What if the writing life you’re working so hard to create is only one of several writing lives available to you?

As writers, we can become very attached to a particular picture of what the future is supposed to look like. Finish this manuscript. Find an agent. Get published. Write another book. Build an author career. Perhaps leave the day job one day. Perhaps earn enough from our books to write full time.

There’s nothing wrong with having a vision. A clear direction can give you something meaningful to work towards.

The problem begins when that vision quietly turns into a set of rules.

A successful writer publishes a certain way. A serious writer produces a certain number of books. A productive writer follows a particular routine. A real author sticks with one genre. A published writer should keep doing whatever worked before.

Before long, a dream that once felt expansive can begin to feel incredibly narrow.

And when you believe there’s one correct road ahead, every decision carries enormous weight.

Should you query this book or publish it yourself? Should you keep writing in your current genre or follow the idea that keeps pulling at you? Should writing remain something you fit around your existing life, or are you ready to give it greater priority? Should you keep pushing towards the writing career you once imagined, even if the version of success you want has changed?

Trying to identify the single right answer can create more pressure than clarity.

There’s another way to approach the question.

Instead of asking yourself to predict one perfect future, imagine three.

Why Writers Need More Than One Version of the Future

The idea behind a Writer’s Odyssey Plan is adapted from Odyssey Planning, an exercise associated with Stanford’s Life Design work and popularised by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans in Designing Your Life. The broader concept is simple: explore genuinely different possible futures instead of assuming your life has one predetermined best path.

For writers, that can be incredibly freeing.

Your writing life is allowed to change.

You might begin wanting traditional publication and later discover that independent publishing gives you the creative control you value. You might start your career writing historical fiction and discover a nonfiction book you feel deeply called to write. You might once have dreamed of producing four books a year and later realise that one carefully written book every two years gives you the creative life you actually want.

Or you might complete this exercise and realise that the direction you’re already taking feels right. Your answer could be greater commitment to the path you’re already on.

The purpose of the exercise is exploration.

You’re giving yourself enough room to see possibilities that can disappear when every decision has to be practical, sensible and immediately achievable.

Take out three pages and imagine yourself approximately five years from today.

Each page gets a different future.

Path One: Your Current Writing Life Continues

Your first future begins with the direction your life is already moving.

Your circumstances can evolve. You’ll learn, grow and experience new opportunities. The central question is what your writing life might become if your main patterns continue developing in their current direction.

If you currently write around a full-time job, perhaps that remains part of your life. If you’re already published and producing books under contract, imagine where another five years of that pathway might lead. If your manuscript regularly gets pushed behind work, family and other commitments, allow yourself to see the natural result of that pattern as well.

Make the future concrete.

What are you writing five years from now? How many books have you completed? How are your books reaching readers? Where do you write? What does an ordinary Tuesday look like?

Look beyond the career milestones too. Consider the actual experience of writing.

How much space does your writing have in your week? What happens inside you when you open your laptop? How confident are you making decisions about your manuscript? What are you proud of? What would your future self love you to give greater attention to now?

This path can reveal something important because continuing in your current direction is a valid future.

You might look at it and think, Yes. I want more of this.

Perhaps you like the balance between your career, family and writing. Perhaps your current publishing path still excites you. Perhaps the change you need is smaller than you imagined: another protected writing session each week, a clearer manuscript plan, stronger boundaries around your creative time, or greater trust in the direction you’ve already chosen.

You might also see the cost of a pattern you’ve been tolerating.

If another five years of putting the manuscript last leaves the same book unfinished, that gives you useful information. If another five years of writing books you feel disconnected from leaves you creatively exhausted, that tells you something too.

Information creates choice.

And choice gives you somewhere to begin.

Path Two: The Brave Alternative

Your second path asks you to make a meaningful change.

It can be a practical change, a creative change, a publishing change or an identity-level change. What matters is that this future asks something braver from you than your current direction does.

Perhaps you change genres.

Perhaps you write the story you’ve been hesitant to put on the page because it feels deeply personal.

