Finding Hope Even in Your Writing

Neil Gaiman and hope and you and me

Jun 12, 2023

There’s a New York Times article on author Neil Gaiman where it speaks about how he is unafraid to go looking into dark places, hoping to find light.

He once said,

“The one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can.”

And the core of his message often feels like, yes, the past never goes away, but you are alive now—right now—go grab your potential.

This seems especially true for us novelists and fiction writers who spend a lot of time creating worlds that reflect this one. The key is to not avoid the dark spaces but also to find hope in them (or light) and to do that for our own writing life and careers.

That can be hard.

It can be really hard.

But it’s important to remember not to give up. Not for as long as you are alive.

A 2021 article by Maya Shrikant,

In psychology, hope is a cognitive practice that involves the intentional act of setting goals and working toward them with purpose.
“Hopeful people are able to set goals, identify ways to reach their goals and feel as though they can do the work to achieve those goals,” says Crystal Bryce, associate director of research in the Hope Center and clinical assistant professor in the T. Denny Sanford School of Social and Family Dynamics.
John Parsi, executive director of the Hope Center, thinks about using hope like driving from ASU’s Tempe campus to the Downtown campus.
“If there’s an accident on the I-10 or construction on the Broadway curve, I have to work around that to get to my destination. I can’t just stop in the middle of the highway and give up,” says Parsi. “I have to navigate through the traffic using hope theory and ultimately take agency to literally steer my actions.”
Parsi emphasizes that it is important to know the difference between hope and blind optimism.
“Hope is an active process. Dreams and optimism are just belief structures,” he explains. “When you’re an optimistic person, you believe things in the world will turn out just fine, no matter what happens.”

Writers deserve that. You deserve that. The same article gives practices to help build your hope muscle.

You should check them out, but they basically are:

1. Do things in small increments toward your big goals.

2. Ask yourself how you’re doing, how you feel about the future.

3. Remember that sometimes your culture is pretty pro-hope or pretty against it. And sometimes things happen in your community that are going to most likely decrease your hope. Systemic oppression? War? It’s going to impact that.

4. Practice hoping.

5. Try to increase hope in other people, too, in all the communities you are a part of.