Back in the day I caught a whiff of real creative rewards when I was busy programming computers to do tasks. Mostly they were classwork programs but a few were based on my own pursuits. The high from creating these things was palpable however those days have passed. I don't really have room in my life to program anymore. It's given way to writing, although for that it's mostly just me writing opinion pieces and social networking screes on Google Plus. The rewards aren't as profound as they were when I was at the end of a long programming task, but they give a little pleasure.
Now that I think about it some more, I would also say that being creative at my work, writing novel SQL code lies somewhere in between computer programming and writing. I value the time I have to devote to it and the reward is almost as rich as it was when I was writing computer programming code.
I really think that the longer something takes, the more you put into a project the more you get out of it. The rewards for a multiweek computer programming project, toiling away with debugging and testing edge conditions and refining the code leads to a huge blaze of rewarding feelings when the final product is running correctly.
As for inspiration, that usually comes from necessity. Mostly that is either my own curiosity, my opinions, or some task that is assigned to me at work for some grander purpose that I usually don't understand.
