15. Reclaiming your creative calling

Have you ever found yourself lying awake very late at night or very early in the morning wondering if you've missed your calling in life? I'm guessing most writers will be in the yes camp; we tend to be sensitive souls, primed by school and work and even religion to long for "the call" to a vocation of purpose and meaning.

I think our insomniac worries stem from a common cultural fallacy: ideas about having a calling are often conflated with having a career. And this reduction fundamentally confines our vision of what a vocation can be, who gets to have one, and what counts as valuable work.

But writing as a vocation follows an internal rubric of integrity, not an external one of success — which gives you the freedom to measure your creative life by its impact on your spirit, not by your job or your publishing credits.

Tune in to explore what makes vocation such a powerful idea for creatives, and how reclaiming it might shape your writing.

Writing praxis tip

This month's prompts will help you discover what a creative vocation means to you and how your vocation might be asking you to evolve, deepen, or just shake up your practices.

Before you dive in, take a few minutes to write down some phrases that describe your current sense of your own writing vocation. This doesn't need to be an impressive and permanent manifesto or mantra (it's actually better if it's not). Just jot down what comes to mind, in whatever format you like.

Building off your initial response, here are some further questions to home in on new possibilities...