If you have abandoned your dream, go back to that point in time (or points in time) to when someone or something shot it down. Go back to that point and reclaim the dream right then and there. It might sound cliche to reclaim it and believe in it again, but with specific ways of reclaiming and renewing belief, you can do it, things don't have to stay the same. You can change it. The gift(s) you were born with don't go away. You can reach into those gifts again. Those gifts bore your dreams. The dormant dream can be reawakened and the gift can be reopened. Don't leave it wrapped up on a shelf. Allow it to surprise and delight you again.
Sometimes when the writer freezes, ceases to work due to lack of passion in one's work to the point of not even feeling like doing the work, or still gets the desire but gets writer's block, it can be due to a need for perfectionism. Who first made you feel like you have to be perfect? Who told you that your work was terrible, useless, ridiculous, needless, a waste of your time? Who of your critics put you down too hard and attacked your personage rather than just your book they didn't like? Go back to those points in your timeline and rewrite them in a Jungian technique of Active Imagination ( the first AI I ever knew!) and tell yourself they were wrong about your work, that it IS worth your time, worth pursuing. Tell yourself you don't have to be perfect and find the perfect words. You can find GREAT words, but words always have alternative words. It can be boiling hot, excruciatingly hot, unbearably hot. For now, unless or until you find a mirage of exact words, just say "It is hot." Unless adjectives come to you in the middle of the night and wake you up, keep it simple. When you write your second draft the adjectives might emerge for you to see. Don't cross out everything you write as you go through your first draft. Just get it out, not worrying about its perfection and your critics or rivals or haters or those who have shown disdain towards you as a writer. The same thing goes for being an artist of any sort, or any vocation you have chosen in life--remember, most the time, IT chose YOU. I could be humorous here, then, and say don't take the blame or tomatoes people throw at you, because if IT chose you, it's just not your fault! It's ITS fault! Blame it on the muse. (No, do not ever blame anything on your muse--it is too sacred.)
There is something else: loss of hope. Loss of hope can be at the bottom of all of the above, especially for writers that simply can't face the paper or the keyboard anymore. Hope leaves people for various reasons. Hope sounds like the word open and also has the word pen in it. You have to open your pen, so to speak. You have to HOP to it and be OPEN to HOPE. It is easy to lose hope when someone or something takes the wind out of your sails. It is easy for beginning writers in a writing class to not get their hopes up if they think they can't write or always only got C's on their papers or failed all their papers. But a good teacher gives them hope that if they were failing students before, they can become C students (at least) in the class and pass and if they have been C students they can become B or A students.
The point of teaching wriitng is never to find fault but only to help people improve their skills. It is a process and not just a product, especially for learning writers. Even experienced writers and/or professional writers have to go through a process to come up with their final draft of an article. I don't usually draft myt blogs because I usually write them off the top of my head, how I feel that day. Now and then I will edit a sentence or two if it is a more formal entry. Articles or papers for classes, literary magazines, or newspapers, were things I always drafted. And now the same goes for my future books too.
In any case, the point here I wanted to make and will now get around to is that some people lose hope because of past school experience or a bad experience with a teacher that cut their writing up into shreds and makes a scrapbook out of it all so that they always remember how wrong they were and how awful their writing was. That is what it can feel like. I had students describe that sort of feeling to me before when I would ask them about their writing experience on the first days of class.
There are other personal reasons for losing hope also. Maybe you did not fulfill your professional goals with your writing on your projected timeline. Maybe someone told you it is too late. As long as you can think, you can write. It is never too late so long as you can think. If you don't type or have issues later in life that prevent you from typing, you can buy a recorder then have someone type it for you or get a Dragon program that will type as you dictate.
Or maybe somehow you lost your manuscript that you thought would be your bestseller and you feel you cannot bring yourself to do it again, that you could never repeat the performance. Ballerinas and stage performers repeat performances all the time. So maybe you already had your opening night. Now it is time for the closing night of the performace. So many people start things they just don't finish. Don't be one of those people or don't be that person anymore!
There are so many emotional reasons for not finishing things and things in the psyche. Whatever the reason, forge ahead with pen. This is something maybe I will write more at length about soon--but definitely sometime in the future: How to get to the point where you will finish things. ADD? ADHD? Multi-task too much? Busy work schedule? Life is a three-ring circus? Trying to make everyone else around you happy by always jumping through the hoops? So many reasons to get rid of. So many. Get rid of them.
Rid of them.