Finding Your Purpose

What are we doing here?

Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash

I like to think I know what I’m doing when I write. That I know the message I’m trying to get across, and that others understand it as well. And I believe I tend to do this.

That may not always be true, if it ever is, but I still like to think it.

The most important thing to me when writing is why I’m writing. I’m big on themes and overall messages, so I’m always looking for one or two good ones to throw into whatever project I’m working on. This is something I do no matter what, since, for me, it’s the primary part of my fiction work. If I’m not working on bringing people heavily into this journey with me, then I’m not doing what I’m meant to do.

This brings me to my purpose, and how I found it.

Specifically, I know my purpose comes from writing. I’m part of the lucky bunch who have pretty much always known what they want to say, and I know that my purpose is to let people feel when they read what I’ve written when it comes to my fiction. That’s my purpose in life. To make others feel.

I first discovered that I wanted to do this when I was fourteen. I’d been interested in writing since I was a kid, but it wasn’t until I was a little older that I wrote a novella that I actually finished, and I considered this to be the first step in my writing career.

I let my mom read the novella. I can’t remember if she liked it or not, though she probably said she did to make me feel good. Either way, I remember coming downstairs to find her crying as she read it. She laughed when she saw I had caught her in the act, but I remember feeling a sense of pride once I realized what she was crying over. She cried at something I wrote. Something I made. I made someone feel that strongly just with words on a Google Doc, and I knew at that moment that I would want to keep doing this.

But it’s hard to find a strong, solid purpose. Sometimes impossible, especially if we don’t know how to find it. So, where do we start looking?

Where To Look

It’s hard to know where your definitive purpose will come from. You expect it to come in a vision, a dream, or in a direct comment from a mysterious stranger in an alleyway. For most people, it doesn’t work this way…