Rapid Action Troops for Writers

By Anu Lal

Someone has to do something about it.

Seriously! Rapid action troops needed. It could turn worse if no action is taken right now.

The issue is serious. Someone has skipped their mission task.

You.

You should be doing what you are meant to do, right now. You should have been performing your mission—writing.

Why are you here? Is it just the time you spend daily on reading or is it your creative block that led you to this blog? In the former case, you can learn the best ways in which you can stay motivated in your craft. In the second case, that is, if you are struggling with your creativity, the options are pretty simple. Go and write. That is the only and the most vital message this article is destined to provide you.

Ray Bradbury once said, the best way to be a writer is to keep doing your craft. By the time one attends writing classes or reading books on How to—, you could create a page or a dozen of you own creative art.

Still, I don’t disagree what once Mr. Stephen King noted about writing classes. He says it would be a good thing to attend writing classes, as they teach the students how to take writing seriously. This step is crucial in getting an armature transformed into a professional. Taking one’s work seriously means doing the big deal oneself; meaning not just starting off with a great plot with stories, but also finishing them time bound.

I presuppose while writing this article that you are a matured writer, who just passed by this blog, during one of her daily reading hours. I strongly believe, for a writer, life should be a sea of writing and ideas. On very few occasions dotted with islands of ‘reading’. Of course, Steve King also said, you must read more to write more. But I tell you this; if you would not write on a daily basis, your mind might wander off into the abyss of guilt of ‘not-writing’ and would haunt you. This might keep you aloof from the inner soul of a book. Meaning; however hard you try, getting inside a book and losing yourself within, will not be possible until you take yourself out of the guilt of ‘not-writing’.

Deploying an army of fast action troops cannot save your work or your career as a writer. Your creative river requires your ‘rain of attention’. If, even now, you are planning to search online for articles such as “100-ways to write non-stop” or “How to write–,” you are probably missing the action. Life exists in what one does, not in what one is intending to do. In the latter case, fortunately life is not entirely absent either, but present only as an intention, not as a fact or a certainty.

I hope you have a dream to be a writer, not just a dream to dream the dream of a writer.