Sometimes it's all inspiration - a piece takes hold of you and will not let go, and you either drop what you are doing and get as much of it down as is necessary, or you ignore it and often lose so much that you never get it back. I've lost enough to realise that I get up out of bed at 1 am now no matter what, because there may be regret for an hour's lost sleep, the urge won't let me sleep properly anyway, but much less than the regret for that missing poem or melody.

Always I get enough done that at worst the essence and inspiration is captured, although I will continue until every stray thought is captured. The fact that I will then edit and edit and edit later is not a denial of that first creative thouSometimes it's all inspiration - a piece takes hold of you and will not let go, and you either drop what you are doing and get as much of it down as is necessary, or you ignore it and often lose so much that you never get it back. I've lost enough to realise that I get up out of bed at 1 am now no matter what, because there may be regret for an hour's lost sleep, the urge won't let me sleep properly anyway, but much less than the regret for that missing poem or melody.

Always I get enough done that at worst the essence and inspiration is captured, although I will continue until every stray thought is captured. The fact that I will then edit and edit and edit later is not a denial of that first creative thought, just recognition that it requires both inspiration and hard work to get something worthwhile, even when it is minor. In the film "Amadeus", Salieri describes Mozart as "taking dictation from God." Salieri was not the "hack" musician the film makes him out to be. But there was only one Mozart.

I think to improve in any skill, you need to practice long and hard, and whether you feel like it or not. If you like doing something, even the practice can be rewarding. 

A five-finger exercise is usually a musical composition for piano designed primarily to exercise all five fingers of the hand. It is also used figuratively to similar exercises in other fields. So here if I describe a five-finger exercise, I'm talking about developing skills in poetry. I do this in a number of ways.

One is to just take a simple concept or thought, and write a poem about it. Many of the poems in the "A Natural Progression" section started life this way. "Rosellas" came as I saw some walking from the house to the car one day. No need to sit down and work on that, because there was no inspiration at that stage. Just note the idea down "Write poem about Rosellas" and come back to it in a day or a week or anytime later. I may choose to just write what comes, images and thoughts, and not worry too much about rhythm, rhyme or other poetic devices, and then edit, or I may use such devices to drive the thoughts. Either way, you develop skills in description and in suing the tools of poetry.

Other times, I may just decide I want to try my hand at a particular form - perhaps a sonnet. No inspiration, just the exercise. So I cast around for ideas that might suit the form, look at any notes I may have half formed, whatever it takes. The poem may be so bad that it gets discarded, or it may get put away into the "could do better file". I have such a file that's got stuff waiting to be finished that's 40 years old. But no matter what happens, good or bad, the exercise is worth the effort, because I've practiced those fingers.