Writing as Spiritual Initiation

Reflections on Vocation, Craft, and Becoming

January 2023. It was exactly three years ago that I left my full-time job as a communication strategist and decided to give the writing thing a chance. That thing that was always there, always in the background, always that ultimate dream—so fitting and perfect and sacred I didn’t dare come too close for it might want something to do with me.

The impulse to write had visited me months prior, when I didn’t know where to turn with my existential restlessness and desire, other than the blank, non-judgmental page. Where to turn with a more gluttonous part of me who wanted what I wasn’t supposed to want. I was in long-term partnership with a man back then, a man I still love and with whom I had a wonderful, life-affirming relationship. Still, I found myself fantasizing—in my mind and on the page—about my best (woman) friend and former lover, knowing that both of us were in monogamous relationships.

From that impulse was born a short story. One which I shared with my former (woman) lover, who shared it with her partner, which made me want to be honest with mine and share the story with him too. To say the least, it was awkward. Not only had this impulse thrown me into a rabbit hole of difficult conversations and the study of alternative relational models—it wanted me to keep digging.

I tried to find a way out. I tried to convince myself of my lovely life: my lovely stable communication job, my lovely monogamous relationship. But that impulse began revealing itself as the voice of my truer self. A voice that kept whispering. And then not only whispering. Eventually, it spoke through the vocal cords of a human being—a man. A cocky and sensitive and unfairly sexy creature I wasn’t supposed to want; I wasn’t supposed to fall in love with; I wasn’t supposed to risk my entire life with my lovely partner just to try and discover what damn assignment I had with this other man, who had kids, a mess of a relational life, who lived in another country. Why, voice? Why, impulse to write? Why me?

By then I knew I couldn’t not listen. I couldn’t not keep writing. Its will surpassed my own, and it was my task to move through this unfolding—alongside myself, my partner, my almost-lovers—and document it as devoutly as I could. So I did what I had to do. In January 2023, I didn’t leave my job to write what the voice was showing me wanted to become a novel. But I didn’t search for a new one because of it. It was time to put the writing thing at the center of everything and discover how this long fantasy—of being a writer and living a truer life—felt in not-so-fantasy-like life.

I’d heard interviews about the time it took to draft a novel—a couple of months for some; for others, a couple of years. Sally Rooney drafted her first in three months. Rachel Cusk, two crazy weeks. I anticipated falling somewhere in the middle. Sure, I was a non-native English writer. Sure, I was a twenty-five-year-old business school graduate who’d never read the classics. Sure, I was the daughter of engineers, military officers, and public servants with little connection to the arts. But if there was one thing I knew, as a former volleyball player competing above my age level, it was discipline: showing up, doing the work.

The first draft took seven months, from January to August 2023. During this time I lowered my expenses to the minimum. I relied on the generous support of my family, my partner (the same partner with whom I was risking my future to write this book). I set my alarm before dawn every weekday and brought my yawning self to the keyboard even when I had no idea what I was doing—which was most days. I began couples therapy with an expert in CNM. I worked on my relationship—both with my partner and my self—which meant neither leaving him nor abandoning my need for relational freedom. I listened to every writer interview I found on the In Writing with Hattie Crisell podcast. I read more than I ever had. I studied. I realized how little I knew about the craft I wanted to integrate as my own beyond vomiting cheesy half-truths onto the page, half-truths that despite my incompetence still wanted to be expressed through me—me—why me? At least I had a manuscript now. Not so much a good one. Not one I could show a living soul. Not one that was true—for I hadn’t yet lived enough—but it was something.

The second draft took eight months: from September 2023 to May 2024. I was more confident then: about my creative process, my vocational choices, my semi-open partnership, my identity as a writing apprentice. I began taking some freelance communication gigs, realizing that if I wanted this novel to be any good, it would probably take time. My partner encouraged me to spend some months in the Portuguese countryside, in solitude, focused, since I was privileged enough to do so. It was a good idea. After the Christmas holidays that’s what I did. I brought my favorite books and Mrs. Coruja with me (meet her in the image below). I surrounded myself with printed drafts, fluorescent highlighters, Post-it notes on the walls to keep me motivated. I spent nearly half a year like that. I wrote until one day I was finished: the day I cried rather dramatically on the grass outside, kneeling into the sunset, for I could not believe I’d crossed to the other side whole—and still partnered, still in a lovely, even better relationship, now open. I sent the manuscript to trusted writer friends, Guy James and Sophiia Dehé. I send it to an experienced editor, Jennifer Silva Redmond. I returned to the Spanish capital where I was based. I waited for feedback.

Mrs. Coruja :)

It’s January 2026. The third and current draft has taken me, so far, one year and four months. I had finished the manuscript in the Portuguese countryside but the story wasn’t done with me yet. My alpha readers had enjoyed the ending but it wasn’t my ending. The voice wanted me to leave my lovely open relationship. It wanted me to leave my home in Spain. To return to my country of origin. To end alone (or as a dear friend likes to put it: all one). What began as a short story in 2023—and a call to open my relationship—has since become an initiatory journey to open my entire life. I’m still grappling with what that means. I sense it has something to do with control, or more specifically, with its release. I sense it has something to do with a spiritual kind of authority—the one hard-earned through direct experience, courage, surrender, discernment, failure, more failure, and self-reflection. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that authority and author share the same root. Perhaps, at the deepest level, my call to write—to be an author—is a call to become the authority of my own life.

The plan for the novel—yes, because I’m still into planning—is to finish before the flowers begin to reveal their colors here in Alentejo where I’m now based. That’s how I’ve motivated myself over the years: setting a deadline, pretending I’d be over then, working hard, occasionally distracting (or motivating) myself with a Substack post, defining the next deadline, and failing again. But the other thing this writing journey has been teaching me is to focus less on the object—the lover I can’t have, the perfect open relationship, the finished manuscript, the agent I haven’t landed, the publishing deal—and more on who I’m becoming through the process; trusting that what belongs to me is already strolling, equanimous and unbothered by my impatience, in my direction. However long that takes.

That’s it for today. In case you’re searching for ways to motivate yourself to keep writing—or listening to the voice of your life—here are some books that have kept me company along the way:

Letters To a Young Poet
Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation
Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear
Several Short Sentences About Writing
The Situation and the Story: the Art of Personal Narrative
To Show & to Tell: The Craft of Literary Non-Fiction
On Becoming a Novelist
Mornings with Mailer: A Recollection of Friendship
A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of “A Course In Miracles”
Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative

With Love,
Carlota