Form: Used To + Base Verb

Used to is always followed by a base verb. Don’t forget to tell your students that used to follows the normal past verb rules: it becomes use to with the auxiliary verb did in questions and negative statements. 

Did you use to be inspired?

I used to BE.
I used to be inspired.
I used to be inspired to be.
I used to be inspired to be more.
I think maybe I used to just not think so much.  Or if I did, I didn't think about the outcome.  I didn't worry about what would become of certain things.

I wanted to write, in that I felt I could create something from nothing.  And that something could really be something - funny or serious or contemplative.  I wanted to be funny.  I used to be funny, I think.  People told me that all the time.  And when I think back, it doesn't even seem so long ago, it was what I used to want to do; make people laugh.  Laughing rocks.  It's like an injection of a drug that stops whatever shit you're working on, and for a second, you are laughing.

But my muse died.  It's been so long, I don't even remember what it was like having it around.  It's a very vague memory.  I am not even sure how it died, whether it was quietly or screaming at the top of its lungs as the vehicle it was in plunged off a road into an icy roadside pond, not to be discovered until some terrible dry summer many years later.   Perhaps my sense of humor was in the same car.  Some dry August in the future, someone will come across the roof of the car sticking out of the receding waters.

And we'll all have a laugh as I begin to write shit down.