Devangana Mishra, is a writer, artist and educator and the Founder of Brain Bristle, a non profit for autism and inclusion.
Writing may be the clearest form of expression, close to song, second to prayer. To write well becomes a responsibility for those who choose writing as a career of choice. Below is my list of ideas for budding writers. Such lists have been written in the plenty, but each writer brings their own wisdom. Here is mine, a few things that I recommend would help in the act of writing well, and for sustainably long:
1.Engrossment at task is where creativity grows. Most writers give up too early or try to get their work out there too soon. The latter is understandable, spring blossoms begin in January, the former not so much.
For each work of art, curriculum, fiction or poetry it takes me a lot of undoing of my own build or dictum to let true voices emerge. When you write fiction or non fiction, no amount of learning feels good enough for it and when you write from one’s own pool of experience, no amount of craft learned seems good enough & learning always leads to a pull between surety and self-loathing so to learn to make alliance with that duality becomes necessary..
And then even with knowledge nudging you to create, it takes a while to get into the flow of the tedious, minutiae, brain busting work of writing. There are pulls away, with reasons ranging from ‘this writing’ not being important enough, a lack of surety of takers, the hesitation of jumping into this void. A hundred steps into the dark could end in nowhere, not even an echo. But the more you move into that ether, the more it becomes your only medium to find a way back. It becomes your body, without which you are a particle in a vacuum. So you must put in the work toward the task, the daily grinding of words picked for sentences, ideas to structures, until there can be no replacement for this production. It takes a long, gruelling time to truly become a writer from within.
2. Good writing is good thinking. Like the fire bricks of a tall building. Some of the greatest thinking our world has done is owed to our writers. We wouldn’t have vivid images for ‘friendship as witness of one another’ or ‘love as the step away from fear, to choose love is to move against all forces of alienation and separation’…if not for writers.
We need good writing to put the arbitrary to ways of realization. Good writing should make us nervous. Such is the ingrained power of art.
3 It’s important to remove manmade deadlines that may cage creation, but we must bear the combative pressure of ‘this is my chosen work, I must diligently move pen to paper’. This tug of war helps writers rest their thinking, but equally keeps them exerting toward better, toward more, toward refined, even when no one is asking. Your work is your literary voice. To keep finding ways to practice it to fruition. As a new novelist, it can take anywhere between one to three years for your work to see light because of the mechanics of the publishing industry. In the meanwhile, keep honing your craft. Write small works. Test forms. Practice variety. Put yourself to the discipline of it as ritual. Move your fingers to the rigour, beat, keenness, intensity and grind of what the written word can do that nothing else can. Tune yourself to the sound of clear sentences, so each day language comes a few inches closer to you, and closer to your reader.
4 To keep consuming, reading and learning from noted, excellent and experimental works as common writing wisdom known. There’s no shortcut to good learning, from words and worlds known and unknown as the oxygen to thrive on.
Reading well allows us to understand form, rhythm, and the geography of the literary landscape. But to create well and abundantly from all we know, distinctly, deliberately, is the root of what we contribute as writers. There are millions of readers in the world growing their own tall plants with their read consumption. As writers, we must read as a writer, and then put that very specific art form to practice, with clarity, substance, joy, sound, beauty and credence.
An empty page should call you to write.
5 Loving the power of this common grass-like growth is an immensely important act, even when there might be a hundred other pressing ways to create, to choose this. Choosing writing is like choosing a lover. You choose them every day. You choose them to your highest knowledge, on the bad days and the good ones, in sorrow and in joy.
To choose writing is to commit to this, from a hundred other ways of contributing to the world. To love it wholly becomes duty and dictum. Like a soulmate, or a partner in bed and bind, across holy vows, seven circles of sacred promise and literary chastity until death does you aside.
6 Draft one to many will all look good to you when you’ve written them, but assume them unkempt, amateur. It is only after reading it a few times and those first many drafts, and more, that we begin to find our liked writer’s voice. Even as I write almost daily, I am still not sure if this is yet my liked, most deeply thought out work.
Think of times when you look at photographs of yourself from when you were thirteen or sixteen, scrawny, wild and pimpled, and you felt sure of yourself, but now you laugh. Looking back at your old writing from drafts one to many should be like that and should continue for long.
7 Be proud as a writer. Wear a badge saying, ‘I AM A WRITER’, then keep working until you meet the roundness, integrity and dimensions of that badge. Louder industries can gulp little letters if we let them. To make your writing loud enough to be seen as integral human creation, in a world trying to mechanize everything from love to art, is a huge endeavour.
To confidently wear that coat, with a small lapel pin that has your name tag, writer, on it, takes time. Don’t get lost in the crowd. Keep working your way until that grey tag is found.
James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, Ocean Vuong, Stephen King, Sidney Sheldon were only but writers. No machine can take that legacy away. To keep asserting body to lyric, to shapes and sceneries that properly fit your thinking, is your gate pass into this writer’s room. Keep striving until you are allowed into this sacred space of few. And once you are there, I believe, there is nowhere else in the world you would rather go.
© 2026, Logan. All rights reserved.
