Words are so important to me and inspiration comes from a variety of sources. Sometimes songs just come along and you pick them out of the ether and work with them - both John Denver and Keith Richards (how's that for opposites) have made this comment and I believe it to be true. I'm a very sporadic and lazy writer, I can go for months without writing, though this panics me a little.
Sometimes I'll just sit down with my guitar and play any old rubbish until something that I like appears, other times it can be that I've overheard a phrase in conversation in a shop or on TV and this can become part of the basis of a lyric. I very rarely think "Right I'm going to write a song today" and certainly I've never done the Nashville dentist appointment thing where two or more writers sit down together and try to write a song in half an hour and then go to their next appointment and try to do the same again. One of my favourite songs is Vagabond Heart, for the imagery it evokes, what was behind ... more.
I cant really gove you an answer,but what I can give you is a way to a solution, that is you have to find the anglde that you relate to or peaks your interest. A good paper is one that people get drawn into because it reaches them ln some way.As for me WW11 to me, I think of the holocaust and the effect it had on the survivors, their families and those who stood by and did nothing until it was too late.