Lashing the Muse
A throwback article
This was originally published at The Mad Genius Club on November 10, 2018. I will say that prolonged stress and disruption sends the muse into hiding, and then you have to coax her out and decondition her agoraphobia, but that’s a different post.
So I have a problem. On one hand, I want to write, and am delighted when the muse awakens and sends tendrils of stories out into my head so I can write them down. On the other hand, when those tendrils become tentacles of the kraken and threaten to take over my brain... that’s a problem. I need to find a balance. A way to bottle up the muse, so to speak, and only let it out when I can actually write, because there’s a fair amount of time when I can’t. Or at least, when it’s highly inconvenient to have the muse tickling at my backbrain while I’m supposed to be concentrating on something else.
So, what I need to do is lash the muse to the bowsprit, and stick wax in my ears, and only once we’re past the sirens, let her go again to infect me with the madn... er, stories. Unfortunately, so far my attempts at this have yielded a sulky muse who tends to plop down on deck and fold her arms and stubbornly pout when I remove the lashings. This is less than ideal.
I can’t let her loose all the time. When it’s a particularly loud story, with a bright voice to the main character (and if it were that voice on the side character, I’m writing the story down wrong), it’s hard to keep my mind on the day job. As much as I enjoy writing, I can’t afford to make it my day job and give up science (for many good and complex reasons, not just because Science!) Look, you, being a Mad Scientist requires a higher degree than I’ve got. And more madness. I’m just.. I dunno. I’m an aspiring Mad Scientist. Maybe someday.
So the muse needs to be locked up, at least some of the time. I mean, it would be easy to lock her up and throw away the key. Um. I think it would be easier. I will admit I’ve not tried to actually do that. I have enough trouble with my brain wanting to explore all the shiny interests, trying to force it to focus on only one thing at a time usually backfires. So stopping writing altogether might be like that. It would leak.
The stories leak. I find myself wandering around work, with half my brain off in another universe. It’s not safe. So I write when I can, which is less than I’d like. When I finally get to the place and time where I can sit down to the story, I’m too tired to string together coherent words into anything other than, possibly, vogon poetry. I’m pretty sure there’s no market for that, except possibly as an interrogation method, and even then you’ve got Geneva Convention violations, inter-Galactic war crime trials, not to mention the interrogators whose brain has leaked out their ears. It’s no use.
So I keep steering through the straits of Charybdis, with Scylla sucking on one side and the whirlpool of distraction on the other. And the damn muse keeps snatching the wheel when I’m not looking and pointing us at those story sirens. Spoiled brat.
This one speaks to me deeply. My muse is very much like a cat - sleeping most of the time, but demanding when it wants attention and inclined to pout for a very long time if I don't give in. However, my muse rarely provides complete stories; no, it gives me plot bunnies galore. I've got a warehouse full of bunnies of all shapes and sizes and colors, hopping around incoherently, and none of them want to grow up into anything other than what they are - vague ideas, maybe a scene, characters, world building, but no concrete story.
When I do try to wrangle one of those bunnies into an outline so that I can get an actual full story, they fight me tooth and claw and most of the time, as you, I struggle to find the energy to fight the battle. That initial blank page is a mountain as tall as Everest to try to surmount, and even getting that first paragraph does not make it any easier - I stand on the peak and look ahead and see peak after peak that I will have to climb before I can get to the end.
It is extremely frustrating. I have story ideas; I have characters with depth and personality - but nothing to do (except live in my head and either wax on about little snippets they've done or comment on my daily life. Or get into food fights....) The muse is irritating as you said by constantly humming in the back of my mind so that my brain is rarely completely focused on the job before me, and my day job plus house chores and dinner and trying to help the husband in his writing aspirations just saps whatever energy I have and by evening, the ability to sit down and fight the battle to get the story I see so clearly in my head into a narrative form is gone.
I would be fine if I could just tell stories in the old fairy tale way - write my Silmarillion style story where I can tell to my hearts content like the old myths instead of having to fit the modern expectations where the story is written from point of view to feel real time with thoughts and emotions and descriptions of actions and scenes - if I could just write the world bible and be done with it, I'd be doing great. But modern readers want complete tales, scene leading to scene, an action movie in written form.
Maybe one of these days I can surmount the difficulties and actually get a complete novella written, but it isn't going to happen any time soon, I'm very much afraid. I'll be lucky if I can complete the 2 stories I've got started and try to write one out for which I've had an idea for a year now. I'd like to at least write 4 complete short stories this year. Why is that such a hard goal?
The Muse will keep sending ideas whether I write them or not. At least when written, I chase them out of my head.