Investing in Your Craft (Writing)

Yes, writing is a craft. You will have to indulge into this everyday to master it. That is the truth of every writer’s life. Sitting and staring at the blank screen or white paper is the dilemma every writer experiences (or so I have been told).

Now, you may be thinking how to invest in this craft? This is not a business procedure after all. What is there to invest? You can invest a lot of things.

Time – First of all you will have to invest your time. Without this element, the craft will simply refuse to grow. You will have to drag yourself to your writing desk and write. How much time you invest depends on you. If you are lucky enough to be able to stay back at home and don’t have a day job to go to, you can devote as much time as you want. But, for the unfortunate people out there like me, will have to make time for writing. You will realize that you need to make many sacrifices to make time for writing. You may have to sacrifice watching the soccer match. You may have to sacrifice attending party. Or you may have to sacrifice an hour of your sleeping time.

But the reward of these sacrifices is the delight of holding a finished novel in your hands. Your own creation, your pride. It does not matter whether this gets published or not. You will experience the exhilaration of being able to see the novel till the end. In the world of writers this The End means a lot. Ask someone who has failed to achieve this feat.

Money – Yes, you will have to invest money. You will have to buy books and read. Without reading, the writer within you will not grow. You will have to feed your soul and you cannot survive eating bread only. Or a bit clearly, a writer cannot survive eating bread only. True, there are libraries and you can borrow books. But, that way you will have to hurry through the pages so that you don’t keep this longer than the deadline.

Reading a book is like eating. You swallow the entire course of meal, your belly gets full, but you fail to consume the benefits of the food. Same thing happens when you rush through the pages of a book. You finish the story, but you fail to analyze the plot development, character illustration, dialogue crafting, conflict escalating and the theme.

When you buy books, you surround yourself in a literary atmosphere. Standing at the desk, you won’t have to remind yourself why you are there. You will know in heart that you are there because you want to join the long list of the published writers.

Have fun writing and keep investing without constrain. You will definitely get the result someday.