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The man in the dark suit approaches the microphone. At 75, he looks frail and his voice is croaky. But as soon as the crowd recognises the song, it goes wild. "I've heard there was a secret chord," he begins. This is Leonard Cohen, performing what many consider his greatest song: Hallelujah.

So popular is it today that you might think it came to him in a flash and was an instant hit. But its genesisOrigin or beginning. The book of Genesis is the first book of the Bible, and opens with one of the most famous first sentences of any literary work: "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." was long and painful, as a new documentary called Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song explains.

Cohen is believed to have spent five years writing the song before he recorded it in 1983.

The published version has seven verses, but notebooks found after his death in 2016 contain many revisions.

Estimates of how many verses he actually wrote range from 80 to 180. "To find that song, that urgent song, takes a lot of versions and a lot of work and a lot of sweat," he told an interviewer.

At one point he was reduced to sitting in his underwear, banging his head on the floor of his room at the Royalton Hotel in New York. Even after he recorded the song on his album Various Positions, he continued to sing different versions of it in live performances.

Struggling with the lyrics was only part of the agony Cohen suffered over Hallelujah. When he took Various Positions to Columbia Records, they turned it down. It was finally released by another company 18 months after he recorded it.

Even then Hallelujah did not gain widespread recognition. In 1994, suffering from depression and alcoholism, Cohen retreated to a Buddhist monastery in California.

He remained there for five years. Then, shortly after leaving the monastery, he learnt that his song was to be used on the soundtrack of Shrek, in a scene where the hero worries about his mission to rescue Princess Fiona.

Shrek brought Hallelujah to a new, worldwide audience. Other artists hurried to record it. Alexandra Burke won The X Factor with it.¹

Other geniuses too have struggled with their creations. WB YeatsAn Irish poet and dramatist who is often considered one of the greatest poets of the 20th Century. wrote that "a line will take an hour maybe", and said that poetry was harder work than scrubbing a pavement or breaking stones.

But John KeatsAn English Romantic poet who died in 1821 aged 25 from tuberculosis. insisted that "if poetry comes not as naturally as leaves on a tree, it had better not come at all."

Yes: Even the greatest writers and artists seldom get things right first time. To bring their work to perfection, they have to spend hours polishing it and trying out different versions of it.

No: The most essential element in any great creation is inspiration, which Matthew Arnold called a "spark from heaven". You can work as hard as you like, but without it you will get nowhere.    

Or... Different types of creativity need different degrees of inspiration. Writing a poem might be 90% inspiration and 10% polishing. With a novel or a painting the proportions could be reversed.