Here's an excerpt from the preamble of BrainTales, Dilip Mukera's new book:

The Writer’s Manifesto 

I Pledge to Write I am a writer. Even when I am not writing, I am a writer. I do not wish to write, or dream about writing…I am committed to writing. A writer cannot pen lines by wishful thinking…only by wilful doing. In this moment. There is no other tense—just the present. 

We postpone life by hoping. Once we allow ourselves to hope, we are tricked, tripped, and trapped. Choose never to live in wish-fulfillments. Start writing. Now. I salute, and celebrate, your right to write! 

Dilip Mukerjea

“There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored. The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but what he has forgotten is the cost of it. His sense of evil is diluted or lacking altogether, and so he has forgotten the price of restoration. When he reads a novel, he wants either his sense tormented or his spirits raised. He wants to be transported, instantly, either to mock damnation or a mock innocence.” 

~ Flannery O’Connor, writer and essayist;

“Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.” 

— Franz Kafka;

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.” 

— Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath;