For all that I do online, it's the writing that takes up most of my mind—but why?
So, something pretty wild happened recently. But I guess it was only about time before I took the plunge and did it.
You see, every month, either around the first or whenever the moon is waxing, and typically on a Thursday, I do a common witchy thing: refresh my little money bowl with God. It's a fun process: picking out the herbs to add to the bowl, getting the candles and the crystals out, finding all my favorite Bible verses and prayers from my various prayer books. I typically use the Guerrillas of Grace prayer book alongside the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer (BCP). They're both full of awesome prayers that work really well either as cantrips or as parts of a longer ritual.
Most people do this on the first of the month, but I only do that if the moon is waxing at that time, as the waxing moon signals a time of growth. Waning moons are a time of decrease, and doing a money spell around then would be a bit counterintuitive. I choose Thursdays because they're days associated with Jupiter, the planet of abundance, grace, and expansion. This time, however, I did it differently.
One, because the moon was waxing already around January 1st, I got to actually do my refresh on the 1st for once. But two, I chose Wednesday instead of Thursday. Wednesday, ruled by Mercury, is more about advancements, technology, and most of all, communication. And third, I threw out all the old prosperity goop in the bowl from 2024 and started from scratch for 2025.
(After all, who wants leftover goop from the last year, right? Clean slate!)
But all these changes were because this year, I finally figured it out: what my writing is for. It's the stuff that keeps me going, y'know? The stuff that makes me feel alive. There is actually nothing better than seeing my books or journals in someone else's house—knowing that these words left my head to go live in someone else's, and that my characters are haunting them like they haunt me. Maybe that makes writers some kind of literary necromancers—sending the specters of souls that never walked this earth to make an impact on those that do—but hey, it's all in the aim of telling a good story, so may we all be haunted by those narratives we love.
And before I get into what I discovered and what the aim of that spell this month was, let me tell you a little bit about why I started writing to begin with.
What Inspired Me to Write
I think I was maybe 7 or 8 when I first discovered my dad's old typewriter. It wasn't a vintage one or anything, but it was one that still made that classic typewriter font on the paper and the satisfying clicks and punchy noises whenever I hit a key. My dad had his own tax business for the early years of my life and would use it for writing addresses on envelopes or other things like that, so it was all clean and legible for the post office. (He also had paper with his own letterhead, which in retrospect was cool, but at the time annoyed the shit out of little kid me because that letterhead would be in the way of all the stuff I was trying to draw on the countless sheets I stole.)
For whatever reason, though, one day, I decided to screw around with the typewriter, and my dad let me. I popped a piece of normal printer paper in there—no annoying letterhead for once, thankfully, since he gave me a few sheets from what looked like a giant vault of perfectly untouched white paper he bought from the office supply stores—and I just started typing. Mostly hitting keys, trying the little backspace button, realizing the "delete" key didn't exactly take the ink out like it was supposed to, and making a big old mess.
Somehow, I got the idea to write something. I'd always been a big reader and knew that stories started something like this. After all, the font made my page full of gunk look kind of like how those old manuscripts did in movies, and I'd seen scenes of writers at a typewriter like this just clicking away on the keys, so I figured—why the hell not? I only wrote a single page, but it was a story about little kid me seeing a spooky green light in the hallway, walking out of the bedroom I was writing in, and seeing a gigantic cockroach-looking bug standing upright at the sink in the kitchen. (Step aside, Kafka; I had the real bug story.)
Now, obviously, the writing was not good. I don't even have to see the story to know. (I remember what I imagined, but I know the writing needed some work, because obviously, I was 7.) However, all I knew was that I could just imagine stuff—literally anything I wanted—and write it down to read back and re-imagine as much as I wanted. That was a big deal for a kid with an imagination constantly limited by paper (as I'd try to make all kinds of drawings, even taping paper together to make life sized dolls, but they never looked how I wanted). By writing, the things I imagined could be exactly like I imagined them, not only in my head, but in others', too, when they read the story. And when I brought it downstairs to dad's home office so he could read it, he did something very important: he actually paused his work to read it, then said, "Hey, that's pretty good! Good job!"
Sometimes I wonder what would've happened if he didn't want to read it or if he'd told me it sucked. I was very much a kid that would quit at things she wasn't immediately good at: ballet, guitar, all that. Thank God he didn't tell me those things, though, because I only wanted to write more after that—and so I went and wrote my very first "book," a few pages stapled together with a cover drawn on in colored pencils. It was a story about one of my stuffed animals, a white dog named Stuffis, and my pet cat Mitsy Man, fighting a criminal Great Dane in the city.
I still have it. It's a goofy, typo-ridden mess with an even goofier story. But it's special. It's my first book! And it got me hooked on the fact that I could make things come true, make them feel real, just like they did in all the books I read that I could so vividly imagine as I turned each page. I've wanted to be a writer since then, and I was thrilled when I got to take my first creative writing class in high school, as well as stubborn and unyielding when people told me that a degree in creative writing would be "useless" and not help me get a good job.
(Fuck that. I not only got a BFA in creative writing; I got an MFA in specifically fantasy writing, because I've heard too many stories of people going for the "safe" career and ending up miserable. Far, far too many stories. I know firsthand what a life like that looks like, and I rebuke that hell-on-earth, lemme tell you.)
