I get inspired the same way I learned to write—by doing it. When I was a kid, I just wrote because nothing was standing between me and a blank page of onion-skin typing paper loaded into a Smith Corona typewriter.In high school, two friends and I started a story in Mr. Canary’s American History class. I’d write a paragraph, then one of them would, then the other, and it kept going like that for two years across different classes and notebooks. That chain taught me that a story could live beyond a single voice and that momentum beats inspiration every time.
I used to be a writer, and the best thing about it was that there was no expectation; I wrote, and no one expected anything. It was private work—messy drafts, late-night notes, parcels of thought I could toss out or keep without explanation. That freedom is the engine of getting better: you try things that look stupid on the page, you fail fast, and you learn what’s worth rescuing. There’s a calm in knowing nobody’s billing you for your honest mistakes.
