Inspiration

In retrospect, I should have taken a major that sounds boring.

No, I don't mean that I wish my major was boring; I'm actually quite glad that the opposite is true. The problem with being a Creative Writing major is that whenever the "classic small talk" gets deployed in a conversation, the moment somebody asks you what your major is, he or she then would like to know what you write, which is, in itself, always frustrating as you try to sound impressive and writerly as you describe your work as "speculative fiction that explores the human condition in a non-fiction space." Which, of course, doesn't make any sense.

But I don't even mind when people ask me what I like to write. It's always the follow-up question to that question that really gets me, albeit assuming I've been able to keep the person's interest for that long. "So, where do you get your ideas from?" At this point, you can either lie and make up some elaborate falsification about how you and your muse are best buddies, or you can cop to the fact that you have absolutely no idea, and even if you did, nobody really wants to know what this aspect of the creative process looks like.

Sometimes, you're standing in the shower and you think of something that you'd like to write about. This usually means that by the time you've finished showering and gotten dry enough to employ keyboard or pencil/paper effectively, you probably can't remember what the idea was, even if you sang it aloud every step of the way from your shower to your desk. I guess one solution to this problem would be to bolt right for the keyboard mid-shower, or perhaps take the keyboard with you into the shower. Let me know how that works for you.

Sometimes, you get an idea while listening to music, which sounds very poetic and artistic on the surface. The problem with music ideas is that, when you actually sit down to try and write it out, the only way to write out the idea in exactly the right way you need to listen to the same piece of music on repeat over, and over, and over, and by the time you're done, you'll probably have the same regard for that song as you would for a piece of gum you've been chewing for six hours.

Sometimes, I get ideas while arguing with people that I think are stupid. I'm never quite sure if I should cite them when I write the idea out. After all, I don't want to mar the credibility of my work by appealing to the authority of a stupid person, do I?

The worst part? The other day, I finally figured out exactly what I could say when a person asks me where I get my ideas from. It came to me while I was in the shower, listening to my favorite song that just happens to have stupid lyrics. As you can imagine, by the time I dried myself off and made it to my computer, I had another song stuck in my head, and couldn't remember what I wanted to write about.

Which, incidentally, is why I decided to write what you're reading right now.