But still: that's really the start of it. Knowing that I could create my own worlds just like the writers I loved reading, that I could make simple squiggles on paper more accurately portray what I wanted than I ever could with pencils and paints. Even when I tried drawing, to further show people what I had brewing in my head, I just couldn't grab onto it the way I did writing. Kid me went and put all her skill points into the written word, and the rest is history, really.
So what am I talking about when I say I discovered what my writing is really "for"?
Explaining the Mystical Through the Power of Storytelling
One of the gigs I've picked up on the side of all this writing is actually teaching what is essentially first year writing at one of my local colleges. It's all about writing and rhetoric (which is the art of convincing people that your argument is correct and explaining your thoughts). I love teaching; I've found it to be a lot of fun both in a real classroom and online, with subject areas like writing and religion. In my classes, though, part of the curriculum is a focus on explaining through storytelling. Getting people to understand, and agree, with ideas through the power of narrative (because it's a lot easier to grasp an idea when it's made into an example, or a story, than if someone just tells it to you).
I mean, think about it. Would you rather have someone tell you that "classism and financial inequality is bad and leads to really bad things," or would you rather read a story like The Hunger Games? Would you rather be told "changing history books to be more palatable is bad," or would you rather read 1984? What would get you more invested in these ideas and more likely to want to act against the people who do want to make the 1% more 1%-y and the history books more "tame"?
Storytelling is how people understand things. More than that, it's how people connect to things. I could've written Where the Gods Left Of as a more straightforward overview of the entities I investigated over the course of a year—could've been a lot more clerical in the way I described the process and stuck only to the tarot cards I pulled and how I interpreted them. However, being a writer with such a vivid imagination, I was seeing it all: the gods, how they looked, how they acted. I wasn't just getting little whispers of words; I was filtering, through my own mind, the way in which they actually said it. And all the other images they showed me, too—how could I not explain those along with the tarot cards?
How could I not do what has become second nature: paint a picture using nothing but these little squiggles called letters? Embed information and truth into a narrative structure that has people connecting not just mentally, but emotionally?
And as I look around and realize just how many people are clawing for things like Discovering Christian Witchcraft, when I see how much people want knowledge but just can't access it through the stuffy, academic, dense texts that take days just to digest a single page, when I see how much people want to grow and have no idea where to start... I know what I need to do. I have so many ideas for stories that tell so many truths, whether they be my own truths like in The Glass Witch and The Wraith Queen or whether they be a literary reconstruction of old ideas that people desperately need. For example: St. Teresa of Avila's Interior Castle is an incredible explanation of the mystic journey to God, and people need, want, and seek that knowledge—but the actual document itself is so dry.
So what if I re-wrote it as a novel?
Hell, I even have an entire Gospel-retelling on the docket. That's what I would call my magnum opus, and it's been brewing in my head for over a decade now, evolving all the more as I learn and gain more theological perspective. What do you think? Would people rather read the Gospel in the Bible (which they should no matter what, in my opinion, because it's still a good story), or would they rather read the same spirit of that story in the form of a 1930s-style fantasy with all kinds of romance, backstabbing, intrigue, and an open question to the value of Law over Spirit?
You get where I'm going with this.
That's what I've realized now. That Wednesday morning, when I was refreshing my money bowl for the new year, I made it a little bit different than just an ask for prosperity. (Of course I did still ask God to sustain my house financially and all that good stuff because, you know, girl's gotta pay rent and all that.) But this time, on a Wednesday, a day about communication, I also laid my pen down right in front of God and dedicated that ink to Him. Dedicated my talents to Him. I love writing more than anything else I can do—and rather than write stories about whatever random ideas I might get, I decided to give that love over to Him, to put these talents towards the development of humanity: the spiritual and emotional and mental growth of people.
And I feel good about it. Oddly, I feel complete, which I didn't expect. Honestly, I'd be lying if I said it doesn't make me sad that currently, my fantasy books aren't getting as much attention as Discovering Christian Witchcraft and Where the Gods Left Off—because they're pieces of me, and I want everyone to love them as much as I do—but I understand that it's because the heart of those books isn't what people really need right now. Specifically that series; that's a series about the multicultural experience. Not everyone has that experience, I get it.
But all my story ideas after that are all ones that explain something about religion, God, spirituality—and I understand, finally, that this is where my writing has been going this entire time. This is what these gifts are for: to make the dense and dreary into something fantastical and immersive. To expand access to the same ideas, just in, as folks say, a different font. And it's put all the ideas I've had into such deeper perspective—like, ideas I had that I didn't know what to do with suddenly have new life as I look at them again through the lens of this service I've just committed to God.
That's wild to me. So wild. I'm glad I discovered this idea at the start of the year, too—because it means that I've got all kinds ideas to draft up and all kinds of new spark to write. It's renewed my passion for writing all over again (which is needed, because Jesus, writing The Wraith Queen as fast as I did nearly wiped me out).
What about you? What's your passion? What's something that makes you feel alive, and what do you think it contributes to the world? It doesn't have to save the whole entire world in a day—but anything you love that contributes something to just one life, even your own life, and helps that growth happen is a beautiful and worthy thing.
Sara Raztresen is a Slovene-American writer, screenwriter, and Christian witch. Her fantasy works draw heavily on the wisdom she gathers from her own personal and spiritual experience, and her spiritual practice borrows much of the whimsy and wonder that modern society has relegated to fairy-and-folktale. Her goal is to help people regain their spiritual footing and discover God through a new (yet old) lens of mysticism.
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