Through the ages, writers (being writers) have been very open and vocal about how inspiration strikes them. Hemingway walked up and down a set of stairs to summon that one true thing. Annie Dillard liked to turn out the lights, close the windows, and have one desk lamp over the page in shielded consciousness. Rilke needed a 'feeling of home' while Alice Walker opened her heart to a feline. Some writers stand, some sit, stay seated, and some go to bed (Proust was notorious for his bedbeingness; I've tried this in the coldest, darkest months - I usually stress about laundry and then instantly fall asleep).

What these writers share is a view that writing is something we arrive at, prepared, humble, full of intent, and open. We are active and passive simultaneously. But we come to a place. "My name is Stephen King. I'm writing the first draft of this part at my desk on a snowy morning in December 1997."

Stephen King (Born September 21, 1947) - yes, the one who mined his own depths and terrors, abused his own inhibitions and weaknesses to bring us story after story of fear, redemption, terror, and safety - knows something about meeting the page in that place.

You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or even despair (the sense that you can never completely put on the page what's in your mind and heart). You can come to the act with fist clenched, and your eyes narrowed, ready to kick ass and take down names. You can come to it because you want a girl to marry you because you want to change the world come to it any way but lightly.

In King's iconic writing about writing, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, he bids us care: "Let me say it again: you must not come lightly to the blank page."

Stephen King. Photograph by Andrew Unangst.

I imagine King walking to his place with a heavy tread, open heart, and maybe wiping off his lenses, momentarily blind before he adjusted them back on his nose. Maybe he cracks his knuckles, removes his shoes.

I'm not asking you to come reverently or unquestioningly. I'm not asking you to be politically correct or cast aside a sense of humor (Please God you have one.) This isn't a popularity contest. It's not the moral Olympics and it's not church but it's writing dammit it's not washing the car or putting on eyeliner. If you can take it seriously, we can do business. If you can't, then we won't. It's time for you to close the book and do something else.

In this place of inspiration, full of acceptance but with intent - comes the creative telepathy. That's what King calls writing: "telepathy, of course."

Telepathy is communicating with something else. Something circumvents the ears and eyes and wizzes directly into the brain. Past memories, future hopes, whatever it is strides through all the noise and gently taps (sometimes slaps) our consciousness.

All the arts depend on telepathy of some degree, but I believe that writing offers the purest distillation. Perhaps I'm prejudiced, but even if I am, we may as well stick with writing.

King calls this place in which telepathy is possible, our 'far-seeing place' and inventories his own:

There are things on my mind summer worries (bad eyes, Christmas shopping not even started, wife under the weather with a virus) some are good things (our younger son made a surprise visit home from college)... but right now all that stuff is up top. I'm in another place, a basement place where there are lots of bright lights and clear images. This is a place that built myself over the years. It's a far-seeing place.

Roald Dahl's writing desk was originally a shed outside his house in Great Missenden, England. He put a board over the armchair to write. Now his entire writing place sits in the wonderful Roald Dahl Museum.

Inspiration is a state of being, something at which we arrive. How do you approach your far-seeing place? Read more on how we exhale what we are to leave space for new; or one writer's journey of lost and found (and lost again). At the end of it, we must simply sit with ourselves - worries and good. King's On Writing is never far away from my place.