Keep the juices flowing

Daily writing prompt

How are you creative?

I never consciously imagined myself to be a creative human being. Mostly, creativity comes and goes of its own accord. The creative juices keep flowing outside my control.

I composed a short story in 6th grade and got complimented by my teacher for it. The plot was about a hijacked plane and this female protagonist (me, obviously) saving everybody with some clever tricks up her sleeve. I remember zoning out while writing the story; it felt like getting dragged into the bottomless depths of an abyss. When I somehow climbed out of that, I found myself holding my essay.

Over the years, that abyss became my regular go-to place. Not like your local cafe in town, as on each visit I saw and wrote about completely new things.

When I started trekking, I drew inspiration from things around me – like people’s faces, a mountain village, green meadows, and my own feelings while struggling to climb a steep slope. Mountains sent shivers down my spine (they still do), as they bombarded me with ideas to write about.

I remember after I came back from my first adventure course in Sikkim, it was hard to deal with the overwhelming sea of emotions. So I unloaded them on a piece of paper; and while doing so, I made my trip to the abyss. I wrote about every wonderful sight, smell, and sound as if on cue, and I sat back and let my fingers do the magic.

Yet it is not enough to rely on my creative urges as and when they feel like coming. A good piece of work hides behind it a long and arduous journey of daily reading and writing. I believe in three points for becoming a better writer- practice, more practice, and even more practice.

Creativity can be likened to a goddess on a hill- you climb up, pay her respects, and keep her happy. Then she showers you with treasure- basically ideas. Beautiful, horrifying, delicious, boring, and all kinds of ideas that you can possibly write about and show to your readers to blow their minds.

When a misty cloud crawls up the lush green slopes of a hilltop, I hail the goddess of creativity and my days of practice- to convert this beautiful scene into words in the most perfect way possible. I keep the creative juices flowing.