Juliet Marillier, one of my favourite authors, recently wrote this about inspiration:

Not being of a scientific bent, I won’t attempt a discussion of how inspiration relates to brain function. The fact that some people end up as writers, composers, artists or choreographers, while others become accountants, plumbers or truck drivers is probably as much a matter of nurture as it is nature. And where does creativity start and end, anyway? To be a good teacher, baker, gardener or parent, you must be creative; you need inspiration. You need those sparky ideas, the ones that seem to come from nowhere and enable you to communicate with others in a special way. It would be arrogant for us, as writers, to believe that inspiration visits only a narrow group of creative artists.

Well said.

You can read the entire entry at Writer Unboxed.