Where do creative people get their inspiration?

From The Observer:

Reverie is crucial to the creative mind. And although this predominantly comes down to nurture over nature, creativity is lost without an instinctive ability to access free-floating mental states. The myth goes that creatives either lie back and let the muse come to them, or force it out through hard work and lengthy trial and error. The reality is somewhere between the two - a combination of inspiration and evaluation, of being able to let an idea come to you and then crafting it into shape. When AE Housman walked home after a liquid lunch at the Spaniards Inn on Hampstead Heath, three stanzas popped fully formed into his head. It took him another 12 months, he said, to finally come up with the fourth stanza.

This is a classic story of creativity, where at some unpredictable moment the unconscious serves something up to you, which is pretty well formed, and anecdotal evidence shows that the majority of people get their best ideas when they are off guard and least expect it.

In the cognitive science of consciousness, there is a lot of interest in what people call the 'fringe of the mind', an idea started by William James, the father of psychology, who in 1890 wrote about the 'reinstatement of the vague' - the ability to be interested in ideas that are not yet fully formed. Creative people have a more intimate relationship with the fringes of their mind, and consequently are able to catch the gleam of an idea as it flashes across the corner of their consciousness. Ted Hughes was a great fisherman and liked to use the metaphor of fishing for the creative process. He believed that in order to be creative you have to be able to 'catch' concepts as they come up from the unconscious. If we can't do that, he believed, then 'our minds lie in us like fish in the pond of a man who cannot fish'.

Creativity is mainly learnt. And while there is an element of nature involved, it predominantly comes down to nurture - a way of thinking that is picked up from parents or the people around you. Timely encouragement, of course plays, its part, along with finding an area of interest that really gets under your skin.

Creative people do, however, intuitively know the value of alternating the rhythms of work: when to let the mind wander, when to get down to hard work and when to put a problem on the back burner and leave the subconscious to mull it over. This is a crucial flexibility of mind demonstrated by the way creative people, even during periods of intense activity, manage to create little holes for themselves where they will instinctively take the mini breaks they need to let ideas come to them.

Time out feeds the quietness of mind that is essential to creativity.