In Which Your Muse Is Not A Fairy
Traditional Muse
Traditionally, the muse is treated as an external force, fickle and impatient.
It is up to her, whether she appears to you and grants you a brief moment of inspiration, like a fairy doling out wishes.
*Record Scratch*
/thwaps you upside the head with a star-tipped wand
Snap out of it.
Writing is work.
Writing is amazing, glorious, riding a rainbow unicorn through a jellybean rainbow work sometimes, but it’s always work.
You CAN NOT sit around and wait for a muse to find you.
If you’re waiting for inspiration, or time, or life to slow down, you’re going to miss the boat.
This is a difficult lesson to learn, mostly because sometimes you DO get struck by creative lighting out of the blue. It happens, and it’s so incredibly magical that it becomes tempting to believe that ALL creative pursuits should feel that wonderful all the time.
If you wait for your “fairy muse” to find you, you will
- Never finish what you start
- Produce very little completed work, and what you DO write may be disconnected scenes that are impossible for a reader to follow
- Ride the emotional roller coaster of “I am AWESOME and I can write anything!” followed by “Holy geriatric pixies, I’m the worst writer EVER.” so often that your friends and family members will dread hearing you talk about your latest piece.
Use Your Muse
On the upside? If you stop treating your muse like an external fairy and instead treat her like a part of yourself, you can stop waiting for her to grace you with her presence and start tapping your own fount of creativity.
The first step is banishing the image of your muse as someone who grants wishes or visits you on their own schedule.
The best way to banish that image is to replace it with a different one — and I think there’s value in everyone finding their own mental portrait of their muse.
My “muse” is Buckethead. She’s somewhere between 5 and 10 years old, is always covered in cookie crumbs, and wears a bucket over hear head. I don’t know whether I picked her or she picked me, but there’s no removing her now. She is a never-ending fount of creativity, constantly seeing the world from strange angles and chiming in with ridiculous imagery and songs to brighten up my day.
Why is this a useful image for me?
Because Buckethead is always with me. Not only that, but I know I can’t demand things from her the way I would an adult. I have to coax and tease and reward her when she helps me. I can give her a problem to solve, but I have to give her time to solve it and I can’t be mad at her when I don’t understand or like her response.
Some folks see their muse as animals or birds, others as shapes or clouds of smoke.
My muse likes to pretend she’s a train and loves to sing My Little Pony songs while I’m supposed to be paying attention in meetings.
TLiDR
The Lesson is, Dear Reader, that you should never be sitting idly, waiting for a visit from the spirit of creativity.
The creativity lives INSIDE of you, and you can actively seek a connection with it so that even when writing is WORK, it’s also joy.
12 Comments
Perfect! Great post, Tami and very relevant for people who need a reminder of what a real ‘muse’ is and not what we grew up thinking from movies and books. Bringing the fantasy down from the pedestal and grounding it in reality can be very difficult, but so worth all the pain and work.
<3 I remember reading a fun quote about how your muse will only stop to talk to you if it finds you working. ^_^
Haha! I like that :D
I probably have a hundred three-page ‘novels’ floating about. ‘Wonderful,’ ‘awesome’ ideas that inspired me… for a day or two. Then the inspiration dimmed, the WORK of writing set in… and nothing ever got finished. My computer has a folder called ‘Old Writing’. I should label it ‘The Mausoleum of Inspiration.’
I also have a completed manuscript, one that’s well on its way to being submitted to editors. Like all my other writing, it started with a flash of inspiration. This time, however, I kept working when the fun evaporated. Sometimes it would only be 15 minutes a day — and I’d spend most of that time staring at a blank screen. What I wrote was crap. But the funny thing is, the more I forced myself to work at writing, the easier it became. Yes, during my ‘uninspired phases’ the quality of my writing sucked. But when I re-read it, I found that my Muse was able to see the gem in the muck. My ‘unmitigated crap’ polished up into decent writing. And it never would have happened if I wasn’t willing to put crap on ‘paper’ to begin with.
Books are not gifts from the Universe. They’re work.
For literally thirty years I waited for my Muse to give me enough inspiration to write a book. She never did. When I finally sat down and just did the work myself, I found my Muse tagging along, peering over my shoulder and offering inspiration.
Gads, I want to frame your comment and put it on the wall. This. Yes. A billion times this.
I’m still working through the pouty “I don’t wannas” when it comes to forcing myself to write, but even at my most toddler-ish, I know what I SHOULD be doing.
Can I second the request for a poster! I love this part,
“Books are not gifts from the Universe. They’re work.
For literally thirty years I waited for my Muse to give me enough inspiration to write a book. She never did. When I finally sat down and just did the work myself, I found my Muse tagging along, peering over my shoulder and offering inspiration.”
Quoted for Truth
“The Mausoleum of Inspiration” <3
I always liked the ideas Steven King and Louis C.K. have about their, well, ideas. King doesn't keep a "writing journal" because it would be full of crappy ideas that aren't worth writing. Only the ones that stick to you, that you remember unprompted, are worth the effort. Louis C.K. yearly throws his routines away. This forces him to write better comedy and to constantly be in the state of writing new comedy. And his comedy, though very lewd, is fantastic. Don't watch if you can't stand swearing, but here's the him explaining: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R37zkizucPU
I’ve seen that! Very, very good stuff. I also like the throwing out the old routine … that’d be like an author not allowing their series to go on forever, so they can branch out and try new worlds, new characters, new … anything.
Complete truth.
It’s funny how badly people that don’t write misunderstand the writing process…
As if writing is just…you get an idea and you write it out and all done! One burst of inspiration and you’re done, like it’s a lark.
Fuck that.
Writing IS work.
It’s hard and it drags and very oftentimes, it can seriously suck. But now and then…every once in a while, what you see in your head comes flowing out so perfectly that it feels like a river of fire flowing from your mind out into words.
I write for times like that…
Perry, stop stealing my icons and using my email address. It’s confusing. =P
It’s not even “people that don’t write”, alas. It’s a lot of people trying very hard to be writers and not sure just how this creativity thing works.
I dunno if you lump “blogger” in with other writers, but as a blogger, this is incredibly true. While you can stash posts for awhile, in the end, blogging is about dragging 250-1500 words out of your head most days a week and spewing them forth on the internet after a quick run through the internal edit filter. If you wait for inspiration, your blog will suck. Because having a good blog (like writing a good novel) is about consistency.
Eventually you learn to forgive yourself for writing shitty posts and just move on. Feeding your muse helps, but you can’t wait around for it!
I like the idea of giving my muse some kind of characterization though. I need to think on that.
It’s true of any creative pursuit, really, and blogging totally counts. <3
Especially the consistency. And you're right, sometimes posts are crap posts, but at least it's content that's going out on a regular basis. As long as there's more value than crap, it's all good. ^_^