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?
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.