Where does inspiration come from?

Since starting this blog earlier in the month (so very long ago, whew!) I decided to push myself to write as much as I could.  Not just for the sake of writing but to exercise a literary muscle that has fallen into decline over the last decade.  

I don’t know for sure why that happened.  It’s just that sometime towards the end of highschool I just stopped writing.  Walked away from all my half-finished novels and forgot all about the craft.  Even in college I deliberately took a pass on the English courses offered so I didn’t have to do the extra work.  For somebody like me, who started writing stories in grade three, and who would later spend days and days reshaping chapters of my horror based novellas in my early teens, this was a strange occurrence.  Where did that devotion go?

Looking back, I see several possible correlations.  I stopped writing when my social life began to take off.  Up until then I was a bit of a loner who used writing as his key catharsis.  Once I had a whole lot more friends and several theatre groups vying for my time the energy and focus I placed upon my writing faded completely from view.  It wasn’t that I didn’t want to write – it was that I just didn’t think about it.  I’m also certain my insatiable and somewhat destructive interest in girls and alcohol had something to do with it too.

Since then, and until recently, my only major writing outlet was poetry.  Deciding that it was time to pay homage to and to perhaps kill all of my bitterness and anger, I began writing at a frantic pace.  What came out first created a feeling of relief, and that slowly developed into pride.  And suddenly one day I felt good.  The Cobain in myself had been set free, and with it my knife-wielding muse.  I set down my pen and didn’t ever really look back.  I kept wanting to write, and even found myself writing or typing key sentences that hopefully would propel myself forward, but the rest just drifted away.  There was no inspiration to drive me.

Something has changed.  Whether that something is totally within me or as part of my environment, or a healthy combination of both I’m not sure.  But I feel so inspired to write.  Not just some of the time, but all of the time.  I could happily sit in front of my computer and just keep the words flowing.  And though I’m still resurrecting the demons from my past, as in my last post, and I’m still planning on writing the ever-changing apocalyptic horror novel from fragments of ideas in my head, I’m approaching it from that happy place, not the lonely or bitter domain from my youth.

I still have a long way to go before I’m truly proud of my writing, again.  My literary muscle is still a featherweight.  But with consistent practice, some more reading and even a couple courses I’m planning on taking; I think I’ll develop that pride again.  So for me at this time – my inspiration is the journey to be a better writer.  What better vicious circle could you ask to be in?