Capturing Your Vision as a Writer

Have you ever asked yourself:

Where do you want your writing to take you in the end?

Where ever you want your writing to take you as a writer is called your vision. Many people confuse your mission statement with your vision. If your writing career was made into a book, your mission statement would be like the theme of your writing career whereas your writing vision would be like the ending or the goal of your writing career. Another metaphor would be you are on a journey. Your mission statement is your GPS and your vision is your destination. Writing a mission statement was the subject of another one of my articles and there is a link to it at the bottom of the page if you would like to review it.

As I said, your writing vision is like the ending of a book. It is the culmination of where you are heading as a writer. It identifies what you ultimately want to accomplish as a writer.

Vision is the ability to see. We have a vision when we see the end results that we desire. In our writing vision, we need to see what we want to accomplish in order for us to have a definitive vision. The more detailed your vision statement, you will know what you want and you will know when you have arrived. Your vision is your crystal ball into your future.

How do you as a writer determine your writing vision?

Perhaps you are having difficulty determining your vision. Here are a few exercises to get you started.

• Write a Bucket List. A bucket list is a list of everything that you wish to accomplish before the end of your life. Get as detailed as possible. Do this before you do the next exercise and it will make the next exercise much easier.
• Imagine a hundred years from now and your life has ended. Write your obituary. Include all of your future accomplishments as an author and writer. Include family and guests who attended your funeral. Can you imagine anyone famous attending? Include those names as well.
• If writing your obituary seems too morbid, write an imaginary Wikipedia profile of your life of the future. Imagine that you accomplished everything that you ever hoped to accomplish. What does Wikipedia say about you as a writer? What are your accomplishments? Who did you influence? Look at other Wikipedia author profiles for inspiration.

Based on the above exercises, create a vision board. A vision board (also called a Treasure Map, a Visual Explorer, or Creativity Collage) is a collage of images of your dreams. Therefore, your vision board will contain items that you hope to see by the end of your career. Cut out items and headlines from magazines and copied and printed them from the internet and include them on your vision board. What lifestyle do you want to be living? What kind of house do you want to ultimately own and how does your writing fit? What name do you want for yourself? What altruistic endeavors do you want to be remembered for accomplishing? Who would you like to have met? Who and what is part of your end destination as a writer?

I use a Pinterest board as my vision board. Onto it, I download photos from my computer that I have taken or pictures from the internet. I make covers for future books and include them on my vision board.

Use the information that you have obtained from the above exercises to help you write your vision statement. Based on this vision statement, you will then be able to write goals that will lead you from where you are now to the place that you want to go. With a mission statement and a vision statement. Your memoir now has a theme and an end. You have your GPS and your destination for the journey of your lifetime. Enjoy the trip.

Revisit your vision from time to time to determine if your vision still works for you. If you have accomplished your vision, you definitely need to look beyond the vision that you first created.

Imagine that your vision is like the trip to St. Louis. Imagine initially your decision was to go to St. Louis, but you really don't know what you want to do in St. Louis, so you have to research a more detailed plan. Let's say that as you researched your trip, you discovered that you could go to the St. Louis Zoo, and of course, you would want to go see the arch and the Mississippi River. It is the same with your vision. At first, your vision might be very vague, but that's okay, as you begin to achieve some of your goals, your vision will become clearer and you will be able to better define what your vision really is.

Perhaps you have changed your mind about where it is that you really want to go. Make some adjustments to your vision. It would be similar to if you were on that trip to St. Louis and you get close to your destination the city and you decide that you no longer want to go to the zoo, you'd rather go to the casinos. It's the same with your vision. Perhaps you no longer want to write love stories, but what you really want to do is become the greatest mystery writer that ever lived. Do not think that you wasted your time with love stories either. Those love stories brought you to a closer vicinity to where you ultimately wanted to go. The point is, that the original vision gave you a general destination. Your ultimate destination in your writing career will materialize as you continue your writing journey.