Perhaps you query agents after years of thinking about it. Perhaps you move towards independent publishing. Perhaps you reduce your work hours and give writing a defined place in your professional life.

Perhaps you finish the manuscript you’ve been carrying for years.

Or perhaps the brave choice is quieter. You begin treating your writing as something worthy of your time. You put two writing sessions in your diary each week and protect them with the same respect you give other commitments. You let yourself call yourself a writer now, while the manuscript is still becoming a book.

Carry that decision five years into the future.

What changed because you made it?

What are you writing? What books exist because you chose this route? How has your writing week changed? How has your confidence changed? What opportunities became visible once you began moving?

Then ask yourself one of the most useful questions in the entire exercise:

What became possible because I was willing to begin before I felt completely ready?

Sit with the answer.

Writers often imagine confidence arriving first and action following afterwards. In reality, confidence frequently develops through experience. You make a decision. You write the scene. You send the query. You finish the draft. You discover that you can handle what happens next.

Path Two lets you see what might become available when readiness becomes something you build through action.

Path Three: Your Unconstrained Writing Life

Path Three opens the doors wider.

For a few minutes, move money, approval, status, sales figures, algorithms, reviews, family expectations and publishing expectations to the side.

Those factors can return when you move into planning. Right now, you’re listening for what you want beneath them.

If your choice needed to impress nobody, what would you write?

What kind of author would you become?

Would you choose the same publishing pathway? Would you write more books or fewer? Would you change genres? Would you write something stranger, more personal, more ambitious or more playful?

Would you teach alongside writing? Travel for research? Collaborate with other creatives? Write in a cabin surrounded by silence? Work in a busy café because the movement around you makes you feel alive?

And then go deeper.

How would you like being a writer to feel?

That question matters because writers often build goals around achievement while giving far less attention to the experience of the life surrounding those achievements.

You can have a publishing goal and still ask how you want your days to feel while pursuing it.

Perhaps you want your writing life to feel spacious.

Perhaps you want focus, adventure, peace, connection, freedom or creative excitement.

There is valuable information inside that feeling.

If every external achievement in your imagined future looks impressive yet the life itself feels exhausting, pay attention. If the quieter version of your future gives you a strong sense of satisfaction every time you picture it, pay attention to that too.

Success has more than one shape.

Your third path gives you permission to discover yours.

Put the Three Futures Side by Side

Once you’ve written all three, place the pages beside one another.

This is where the exercise becomes particularly useful.

Rather than immediately selecting a winner, look for repetition.

What keeps appearing?

Perhaps protected writing time is present in all three futures. Perhaps every version of you finishes the manuscript you’re working on now. Perhaps two futures involve teaching, speaking, travelling for research or moving into a different genre.

Perhaps every version of you has a clearer writing rhythm.

Perhaps every version has finally given writing a place of genuine importance in their life.

Perhaps each future is built around a completely different career, yet the writer in every one of them feels calm, confident and creatively connected.

Those repeated elements are clues.

Your three futures can look radically different on the surface while still pointing towards the same underlying need.

That is where clarity often lives.

Turn Your Future Into a Small Experiment

A five-year vision becomes useful when it begins influencing something you can explore now.

Choose one element from one of your futures and test it over the next seven days.

If one future includes morning writing, try two morning writing sessions.

If another involves historical research and travel, schedule a local research day somewhere connected to your subject.

If you saw yourself writing in another genre, write one scene in that genre.

If your future self has a dedicated writing space, make one practical improvement to the space you already use.

If every future shows you taking your writing seriously, place one protected writing appointment in your calendar and honour it.

You’re gathering evidence.

Notice what happens when you actually experience a small piece of that imagined future. Does it energise you? Does it support the way you naturally write? Does it make returning to the manuscript easier? Does it create a sense of expansion or clarity?

A future becomes far easier to understand when you experience part of it rather than analysing it endlessly.

Your Writing Personality Can Shape the Futures You Imagine

Your Bird Writing Personality can also influence the way you complete this exercise.

