What are you willing to give up in order to become who you really need to be?
—Elizabeth Gilbert

Writers are like anyone else. We require shelter, food, and water. We need companionship, in human or animal form. We do better if we recognize our purpose in this world. For me, that purpose is writing.

For me, writing is the lens through which I see this crazy world. While I’m talking specifically about writing, you can fill in the blank with any artistic endeavor. Perhaps you pine for the painting life in the same way that I pine for the writing life, which is to say that I seek to embrace every ounce of creativity offered to me.

Pursuing the writing life means making a commitment to putting words on paper, whether by hand or by keyboard. It means staying in close contact with the storyteller inside you. It means being attuned to the inspiration all around you. It means rediscovering your inner child—the one who loved to play make-believe, dress in costumes, and create worlds under homemade tents. It means remembering the activities you loved when you were younger and probably still do deep down somewhere, buried beneath grocery lists and unpaid bills.

The writing life means admitting your love of language, rhythm, and story. A desire to write is born from a love of words—first in relentlessly pursuing other people’s words, and, then, in pursuing our own. The writing life means seeking beauty in the everyday that others, who are not artists, might consider mundane. For me, sitting on my shady patio in the cooler morning air, especially on so-hot desert summer days, enjoying the green of the plants surrounding me, drinking a cup of tea, watching the trees, and seeing the valley in the distance is a perfect morning. I can listen to the birds sing and simply be.

Henry David Thoreau said, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essen- tial facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” For me, living deliberately means accepting that I’m not a complete person unless I give these stories breathing fire within me free range. For some of us, writing is our call- ing, so embracing the writing life means discovering that calling, acknowledging it, and staying true to it despite the myriad of challenges we face every day. Embracing the writing life means tapping into our creativity, letting our souls roam free, and sharing the truest part of ourselves. Often, it means that we go against the grain in how we choose to live because predetermined expectations don’t work for us.

I’ve certainly experienced down times when writing has felt like a chore, as if it were something I did because I expected it of myself. Lawrence Kasdan said, “Being a writer is like having homework every day.” There have been times when I grew tired of the homework and lost the joy that writing had always brought me. I forgot how much fun it was to write a story for the story’s sake, because I got to spend time in a world that I created. I mourned the loss of that joy, and I wondered how to get it back. What is the point of writing if you don’t enjoy it?

For me, living deliberately includes making space for writing. I’m not writing because I have to. I’m writing because I want to. Because it’s an authentic part of who I am. Because it makes me happy. Because it brings me peace. When I talk about writing, I’m talking about the act of world-building and storytelling, but I also mean the physical act—sitting my bottom into the chair and dancing my fingers across the keyboard, typing out words that become sentences that, in time, become essays or novels. Toni Morrison said, “But writing was the real freedom because nobody told me what to do there. That was my world and my imagination. And all my life it’s been that way, even now.” The freedom writing gives me is palpable. When all else fails me, as it sometimes does, writing saves me.

Whether you love to write, or if you have some other creative endeavor that lights you up from the inside, your time may feel fuller when you decide to include the magic of creativity. Writing is how I suck the marrow out of life. “Writing is the act of reaching across the abyss of isolation to share and reflect,” said Natalie Goldberg. And it should be writing spurred by joy.

As Elizabeth Gilbert asks, what are you willing to give up in order to become who you really need to be? Are you willing to give up wasting time living according to other people’s expectations? According to preconceived ideas about what your life should look like? Your own outdated vision of yourself in five years, ten years, at the end of your life? Many things will happen in 2025 that will be out of my control. As a writer, the main thing I can control is my writing. I have made a deliberate decision to focus on writing with joy this year. Not in writing to market, not in writing to expectations, and not in expectation of book sales. I’ll be writing because I love writing above all else.