Where art thou, Muse

Inspiration is easy.
I'm not kidding. Honestly. I walk around with my little notebook, hearing snippets of songs, snatched segments of conversations, or being dumbstruck by a view or image I encounter. All of these go into the book.
Then all I have to do is write!

Yeah, cause that's easy.
Thats where all of the ideas, inspiration, moments, and observations come unstuck. Transferring the things you've collected onto the page without simply recording something verbatim is hard. How does this astounding sunset become part of the story? How can I transfer the awe I felt as I watched the clouds explode with light into a story about a woman who has just been shot? Why do I never find anything that fits with what I'm trying to write?
Well, I probably do, but I need to put the language into context. I need to get the reigns on it and make it do what I want it to do. I need to be the writer.

Brevity is the soul of Wit

I'm trying to enter competitions. It is a challenge I'm setting myself that if I want to be successful as a writer I need to write. Many competitions out there aren't really competitions, but serve other useful purposes.
For example, competitions that offer a critique of your work if you pay a larger entrance fee are not really competitions. Although there is a prize, and at least having a chance to recoup the loss is probably worth the risk, these competitions are almost certainly a way for writing consultants and agents to drum up business.
So, what do I do instead?

Unbelievable

[Spoilers for Catcher in the Rye, Life of Pi and Atonement. Potential spoilers for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, Fight Club]

So, do we then depend on a narrator that we know is untrustworthy for the sake of having secrets? H.P. Lovecraft had narrators in his stories who were as much adrift in the worlds in which they found themselves as we, the readers. They could only report on their own thoughts and the activities they observed around them. They were assumed to be trustworthy until such a time as they were lost in the mystery as it unfolded. We are as weak as they are, thus we empathise, particularly in the face of such spectacular power. Almost inevitably, such narrators become unreliable, even if this isn't obvious from the start.

Ursula K. Le Guin Is Dead

It was inevitable, I know. She was old and had been ill, but it was now, and that was unexpected. I suppose it normally is.

Ursula Le Guin died last evening, or afternoon, or morning, depending on where you are in the world, and for the first time in a long time I’m crying for a stranger.

A Question about speech

I've come across some work on free indirect speech/style recently, and have come up with  questions:
If our character's speech and thoughts are being filtered directly through to us by the narrator, what does this say of the omniscience of our narrator? If the narrator cannot then be omniscient in every aspect of the story, what does this say of the reliability of the narrator?