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Great discussion @hope-ann. I agree with @Daeus-lamb and @Karthmin that if I wrote only for money it would kill my soul. *dramatic Feeler swoon*

But I have a bit of a spin-off question. It’s kinda related, kinda not, but I’ve been turning it over and over for several months and I’d love to hear what you people think.

 

Most (probably all) of us are here because we believe God called us to be writers. As a fourteen-year-old beginner, I had grand visions of locking myself away in a tower and living on bread and water and the souls of my own discarded poems— never rich in money, but endlessly wealthy in my heart.

Growing up, I encountered endless people (and articles… and quotes) who told me it would never work. Writers never get famous. Writers die in the poorhouse. Writers are weird. People don’t like writers; if you write nobody will like you/want to marry you/just generally want to have anything to do with you because it isn’t What People Do.

Some of those are valid concerns.

Most of them are hogwash. (Besides. If you won’t marry me because I’m a writer, I wouldn’t want to marry you anyway. So there.)

So, I learned to roll my eyes at them. But now, at nineteen, wiser in the world, a little more temperate in my dreams (at least outwardly ;P), beginning to understand humanity as a complex whole made up of little cells of people called families, I’ve realized that in pushing those critics away I unconsciously pushed away something much bigger.

In rejecting the naysayers, I essentially put a wall in my brain to block out everything hum-drum associated with them. Such as the necessity of money. The duty we all have to our fellow humans to be engaged in human things. The duty we all have to ourselves to be humans. The joy God means for us to experience in small everyday things, like sitting on the floor and playing endless games of tic-tac-toe with your brother, or curling up on your bed with the little kids all piled around you and reading them a story. Or maybe saying ‘you know what, I need to give writing a break for a while. Let’s go find a job at a local café and see what it’s like to work.’

In short, the question is this. What does it mean to devote ourselves to our calling?

In pushing back against people who say writing is a waste of time, I think a lot of us overcorrect and end up so stubbornly attached to ‘GIVE ME WRITING OR GIVE ME DEATH’ that we kill our own ability to take joy in other things.

Not only is this unhappy for us, it’s unhappy for the people in our lives who love us. Writing is the kind of calling that literally consumes. It’s been said (truly, I think) that a nonwriting writer is a monster courting insanity. It’s addictive. But does devoting ourselves to our calling mean permitting the addiction to consume our lives?

I’m fairly certain this is where a lot of the stereotypical ‘suicidal’ loneliness comes from in artistic circles. We get so used to pushing against a majority world that tells us not to dream that eventually we end up pushing the whole of it out the window and shutting ourselves in our own little bubble where no one can reach us, and all pleas to come back and be sensible and reasonable fall on deaf ears. Is this devotion, or is it childish blindness?

For many writers (myself included) writing is a means of self-actualization. I create my worlds and discover myself or create myself and discover my worlds— never quite sure which. This is one of the many ways I’m convinced that writing is a blessing to the writer as well as the reader. A special way for difficult people to understand themselves and understand the world.

But because we find this gift in writing, does it mean we can’t find it just as well in living life? That perhaps writing was given to us to teach us how to live life more fully, not the other way around?

What do you people think?

@Raemarie @wordsmith