How Genius Struck the ‘Hamilton’ Creator

Some people get brilliant ideas in the shower. Others are inspired while running, and still others say that dreams and sleep bring them fresh concepts.

So what about “Hamilton” star Lin-Manuel Miranda, who spent six years honing his Pulitzer Prize-winning play?

“It’s no accident that the best idea I’ve ever had in my life … came to me on vacation.”

“I’m as distracted as any writer with a deadline; it has always been a challenge to actually get down to work. Some of my best ideas come when I’m walking my dog” in his Manhattan neighborhood, Miranda told the Chicago Sun-Times in a recent interview.

“I use the audio recorder on my mobile phone,” to record any flashes of brilliance, he said. “I think that’s how I wrote [with Tom Kitt] the opening number, ‘Bigger,’ that Neil Patrick Harris sang at the 2013 Tony Awards,” he added.

Miranda has also said he found inspiration in unexpected places. The opening piano riff in “Hamilton,” a memorable sound that’s repeated throughout the show, came to Miranda in the form of a door squeak.

“I wanted the sound of a door slamming as the downbeat, and in my computer music program I grabbed a sound file called ‘Door Wood Squeak.’ The sound of the wood squeak was so compelling I set it to notes,” Miranda wrote in his book “Hamilton: The Revolution.”

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And he said the initial idea for the blockbuster hit came to him while he was taking a break from work. “It’s no accident that the best idea I’ve ever had in my life — perhaps maybe the best one I’ll ever have in my life — came to me on vacation,” Miranda recently told The Huffington Post.

“When I picked up Ron Chernow’s biography [of Hamilton], I was at a resort in Mexico on my first vacation from ‘In The Heights,’ which I had been working [for] seven years to bring to Broadway. The moment my brain got a moment’s rest, ‘Hamilton’ walked into it.”

Steven Spielberg has said something similar about creativity: “My ideas come when I’m not forcing them. My subconscious often governs me much more than my conscious.”

Albert Einstein always said he thought in pictures: “Words do not play any role in my thought; instead, I think in signs and images, which I can copy and combine.”

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For Miranda, though, words are everything. He even uses Twitter to work on his ideas.

“When I began working on ‘Hamilton,’ I found the quick exchange of ideas on Twitter to be really wonderful. It felt like a segment of the population was watching the creative process and kind of urging me to finish the show.”