Dove, Owl, Peacock and Eagle patterns are tendencies rather than fixed labels. Most writers carry a blend, and your patterns can shift depending on the project, your circumstances and the season of life you’re moving through.

If you lean Dove, look at whether your imagined futures have been built largely around keeping everyone around you comfortable. Doves naturally consider other people, which is a beautiful strength. In this exercise, make sure you appear fully in the picture too. What changes when your writing needs receive equal weight?

If you lean Owl, your analytical mind might immediately begin researching whether each future is feasible. Give imagination the first turn. Make the plans rough. You can assess logistics afterwards. The purpose at this stage is to reveal possibilities rather than produce a five-year business plan.

If you lean Peacock, three writing futures can multiply very quickly. Your imagination is an asset here. Capture the possibilities that excite you, then choose three distinctly different futures and explore each one deeply enough to learn from it.

If you lean Eagle, watch the tendency to make the third path the biggest, fastest and most externally impressive version of success. Create at least one future around satisfaction rather than scale. A meaningful writing life has many possible measures of success.

Same exercise. Different pathway through it.

Use Your NLP Modality to Make the Exercise Work for You

You can also adapt the Writer’s Odyssey Plan according to how you naturally process information.

If you’re primarily Visual, draw your three futures as timelines. Add images, colours, locations, book covers, milestones and visual markers. Give yourself something you can actually see.

If you’re Auditory, speak each future into a voice note. Describe an ordinary day five years from now as though you’re already living it, then listen back. Sometimes hearing your own language makes patterns remarkably clear.

If you’re Kinesthetic, use physical space. Choose three places in the room, one for each possible future, and stand in each while you imagine it. Notice your posture, energy and physical response as you move between them.

If you’re Auditory Digital, create a clear framework for each path. Give yourself categories such as writing, publishing, work, lifestyle and relationships. Let yourself imagine freely first, then bring your analytical strengths in to organise what emerged.

There is no superior way to complete the exercise. The most useful method is the one that helps you access information you can actually recognise and work with.

Create Your Writer’s Odyssey Plan

Give yourself twenty to thirty minutes.

Take three pages and write the year at the top, five years from today.

On the first page, explore the future created from your current direction.

On the second, explore the future created through a brave and meaningful change.

On the third, explore the writing life you would choose with greater freedom from outside expectations.

Describe an ordinary day.

Look at what you’re writing, where you’re writing and how your books are reaching readers. Consider how writing fits alongside your work, family, health, energy and the rest of your life. Pay attention to what you’re making space for and what you’re choosing more deliberately.

Then ask the identity question:

What does this version of me believe about themselves as a writer?

When all three futures are complete, circle the themes that appear more than once.

Finally, choose one tiny part of one future that you can experience this week.

Because your five-year writing life is shaped through the choices you’re willing to explore now.

The Writer You’re Becoming Begins Here

Your Writer’s Odyssey Plan is less about predicting exactly where your life will take you and more about seeing what becomes visible when you give yourself several possible roads.

You might discover that your current path deserves greater trust.

You might recognise a change you’re ready to make.

You might uncover a creative desire you’ve been placing behind somebody else’s definition of what successful writing should look like.

And you might discover that three very different futures contain one thing in common: the version of you living them has finally claimed their identity as a writer and given their book the space it deserves.

That is worth paying attention to.

If this exercise has helped you see the writing future you want, and you can also see a gap between where you are today and the writer living that life, this is exactly the kind of work we can do together inside my Write The Darn Book™ 90-Day Transformation Method.

My one-to-one coaching brings together the inner work and the outer work. We work with your identity, resistance, writing personality and creative wiring, alongside the roadmap, manuscript structure, writing rhythm, milestones and practical actions that move your actual book forward.

If you’d love someone in your corner helping you turn that vision into pages, you can book a free 15-minute clarity call with me at maddisonmichaels.com/call. We’ll talk about where your writing is now, where you want it to go next, and whether working together feels like the right next step.

You are the vessel for the story. Let the words flow through you and onto the page.