What’s the difference between a job and a vocation?
A job is what you do; a vocation defines you.
A job is something you can change; a vocation changes you.
A job is done for the money; a vocation isn’t about the money.
A job takes time; a vocation fills it.
You can take time off work; there’s no vacation from a vocation…
“Cut!” with the aphorisms. Simply stated: Writing is my vocation.
I’ve had jobs as a writer. Fifteen years as a community journalist, another 15 as a communications manager. And because they engaged my skills and put them to good use, they were fulfilling careers. But they weren’t enough. In the wee hours, I’d find a closet or corner of the house where I could write what I call ‘real fiction.’
My jobs supported my family and me. But they were also an evasion. As a young man, I didn’t have the courage of my literary conviction (double entendre intended). I feared my creative urge for poetry and prose would never lead to a livable income, or that I’d never be good enough to claim the prize of a best seller.
Because I was afraid, I didn’t pick up my walking stick and don the robe and cowl of a poetic monk. I went looking for work. After a decade of very odd jobs—the most symbolic in a factory manufacturing typewriter keys—I took an accelerated journalism course at Langara College in Vancouver, and set foot on my career and life path.
But the ARTesian well of creative writing flowed on beneath the surface. Clattering away in the dead of night, I wrote three novels: Josh and the Magic Vial, which was nominated for a BC Book Prize in the young adult fiction category; Einstien Dog, nominated for the Chocolate Lily Award of the BC Primary School Teachers’ Association; and The Boy From Under, my first self-published book.
I had the best of both worlds.
In 2012, I retired from my day job. “At last, I’ll have all the time I need to write that best seller I know is in me,” I thought.
To my utter surprise, I stepped into that glorious fresh start I had earned through three decades of day-to-day work, and stumbled into a state of confusion verging on depression. I hope colleagues from my gainfully employed era will forgive my unfair analogy, but I liken the experience to that of a prisoner, having served his life sentence—with time off for good behaviour—stepping out of his confined and defined quarters into the disorienting freedom of an unfettered world.
I discovered, once the whoops of my premature celebration had petered out, that although my literary vocation still infused me, I wasn’t yet a writer in the full sense of the word. I still had to become one, had to give myself permission to be one.
More about that in future posts about The Writers Cycle.
Having resolved the disturbing confluences of life-after-retirement, I am well on my way to feeling confident about calling myself a writer, doing public readings, promoting and selling my books, looking for opportunities to share my stories and knowledge.
I have written three more novels: The Mural Gazer, set in Chemainus, BC (AKA Muraltown); Stained Glass, set in the historic townsite of Barkerville, BC; and Entrapments, which I am sharing in a Direct-to-Web (D2W) edition as I finalize my working draft.
Two more novels and a book of short stories are germinating in my restless thoughts. Whether or not I will have time to imagine, research, write, and promote them is another matter. All I can say as a writer is, I’ll be living and breathing life into them every day, because a writing ‘cycle’ has three dimensions. It doesn’t just go round and round. Viewed from the proper perspective, it’s an upward spiral that never reaches ‘The End.’
Until the end…