Inspiration: is it hard sweat or divination from the Gods

This is a re-published post.

Inspiration comes from hard slog, facing up to the clean white paper/screen or does it? Where do you get that first spark from? And is the written piece outsourced from some great divination?

“You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.” Jack London

“I see something happen, read or hear about an event, and the first question that pops into my mind is, How can I use that in a story?” Terry Brooks

“I only write when I’m inspired, and I make sure I’m inspired every morning at 9am.” Peter DeVries

“Your intuition knows what to write, so get out of the way.” Ray Bradbury

Inspiration for this blog was facing up to a clean page, researching ideas from googling, mind-mapping, and finally ideas started to flow, including: where does inspiration come from?