From today’s Writer’s Almanac email:
One day in January of 1965, the complete first chapter of One Hundred Years of Solitude came to him suddenly while he was driving his car from Mexico City to Acapulco. He came home that night and told his wife not to bother him and locked himself in a room for eight to 10 hours a day for the next 18 months and wrote the novel. The original manuscript was 1,200 pages long, and García Márquez pawned their heater and his wife’s hair dryer to pay for the postage to send the novel out to publishers.
Damn. Just damn.
I feel like this.
But I bet it took Tolstoy a bit longer to think out “War and Peace.”
And besides you have musical scores running through your head without having had formal training. The rest of us are left with hearing what others wrote as our brains do not seem to be programmed to produce original scores. (I tried writing songs at one point: it was a Lichtenberg success story.)