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 tips

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...

First, here's the prompt I shared in the pod episode: Think about any recent moments when you've felt creative flow and possibility (in your writing or in any other area of your life), and then consider what made those moments different — what were you able to let go in those moments that made room for a different kind of experience?
What's something you know for sure about yourself as a writer — something so foundational to your practice that you haven't thought about it in years? Brainstorm some ways to subvert that assumption.

Be gentle with this; don't force yourself to do or write anything that feels awful! My example from the pod is that I'm "not a poet." So I'm writing a lot of quick poems, purely for the fun of the process. Experiment with something that feels like play, but that you'd normally never do or write.
What have you always wanted to write or create, but never thought you could attempt? Why does this feel like an impulse you can't follow?

See what happens when you attempt it, with no expectation of "success."

(This might look like basically the same exercise as above, but I promise it's not. Flipping the approach to what you've been denying yourself, rather than what you assume about yourself, will often shake different things out of your creative brain.)
This prompt is for after you've played with the previous three and let them sit for a few days. Now that you've opened those new possibilities, how would you describe your personal writing vocation? Does it feel different than before?

Episode references

This Here Flesh, Cole Arthur Riley