Answering the call of the craft

It wasn’t on my 2025 bingo card to go all in on my writing.

I was going to create a five-year plan to get my finances together, pay down the impending debt that antagonizes me to no end, and really plan this out to make it work with the full-time salary I already had. I’d schedule writing time in between work, and when it was time to say ‘goodbye’ to corporate life and put both feet down on the ground on this new path, I’d be ready.

And then, I got laid off and, as the story goes, everything changed.

I saw a post on Substack recently that talked about being delusional and pursuing this writing dream no matter what others think, or what might seem the most practical path. There seems to be a lot of noise creatives have to block out in order to pursue their calling, given that it seems, there is so much against us from the coming of AI threatening to end creativity entirely, the troubled economy making it difficult for even corporate career paths to provide the stability they once did, the government continues its assault on the arts and anything remotely intellectual, and oh yeah, the planet is dying.

I look at all of the reasons why I shouldn’t pursue a writing career and honestly wonder what the hell am I thinking going this route. I suppose this will all feed into my origin story, explaining the many complicated steps of how I defied the world and decided to become a writer. In spite of all odds, she still persisted.

Who wants to be a writer, anyway? Being a writer is weird.

You are constantly in a state of distress, wondering if the story and its characters you’ve spent time creating is believable. You talk to yourself out loud to hear the dialogue you wrote to see if what you wrote lands in the same way as you intended in your head. You wake up in the middle of the night from insane dreams that you immediately have to write down when you wake up because you’re convinced there’s a plot point in there that can help advance your story.

Writers are strange creatures, indeed.

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” ~ Anaïs Nin

And yet, we hold so much power. Power always derives from purpose, the ‘why’ behind the ‘what’. Why do we write? Why do we spend countless hours writing thousands of words in the hopes that someday someone will read them?

What brings each writer to the page is very unique. Joan Didion, in her essay Why I Write (1976, originally published New York Times), realized after years of contemplation she realized that she, indeed, was a writer. It was the only thing that made sense to her, where she was able to understand her thoughts and the world around her better than she did before.

In her collection of essays, The Source of Self-Regard, Toni Morrison talked about ‘invisible ink’ – meaning beneath the writing – creating an engaging and impactful experience for the reader. A requirement for anyone who encounters her work, if you want to read it, you have to be part of it. Much of her reason for writing was to put Black lives in the center, and through invisible ink, the reader’s presence was required to build that story with her, stepping into the story, engaging with it, and experiencing life from a view different from their own.

As I’m continuing to grow in my writing journey, I’m learning that the path to a fully realized idea is a difficult one. It takes time and care to nurture something from conception to birth. Time is spent building the skeleton that holds the whole thing together, creating space for the organs, muscles, and blood to pump life through it, and the skin to keep this inner system safe. It requires all of you to give birth to another life.

That’s what we’re striving for, though, isn’t it? Creating lives with our words, our music, our art, to live on, inspiring another to create even more life, and keep the cycle going. The cycle that keeps humanity’s soul alight.

The more I write, the more I understand why we do this, why I do this. The reason why we spend so much time and care with each word placed carefully onto the page, used to transform and shape a world to make sense of it. We create the bridge for readers to leave their world, their comfort zones, challenging what they thought they knew as they enter new ones. This birthing takes time, but it’s always well spent when we get to see our final piece come to life.

I’m still exploring what it means for me to be a writer, what my voice is, and how I want to use it. I don’t yet know my full potential in engaging with the craft, but I do know I want my words to mean something to someone. To shake something loose within the reader that inspires them to face the world around them, giving them a new set of eyes to see it differently.

To help humanity’s soul shine a bit brighter. That’s a nice calling if you ask me.

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