In the morning, when I sit down to write, I think of this depiction of the creative process from the novel The Waves by Virginia Woolf :

“I took my mind, my being, the old dejected, almost inanimate object, and lashed it about among these odds and ends, sticks and straws….  It is the effort and the struggle, it is the perpetual warfare, it is the shattering and piecing together — this is the daily battle….  The trees, scattered, put on order; the thick green of the leaves thinned itself into a dancing light.”