Writing poetry without inspiration is like trying to relish a dessert by sampling its ingredients one-by-one. It is cheating the Muses by cutting off their locks while they sleep. Awake the Muses! Then write as they finger their tresses, contemplatively. Then mix, shake well, and savor the ambrosia of the gods.
Lamar Howell's Weblog 
I’ve always wished I could write poetry. Two of my sisters do. One writes free verse, carefully crafted meditations or anecdotes or reflections. The other has always admired Gerard Manley Hopkins and writes poetry like his, full of rich and dense arrangements of words and phrases
The sister who writes free verse was commenting on writer workshop attendees. She said there tend to be two types of people who attend: those who want to be writers and hope that the workshop will unlock it for them, and those who write because it’s a compulsion, what they do.
I write fiction. I use it to relieve boredom and to process what I’m learning.
Recently I wrote the beginnings of a story about a guy who joins a couple of friends in performing at a folk festival. The guy is a pretty good bass player largely because of high school jazz band. The brief festival performance goes well, and they get an invitation to play at a local club, and the group gradually gains renown.
The heart of this group is a girl, Greta, who plays guitar wonderfully and has a genius for songwriting, both carefully crafted and impromptu. She carries her lyrics in her head and often keeps her band on their toes by singing something entirely new in a concert. The band also develops a knack for improvising new songs on the spot, usually from a phrase hollered out by a spectator. (These include “Gina’s a real babe, man!” and “What happened to our dance floor? Why are these barriers here?” and “What in the hell are you talking about?” and “Flick my Bic,” and a waltz to celebrate Jimmy and Sue’s engagement, and “Supply-side economics,” and “Inorganic chemistry is one of the mysteries of the universe.”)
What surprised me was that as I wrote, I could imagine songs that this group would perform, including melodies or at least fragments or shapes, arrangements, lyrics or lyric shapes. In effect, I was creating songs, without having all the requisite skills, and as I read back through that story, I can remember how the songs go. My descriptions are limited by my musical illiteracy, so I don’t know if I could communicate the songs to someone else, but they’re vivid in my head.
Which means that if I had the musical vocabulary, I could write songs, lyrics and tunes and arrangements. This was never one of my ambitions, but it was a serendipitous discovery from a very casual excursion into writing.
I don’t know where the smiley came from, but it’s appropriate.
There is also a song about Jay Leno’s chin, created on the spot when they get on the Tonight Show. I haven’t gotten that far on the story, but the song came to me as I fell asleep one night and I had to get up and write it down.