Fuel.
“Music has always been a matter of Energy to me, a question of Fuel. Sentimental people call it Inspiration, but what they really mean is Fuel. I have always needed Fuel. I am a serious consumer. On some nights I still believe that a car with the gas needle on empty can run about fifty more miles if you have the right music very loud on the radio.”
I was a musician before I ever wrote. Like most kids, I thought I had a fantastic voice, and I spent a great deal of time singing to myself, or no one in particular, often improvising lyrics to well-worn melodies. To this day, I catch myself humming, inventing melodies in my head for no one else's benefit (most likely to others' annoyance).
What I always loved about English, and languages in general, is its musical quality. Each word is like a song by itself. And that's why, when I tutored writing for beer money in college, I always had my students read their prose out loud, something I do to this day. If you select the wrong word, it's going to spit in your ear like a sour note.
I envy poets for their ability to meld the mediums of music and the printed word. Poetry is the closest a writer can get to music on a page.
I'm no musician. I'm definitely no poet. But music, and the musicality of language, drives me like it did Dr. Thompson. There's a reason I keep a guitar parked beside my desk. If I find myself hunting and pecking at the keyboard, searching for the right word, sometimes, on the right kind of night, I can pick up my G chord machine, and the words will find me.