The Nature of Inspiration

Full article at http://retrocollage.com/blog/collage-nature-inspiration/
Inspiration was a favorite topic in most of the filmed stories of artists and writers I watched on TV as a kid, and naturally Hollywood did its best to glorify and accelerate that exalted state.

After a magically shortened period of frustration and failure, SHAZAM! The lighting of inspiration strikes! The dam has burst and the artist's work floods out of him and gathers fame and fortune in its wake ...

This kind of inspiration was fun. It was attractive. It was the way I thought about inspiration and the way I wanted inspiration to hit me. I believed in it for many years.....

The only trouble was that it was dead-wrong.