My answer is, I don't know. It's certainly not any magic formula, it's simply something there, inside my head. Maybe its due to that childhood shyness that cut me off from people and forced me into a world of my own imagination, I was an observer rather than a participant, an eavesdropper on conversations, a gleaner of information. A writer must be all these things.
Inspiration is a mystery.
I've never known how to define it. For me, it's never based on an incident I read about in a local newspaper or a magazine article. If I had to pinpoint it, I would say inspiration is an interactive chain of thought which always for me begins with the main character. As I write her, I get to know her, to understand how she thinks, reacts, who she is. Once I have the idea for that character, that person, then the other characters emerge and the story begins to form around her.