Creatively speaking, I try not to have a specific inspiration to start with. I just start putting shapes on a page, and if I like the way they mesh together then I begin to develop it further, starting to give it theme and solid form. Now, certainly there are certain themes that are recurrent in my work, and I suppose you could call those an inspiration if you want, but I think that creatively sometimes the best way to work is to freely create to start with, and then add inspiration over the top. That can be really hard at first, because even though I've practiced it for a long time, I often end up with more freely created things that I don't like than I do with freely created things that I do like, but once you get used to the process it can be really helpful.
EDIT: Though I might mention, even though I use it for visual art, the method I used was actually derived from a method of writing that Stephen King describes in his biography, On Writing. The metaphor that he uses, and I really like it, is that as an artist he actually works more like an archeologist. He may understand the vague outlines of the idea once he comes upon it, but his job is not to create a form so much as to find the form that is there and uncover it.
That is to say that whatever you're doing, whether it's short story writing, painting, composing, whatever, in using this method you stumble upon the core of the idea by little more than pure dumb luck (which often means trying many things that will fail before you stumble upon the right one). Then, once you've got the core idea, your job is to let it tell you how it should be developed. It already exists, you're just making its existence evident.
