Ever wonder where ideas come from? I do. I know they come through the right brain, but where does the right brain get them? I opened a book called
. Here's what I found:
| Socrates said that all good poets "are inspired and possessed." I don't know what possess someone to become a poet, but all poets inspire me. As I writer of plain prose, I rise in awe of those who push poetic pens. |
| Harriet Beecher Stowe got the idea for Uncle Tom's Cabin reading the newspaper. I defy any writer to spend a morning skimming the paper—a good or a bad paper—:and not find a fortune in ideas. The rest, of course, is work. |
| Goethe's poems came suddenly upon him and insisted upon being composed immediately. Is anyone surprised that the great Teutonic poet would be driven by insistence? Whatever it takes, Johann. |
| Mozart, as it sometimes sounds, composed while "walking after a good meal." And as it also sounds, when he couldn't sleep. Where the ideas came from, he had no idea. But said that he could never force them to come. |
| Poe was inspired "by a species of fine frenzy—:an ecstatic intuition." Poe's frenzies, sometimes drug-induced, earned him a reputation for the macabre. But his muse brought him much more than horror and death. |
| To Amy Lowell, the best description of the creative process is the familiar, "it came to me." Not a lot of help, but after self-publishing her own work, Lowell helped other poets find their way into print. |
| Dostoyevsky was driven, it seems, by a dark muse. My favorite writer inspired me to take up the Russian language, just so I might be able to read him in the original someday. That day eludes me. Call me an idiot, but I press on, if only for a taste someday. |
| Walter Lantz was on his honeymoon trying to silence a bothersome woodpecker, when... Well, you know the rest. |
But the explanation I like best comes from another source.