Sometimes the need to write takes upon you.  You may have nothing to say, no stories or
poems or songs or rants striving to escape your mind, but you need to write.  This is often a
painful thing, the desire to write without the words to back it up.

 So you go and you sit and you let your mind wander.  In the shade of a tree or in the heat
of the sun of a dying summer, you call forth into the recesses of your consciousness.  You cry out
in your mind, trying to summon your Muse, trying to bring forth the magic that carries your
thoughts across the page for all to see.

 Sometimes this works.  Your mind clears out and becomes idle.  Your everyday thoughts
fade away and an Idea pops up, screaming, “Get paper!  Get a pen!  Grab hold of me, we’re going
for a ride!”

 So you obediently grab hold and ride the wild, untamed Idea out.  Hanging to the furry
back of your wild, kicking, bucking Muse with one hand and waving your pen about in the other
like a rodeo rider’s battered Stetson.

 Sometimes the Idea kicks you.  Sometimes you try too hard to tame it, and the Idea
becomes broken, domesticated.  No longer a raging, snorting, primal Idea, but merely an everyday
idea.

 A good writer can avoid this.  A good writer knows how to hold the Idea in rein while
letting it choose its own course.  Anyone can steer an idea around a page, but it takes a true artist
to be able to give in to the whims of the Idea and let it take them where it will.

 And so the writer will sit, oblivious of the outside world.  Ticks and mosquitos from their
shade tree will go unnoticed.  The sweat pouring down their backs and necks from the dying
summer heat will be ignored.  The only thing they feel, see, or experience is the thrill of the ride,
and the exhausted satisfaction that comes of having ridden and ridden well.