Author Alison Habens, best known for novels Dreamhouse, Lifestory and The True Picture, has been taking dictation from half-naked goddesses of creativity straight from the myths of ancient Greece and Rome.

Who are these sexy, supernatural sources of writing advice; and how can we get their brilliant ideas whispered in our ears? Well, take a deep breath (that’s literally inspiration) and come on up the Helicon mountainside for a sip of the Hippocrene spring…

Where do you get your ideas from?’ To the question all writers are asked, the ultimate answer. At the start of the literary timeline, the Muses were invoked by Hesiod, Homer and Horace. Nine goddesses of creativity, their fame and fortune came and went over centuries of writing fashion; but writers still tell of that moment when the words flow, as if from nowhere, faster than normal thought.

This is my own experience at the spring of unplanned sentences. Read about the source of inspired storytelling here. As a novelist, essayist, playwright, poet; I wonder where I get my ideas from, too. Sometimes characters pop into my head fully-formed, dialogue pours from an unseen voice at my shoulder, plot problems are ingeniously solved in a heartbeat; the material streams quicker than normal writing when I consciously choose one word at time.

On nine pages, each named and themed for a Muse (from comedy and tragedy, to erotica and science-fiction), I put forward a theory: and so many famous writers endorse it, surely it must be true. Divine Inspiration is a real thing.

Can modern authors still invoke the muse as some sort of translator between mortal and immortality? Does she personify a process or place, in human physiology, where writers’ ideas come from: a genius gland, an inspiring synapse?

As high priestesses, the original Mount Helicon Nine had possibly smoked laurel leaves, which may have had a slightly narcotic effect. Legend has it, when Apollo was put in charge of the ecstatic goddesses, he sobered them all up; and to to this day, poets only wear the laurel leaves instead of inhaling or imbibing them.

And the Hippocrene spring water tastes like everything from tea to beer, served everywhere from Kent to Xanudu, in my catalogue of ‘divine inspiration’ which starts here. Not all drunk or mad (Plato said it, not me) it lists such reliable witnesses, from the history of poetry, as to prove the phenomenon really exists.