What are you committed to? By Andrew J Chamberlain

This week I visited my new spiritual director for a first meeting. I had a delightful hour talking about family, faith, and church, and in the middle of the conversation she asked me a question which made me pause and think:

“What are you committed to?”

What made this a challenging and useful question was the word ‘committed’. In being asked this question she didn’t want to know about what I liked doing, or what amused me, or my hobbies, it was about what I was committed to.

Once I started to think about this, I found that the list was pretty short. Family, spending time with God, and my writing and related projects were together about the sum of it. I was encouraged by the fact that, when I answered this question as honestly as I could, writing and related activities were on that list. It seems that deep down within me I am not ‘playing’ at this writing business, it really does mean something to me.

This is good news, especially given the challenges that writing presents to anyone who is at all serious about the craft.

So now I am offering the same question to you; what are you committed to? As you are most likely reading this to yourself, you will be able to ask the question privately and answer it privately; but once you’ve answered it, you might find it helpful to review that answer with someone else that you trust, you may even want to share your thoughts with others on the ACW Facebook page.

I’d dare to say that most of us would include writing in some form in our answers to this question. If this is true the challenge for us is to work out what the consequences of that answer are, but I think that is a subject for another post.

Andrew Chamberlain is a writer and creative writing tutor. He is a commercial publisher of fiction and memoir and the presenter of the creative writer’s podcast: The Creative Writer’s Toolbelt, he is also the author of The Creative Writer’s Toolbelt Handbook which contains the best advice and insight from 100 episodes of the podcast.