A Calling

     This week I watched an interview with the cast and crew of "Before Midnight," which, by the way, is available to rent or buy now—something you should do as soon as possible. It is one of the best films released this year.

            During the interview an audience member asked the amazing writer/director Richard Linklater how a college dropout went from working on an off-shore oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico to being such a successful filmmaker. He answered that it's like anything else. You dedicate your life to it.

            He's right. Whatever you want to do just dedicate your life to it.

            I've dedicated my life to a few select things. Writing chief among them.

            In the same way Linklater went from working on an off-shore oil rig to making movies by dedicating his life to it, I went from a young theology student to a novelist by doing the same thing.

            Twenty years ago I dedicated myself to writing in general and writing novels in particular and writing mystery/suspense/thriller novels even more particularly.

            That's why when asked while speaking at a book club recently what I read for fun I had to answer nothing.

            From the moment I dedicated my life to being a novelist in general and a mostly crime novelist in particular I would never, could never read anything the same way again—any more than I could experience life the same way again.

            I have a lot of fun reading. I don't ever read just for fun.

            When I'm reading I'm also studying, also evaluating, also writing.

            When I'm living I'm also observing, also researching, also writing.

            Experts say that the difference between those who dedicate their lives to something and those who don't is just that—those pursuing a calling can no longer do what they do just for fun.        Which is why I recently read "The Cuckoo's Calling," the first crime novel by Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, writing under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith.

            Though the Harry Potter books were not for me, I appreciated them greatly and admired their creator, so when she turned to crime I had to investigate.

            After losing his leg to a land mine in Afghanistan, Cormoran Strike is barely scraping by as a private investigator. Strike is down to one client, and creditors are calling. He has also just broken up with his longtime girlfriend and is living in his office.

            Then John Bristow walks through his door with an amazing story: His sister, the legendary supermodel Lula Landry, known to her friends as the Cuckoo, famously fell to her death a few months earlier. The police ruled it a suicide, but John refuses to believe that. The case plunges Strike into the world of multimillionaire beauties, rock-star boyfriends, and desperate designers, and it introduces him to every variety of pleasure, enticement, seduction, and delusion known to man.           "The Cuckoo's Calling" is a well-written, well-told tale by someone who has obviously dedicated her life to writing novels—though not to writing crime novels.

            I can promise you J.K. Rowling had fun writing "The Cuckoo's Calling" and that Richard Linklater had fun making "Before Midnight." But I will also bet you that they both found the endeavors to be difficult, exhausting work as well.
            Doing something for fun has its reward but there is nothing more fulfilling than dedicating your life to something, than expending and exhausting yourself in the pursuit of something more. Rumi, the great mystic poet who understood a thing or three about life and dedication, said it this way, "Let the beauty we love be what we do."
            That is not just creativity. That is a calling.