Inspiration doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t knock.
It arrives sideways — in the middle of someone else’s sentence, in a half-heard line on the radio, in the static of a dream you’re still leaving as you open your eyes. Half awake, somewhere between the dream and the ceiling, and a scene is already dissolving — but something of it stays. A colour. A feeling with no name yet. The first thought of the day, and already it’s asking to be followed.
You don’t summon it. You notice it.
That’s the part people get wrong, I think. They imagine the songwriter waiting for lightning — sitting very still with a notebook open, hoping the sky does something. But it’s not stillness that finds the spark. It’s attention. It’s living with your eyes consciously open to the world.
A friend says something offhand, and it lodges somewhere in your mind. A character on a screen says one true thing in the middle of a forgettable scene, and you sit up. A favourite singer reaches for a phrase and takes a thought you already half-had, and lifts it into the light properly for the first time.
None of it arrives as a finished song. It arrives as debris — a splinter, a single bright thread hanging loose from something bigger you can’t see yet.
The work, if you can call it work, is staying open enough to catch the splinter before it drifts past. Most of them do drift past. You’re tired, or distracted, or simply living, and the moment goes by the way every other moment does — unremarked, ordinary, gone.
But sometimes you’re looking. And that’s the whole craft, really — not the writing, not yet. The looking. The research of just being alive with your senses tuned to a frequency only you can hear.
I spend most of my days framing the world through the shape of a song before I’ve written a single word of it. A conversation becomes a possible chorus. A dream becomes a room I can stand a character inside. The world keeps handing me debris, and my job is to decide, almost by instinct, which piece of it is actually a seed.
That’s the chasm every idea has to cross — from nothing, through whatever briefly caught your eye, into something that exists now that didn’t exist an hour before. Most fragments never make it across. They sit in the dark, half-formed, waiting for some second piece to drift close enough to click.
But the ones that do cross over — that’s the part I live for. Not the certainty of where a song will land, but the moment a stray thought turns and looks back at you, like it’s been waiting there all along to be found.
You don’t make inspiration happen.
You just have to be ready for when it does.
This post originally appeared on my Substack