If somebody tries to convince you they know how the creative process starts, I suggest you don’t fall for it, nobody knows. For the Russian writer Bounin, for instance, it all began when he was five. As he was paging through a medical book, he saw the profile of a man against a hilltop and the words: “A cretin in the mountains.” A colleague of mine grabbed a brush because he spent his childhood slaving away at a big black piano and wanted to taste the freedom the colorful paint-box promised.