Inspiration

This is how I used to write.  When I was in college, I would let ideas percolate in my mind for days before I sat down in front of my desktop to tap out a few lines.  Sometimes I would sit for an hour or two, watching the blank screen in front of me, sentences writing themselves in my head before I mentally deleted them.  Frustrated and weary I would go to bed no closer to completing my paper.

It was in the quiet hours late at night that inspiration would find me.  My mind and body would still and in that stillness, sentences that had been dancing without partners would join together.  Whole paragraphs would become clear.  I would see an opening sentence mirrored in the closing paragraph.  Supporting text, themes and character development - these would build upon each other until I could see wholly what I would eventually commit to paper.  Inspired, I would return to the computer and in darkness I would write. And write. And write.

These days my life does not lend itself to stillness.  And those midnight hours, when inspiration still strikes, are for much needed rest, not for creeping to my desk to write.  Instead I squeeze in time while the kids nap, right in between house cleaning and dinner making.  Real quality time, you know?  Most ideas that swim in my mind now are destine to swirl themselves down into the depths of my brain, never to be seen again.

But one night last week as the clock crept toward midnight, my mind was a frenzy of thought, of composition, that would not let me sleep.  That night I did creep downstairs.  And in the glow of my laptop, I wrote. For an hour words poured out and formed sentences, paragraphs, scenes, comedy with little tragedy.  When I was finished, I had over eight hundred words.  I felt unburdened and still.

What I wrote that night is not for this blog.  Most likely, no one else will ever see it.  But to have it out of my mind, captured somewhere else, is enough.  To know that inspiration can still find me is enough.