But for most people who write, the process is not so much about being inspired as about the laborious, excruciatingly painful task of getting the words from your head to the page and then making sure that they are good. Most writers often feel like Jack Nicholson in The Shining , filling up page after page of nonsense, hovering on the edge of insanity, trying over and over again to get their thoughts in order, and succeeding only after many, many rewrites. Inspiration rarely comes into it. Many of us even carry notebooks or slips of paper to note these things down. Often, great ideas are sparked by reading someone else s quality writing, even if the new idea is tangential to the piece you are reading.
Good reading does beget good writing.
But no one except maybe Stephen King can sit down and churn out a fully formed piece of writing based solely on something called inspiration. Waiting to be inspired is the most serious mistake that many writers make. It is the source of what is usually called writer s block. You know the feeling. You sit down to write, stare at a blank page or an empty computer screen and then nothing.