Where do painters and sculptors and composers and songwriters and playwrights and authors and poets and architects and all other creative types get their ideas? Ask any individual and he or she will give you a unique answer – art stems from a particular place inside. But collate enough answers and you start to see common areas.

Without the following five influences, most creatives struggle to find ideas and crystallise them into workable plans.

1. Nature

Who can create a powerful, emotive work locked up in an uninspiring manmade space? Like Wordsworth’s walking tours which beget that wonderful poem ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’, nature has long inspired creatives. We need to survey storms and sunshine and clouds. We need to ponder the varying hues of the sky and the sea. We need to inspect a flower, smell a leaf, taste a berry freshly plucked from a bush. Whenever we are dreaming, thinking, creating, our imaginations are heightened in nature.

Nature, for me, is a powerful inspiration. I am drawn to my gardens in Kent and France. I love to take walks along the beach or in neighbouring towns. I find much meaning in the poets and artists who are similarly affected by nature, such as one of my favourite poets, Leconte de Lisle.

2. People

No man is an island,
Entire of itself,
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.

So wrote John Donne in the seventeenth century, and the truth holds today. Some forms of art endeavour to separate from humanity and immerse in nature alone; think of the poet holing up in his isolated cabin to be alone with his words. But most art is by nature of the people, and thus people are central to inspiration.

One of my favourite activities is to sit on a park bench or at a table of a pavement café and just people-watch. It is amazing what you learn by listening and watching and imagining.

3. Culture

Stephen King wrote: If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.

I think he is right. How can you be a painter without studying others’ works? A choreographer who’s never attended the ballet? An author who doesn’t read?

Breadth of culture is what really matters. I don’t believe for a moment that Stephen King, prolific author of horror and thriller books, reads only horror and thriller books. To be inspired, you need a wide-ranging understanding and appreciation of culture. So you visit museums and galleries, and you read all kinds of books, and you sample all kinds of music, and you try different genres of films. The result is a melting pot of ideas and opinions and influences within which fuels your ideas bank.

4. Experience

Thoreau said it best: How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.

Writers are commonly told to write from the heart, from experience. That means having the dedication and courage to do two things:

• Seek experiences: You have to be proactive and adventurous and seek out new experiences that will challenge you and broaden your outlook.
• Process experiences: You have to be prepared to dig deep and access past experiences; allowing the learnings and all the associated emotions to come forth in your creation.

5. Space

You can’t conceive amid the frenzy of daily life. You need space for your mind to drift. That may mean mental space – letting your thoughts wander on the train as you commute home. It may mean emotional space – turning off your feelings about your daily concerns and allowing yourself time to be creative. Or it may mean physical space – shutting yourself in a quiet room, going for a walk alone or taking a long bath, perhaps.

Personally, I find dedicated alone time for creativity works well. It can be frustrating to spark up an idea in the middle of a dinner party and then try to juggle being sociable outwardly with processing the idea inwardly. But for times when inspiration strikes and you simply can’t make the space to sit with it, keep a notebook to hand. Write down every idea, no matter how odd it seems. Catch every drop of inspiration and in time you’ll have a raging river within to draw upon for your project.