Goodreads asked James Grippando:

How do you get inspired to write?

James Grippando Sometimes an idea percolates in your head for years. Sometimes, the inspiration hits like a lightenng bolt.
When I first starting writing, I was working 50-60 hour weeks in a big law firm, secretly writing a novel nights and weekends. And, I had my share of disappointment along the road to success. After four years of writing, not a single publisher wanted my first manuscript. But my agent believed in that book. "Jim," he said, "you got the most encouraging rejection letters I've ever seen." It sounds goofy, but what else can you say to an author who's taken his best shot and landed face down on the floor? Artie the optimist, I called him. With Artie’s encouragement, I decided to try again, but I was having trouble coming up with another idea.
Then one night in October 1992, tired of staring at a blank computer screen, I went for a walk before going to bed. I got about three blocks from my house when, seemingly out of nowhere, a police car pulled up onto the grassy part of the curb in front of me. A cop jumped out and demanded to know where I was going. I told him that I was just out for a walk, that I lived in the neighborhood. He didn't seem to believe me. "There's been a report of a peeping tom," he said. "I need to check this out." I stood helplessly beside the squad car and listened as the officer called in on his radio for a description of the prowler. "Under six feet tall," I heard the dispatcher say, "early to mid-thirties, brown hair, brown eyes, wearing blue shorts and a white t shirt." I panicked inside. I was completely innocent, but it was exactly me! "And a mustache," the dispatcher finally added. I sighed with relief. I had no mustache. The cop let me go. But as I walked home, I could only think of how close I'd come to disaster. Even though I was innocent, my arrest would have been a media event, and forever I would have been labeled as "the peeping tom lawyer.”
It was almost 2 a.m. by the time I returned home, but I decided that I needed to write about this. I took the feeling of being wrongly accused to the most dramatic extreme I could think of. I wrote about a man hours away from execution for a crime he may not have committed. What I wrote that night became the opening scene of The Pardon. I finished the manuscript in seven months, and it is now available all over the world in 28 languages.
That's a long-winded way of saying that inspiration can come from anywhere. Take a walk. Maybe you'll get hit by lightening.

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