiting for me to reach out and grab it.
And… it didn’t work out. I tried to figure it out for more than a year, but in the end it wasn’t something I could do.
So now here I am, with a new idea that’s going to take me in a new direction. In some ways it feels like I’m learning to write all over again. But I don’t really know what my new dream is yet. I’m in a good place with my day-job at the moment. That just has to hold up for a few more years before I reach retirement age. What’s that going to look like? What will it look like when I get there, and what will it look like through the years between now and then? I’m still figuring that out.
Well, I can understand the apprehension of facing something new, Robert. I’m sorry the former project didn’t work out. What will the future look like? It’s a question that can bring both terror and exhilaration.
But know that we’re all rooting for you, and we’re here when you need us.
It’s okay not to know what your new dream is. That won’t be where you are forever, because dreams have a way of making themselves known!