"Where did your inspiration come from?" It's a question that many authors dread. My answer is usually: "If I knew, I'd bottle it." Last year, I wrote a blog for Bacopa on the subject, especially about how fragile inspiration can be and how easy it is to crush it if you try too hard to catch it. Yet the question about how an idea arrive keeps cropping up, so I've decided, where possible, to make a note of it after I've jotted it down.

I'm hoping that this will have another benefit beyond being able to give a satisfying and honest answer, even if it isn't as interesting as the questioner might imagine. All too often things intervene between getting the idea and being able to start work on it. An idea can go cold, and what excited me about it in the first place might no longer make sense. By writing down a reminder of how the original conjunction of thoughts came about, I might be able to return to them and rekindle whatever it was that made the idea seem worthwhile.

An example could be something I wrote recently. It came out as somewhere between memoir and fiction, and I'm not sure what to do with it. As it stands, it doesn't seem to fit anywhere. I shall seek the opinions of Get the Word Out, the local writers' group to which I belong, and being able to tell them the inspiration behind the piece might help us all to judge what to do with it. There are at least four separate factors involved: the play I appeared in concerning World War One; an article I once read about weavers who taught themselves Greek so they could read works by the likes of Sophocles in the 'original' language; a book I found on a stall which had an inscription on the fly-leaf, and the debate about digital versus hard copy books.

Simply reading the last sentence has made me see that the 600-odd words I have written so far could be turned into something much bigger. (Another project to add to my ever-expanding list!) Even if it remains a modest piece, returning to the source of my inspiration has got the creative thoughts moving again.

You could give it a try too. You never know what you might come up with.