It's No Good Waiting for Inspiration

You can put the idea for a novel or a short story down to inspiration, but the writing of it is much more like hard graft -- that old saw about writing being 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration is uncomfortably true.  Once you have an idea bubbling away inside your head, you can forget any thoughts about a muse descending.  If you wait for that to happen, you can find yourself waiting a very long time. The only way to bring your story from germination to realisation is to write it.

Probationary writers are often put off if the great idea that has captured their imagination fails to set the page alight when they come to write it down. They may plough on for a while, smarting with disappointment and embarrassment, until the gaps between writing sessions get longer and longer and and the number of words set down on paper gets smaller and smaller, until the whole thing is abandoned and forgotten.

However, if you loved your idea enough at the outset to want to write about it, then you may well be on to something and the only way to find out is to keep writing.  It doesn't matter if it feels a bit clunky to begin with, the important thing is to keep going.  If you are continually fiddling away with the first two or three pages, tweaking here, cutting there, that you will never get anywhere.  The literary equivalent of don't look down is don't look back. The time for editing is much later on in the creative process.  When you are starting out on a story, just write.  If it helps to sustain your stamina by having a cup of tea/making a phone call/listening to the afternoon episode of The Archers, that's fine, but don't stay away from your desk so long that you lose momentum.  Forward impetus is all that you need at the beginning -- everything else is dependent upon that.

For me, the creative additive that keeps me curious and motivated and engaged, is one of these...

...because they evoke so many questions. What's yours?