Writing into the World

"There are few excitements as fine as those first walks at dawn after a night spent writing.  I remember them still, the filmy lights and chilly smells, the visionary dignity of empty streets, the uproarious feuding of the birds—and further off the diesel pounding (which seemed the rivers slow deep heart) of barges pushing upstream through the Mississippi’s lifting mist.  The work of those nightlong sessions is now lost, thank goodness, but the excitement remains.  There is this thing about writing, any kind of writing, which makes the hardship and waiting small cost.  I mean the perpetual sense of promise, of what remains—everything!—to be done." 

Terrence Des Pres, Writing into the World