I'm an English major (although I am slowly gravitating toward dual English/Philosophy), and my concentration is in Creative Writing. This is because I've been poor all my life, and would like to remain so indefinitely.

I write. It's what I default to when given free time. I carry a little flip notebook in my back pocket for when inspiration strikes (like indigestion, you can never predict it with much accuracy). Today I seem to have forgotten said notebook, and I feel naked.

OH, SO NAKED!

Moving on, the point is that there are key bodily functions I would rather go without than not have my notebook. Actually no, that's not the point, but it's related. The real point is that, as someone with the inherent urge to write, I've also been cursed with the inherent need to write stuff that is, in fact, good.

"Good" is, of course, relative. One man's trash is another man's treasure, as has been stated by multiplicities of cliche-abusing, er, abusers throughout history. Basically, I just try and write the sort of thing I like to read. This covers a lot of territory, mind you, but I'm especially influenced by what I am reading at any given time. Hemingway makes me want to be minimal and obliquely reflective...Pratchett makes me want to be off-kilter and funny...Dumas makes me want to inject powerful emotions and internecine plots.

Austen and Bronte make me want to take long walks off short cliffs, but that's a subject for another day.

In any case, whatever influences I'm working under, I want to do it right. In my mind, "doing it right" is best translated as "writing something that is as good to me tomorrow as it is today."

This rarely happens. It is a problem.

There's nothing quite like being in the zone when you're writing. You get locked in to the story, caught up in the minds of your characters. I am not exaggerating, either. When you're really bitten by the inspiration bug, you don't want to leave the keyboard (writing longhand is next to impossible for lefties such as myself) because you're terrified you'll never get back into the same sort of groove. It's sort of like bumper-to-bumper traffic moving at 90 miles an hour through, say, the Squirrel Hill Tunnel...terrifying, but exhilarating.

What's disappointing is that, for me, it's almost never anywhere near as good when I reread it as it seemed when I wrote it. This sort of thing is true for life in general, of course...like beauty for Plotinus, everything falls short. That doesn't mean what I've gotten down on a given day is bad...just that most of it is. Hemingway said once he would write 10 pages of complete trash a day, and maybe a single good one. Occasionally, he'd only salvage a decent paragraph.  

Writing is freakishly hard. Well, that's not completely true...good writing is freakishly hard. I'm always amused (and enraged) when people bash on creative writing as a sort of slacker's pursuit. I have the same problem with the sad folks who dismiss philosophy as an idle waste of time. Really, these two groups of people are making the same unfair judgment about two disciplines which are very similar: both writing and philosophy necessarily encompass many, if not all, other human wisdoms. Also, writing and philosophy have been (and still are, and will always be) critical to the foundation and evolution of our civilizations, and therefore mankind as a whole.

I may have gotten off-topic. It happens. But that's enough for now, I think...I believe my street urchin of a muse has just thrown a half-brick of inspiration at me.

Pax vobiscum.