Q&A: Is Writing Your Calling or is it a Hobby?
Can it be both?
Nobody has to answer this question, of course. Just throwing it out there with no judgment at all, maybe because I’m trying to figure out why I’m still here doing this thing I love but coming at it with caveats:
I write because I love writing (clearly hobby talk), but I want to make a difference. (Now it’s getting serious.) I don’t want to have to decide. I don’t want to have to give up one for the other. I want to be me on any given day, even if me turns out to be someone quite at odds with the person who was me yesterday.
I’m probably making mountains out of molehills, which is why I would like you to weigh in.
Dictionary.com says this about hobbies:
An activity or interest pursued for pleasure or relaxation and not as a main occupation: Her hobbies include stamp-collecting and woodcarving.
The Cambridge dictionary says this about a Calling:
a strong wish to do a job, usually one that is socially valuable:
I'm glad she's going into medicine. It's a very worthy calling.
I can relate to both of them, which may be why my writing tends to be all over the place. There are times I just want to have fun with it, and then there are times I want to use it to change the whole damn planet.
Sometimes I want to reach out and connect with someone I know is out there and is feeling the same things I am. I want it to be personal without it feeling like either a hobby or a calling. I want it to be just us.
And sometimes I just want to tell a story.
If someone were to ask me what my writing is about, I’d be hard put to come up with an answer. That’s kind of startling, considering I’ve been at this for a long, long time.
It’s been years since I’ve been focused or disciplined enough to explain what I do in one sentence. I rarely plan ahead, other than to jot brief notes about a possible topic, and I don’t schedule my posts. I sometimes just come up with a title and build a story from there.
And I like it that way. It feels free after so many years of writing in a way someone else might like. Playing their tune. Anticipating the changes they’ll insist on if I wing it too much.
So it feels like a hobby. And it feels like a calling. And maybe it doesn’t matter at all. But I’ll ask it anyway and see if any of you have ever thought about it:
Do you see your writing as a hobby or a calling? And does it influence the way you write?
The conversation pit is open, as always. BYOB.
What an interesting question!
I write primarily as a way of showing up in the world. Maybe it's a hobby, maybe it's a calling, maybe it's a practice.
My focus area for the year (and for the foreseeable future!) is Notice and Name (what's arising in me, those around me, and the environment). To which I've added "...and write about it." Or, as Joan Didion put it, I write to find out what I'm thinking.
It's just part of me now, like speaking.
I'm in a transition from hobby to calling. How's that for a cop-out answer?
I think that a key distinction is whether you write as a career, i.e., that's how you intend to make your living or whether you have a non-writing career or source of making money.
Wallace Stevens was an insurance executive, but I think people would call his poetry a calling.
Do you live for your writing or do you live off your writing? I'm not sure that's an important distinction as to whether writing is a calling or a hobby.
Actually, I want it to be a calling for me. So, thinking about your question was helpful. Thanks!