Inspiration

This picture of the Mud Maid in the Lost Gardens of Heligan is here because it's one of the very few actual, direct, inspirations I've ever experienced. I saw the sculpture, was struck all of a heap, and her story dropped straight into my head. I sat down under a tree and scribbled the outline on the back of an old envelope, dug out from the bottom of my crammed handbag full of odds and orts. Watching the sea in the Race off Portland Bill and thinking, 'Oh, it does look exactly like white horses,' was half of another one (knitted together with the baby-who-won't-stop-crying idea, courtesy of my first child) and lead to Rory McRory. A loving and crazy present of a little soft-toy goose begat Goose Anna while we were tooling down the M40. It rarely happens like that, though. So many kind friends have told me about, say, a squirrel finding an ingeious way to raid the bird feeders, or a tree that looks like a witch, and say, 'There's a story for you, Sandra!' Then look at me with hope that I'll just launch into 'Once upon a time...' If only!
I think inspiration, for me at least, comes not so much from incidents or objects directly, but from how a certain state of mind is created - the state of mind that's a necessary precursor to creative writing. For example, I can't listen to music while I'm working - 'background music' is my idea of purgatory, I am either listening with all my attention, or not at all. However, certain pieces of music do something to my brain and allow stories to begin; they set up a state of mind a bit like daydreaming - peaceful, happy, but with added fizz. This is probably incoherent. I'll bash on. Almost anything by Dvorak will do; de Falla's dances; some operas. San Saens' Introduction and Scherzo Cappriccioso for violin and orchestra makes me fizz, all right. Sibelius' Lemminkainen legend had me fizzing so much I read two versions of the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic, without stopping and nearly fried my cortical synapses. I was inspired - oh, yes! Couldn't write a sensible story afterwards, though. Maybe one day. I'm still haunted by the legends.
Walking can also do it - not any old where, but in some particular places. Aira Force, Ullswater, the Great Glen, West Dean park, Kimmeridge...there's no shortage. For some writers, the mere rhythm of walking can start the creative process off,  but I think I need to be away from bricks and concrete.
I've tried telling myself that this is all self-indulgent nonsense. A real writer just gets on with it, never mind hanging about waiting for the right state of mind, and there is some truth in that. Give me a commission and I'll get on with it, with nary a thought about whether or not I'm 'inspired'. It's different when I'm faced with a blank slate, no deadline, nothing but the need to write, though. I can fiddle about for hours, days, even, and get nowhere if the state of mind isn't right. Does anyone know of an illicit substance that might help?

Along part of the Eden Valley, near Kirkby Stephen, is the poetry path. It celebrates a year in the life of the hill farmers of Cumbria and is a series of large stones in which are carved poems by local poet M.R. (Meg) Peacocke. The poems are accompanied by carved motifs in brass by Pip Hall, which can be 'rubbed'. It's a treasure trove, albeit a muddy one on many days; a meander along the Eden looking out for the stones and reading the wonderful evocative verses - 'Snowlight peers at the byre door'; 'There sails the heron drawing behind him a long wake of solitude.' Fledgelings 'try small quivery leaps, testing the buoyancy of the air.'
Alice Oswald tracks the river Dart from its source to the sea, and at the river's birth sees 'eels in the glints, and in each eel a  finger-width of sea.' Then there's Norman Nicholson's late summer field, where 'dandelion clocks are held like small balloons of light above the ground.' Eilean Ni Chuilleanain picture Mary Magdalene at Marseilles looking over the marshes to the sea, where the water-weeds 'wait for the right time, then flip all together their thousands of sepia feet.' And, and and.....These, and so many, many others make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up with an excess of joy. Oh, why can't I be a poet? I write poetry, of course I do. It doesn't make me a poet any more than tootling on a recorder makes me a musician. I know about trochees and iambs, can construct a Shakespearean sonnet, toss off doggerel by the yard, have even had a couple of commissions from BBC Active for their schools' history programmes, and I run poetry workshops in schools - BUT that special amazing ability to create a piece of word-music to capture a sight, a sound, an idea in a way entirely new, just escapes me. I'd give my eye-teeth for that gift.
I did look at a course on writing poetry, but it began by asking everyone to wrap a scarf round their eyes and feel the world around them and try to describe it. Nah. That's not it. I wish I knew what 'it' was.