Training Your Muse

I want to take my muse and send her to school.  She is annoying, and badly behaved.  She wakes me at 3 a.m. with the perfect idea when I have to be at work by 7.  She sends the resolution to a problem when I’m speeding down the freeway with no hands free to write it down, and (of course) she steals that idea from my brain by the time I am able to pull over.  She teases me with an image that I just know is the heart and  soul of a piece I want to write, and tells me NOTHING ELSE about it.  Hell, she probably sits back and laughs as I struggle to figure it out.  She visits me

with vivid dreams about my characters, and whisks them away as soon as I wake.  She’s poorly trained.   If she were a dog, she’d be pooping on the carpet and running off with strangers, maybe even biting little kids.  In short, she’s a bit of a bitch.

According to the ancient Greeks, there were (are?) nine muses, and they (the Greeks, not the muses) believed those nine were responsible for providing all creative inspiration, from poetry and dance to justice and philosophy.  In The Odyssey, there is a passage where Homer attempts to invoke the muse, to bring her out to speak to him, to begin the tale, so that ….. well, so that he could freakin’ write it.   

So, I guess those muses were a bit of a problem for writers even back then.

It seems, though, that The Nine (with apologies to J.R.R. Tolkein) are even more errant these days - I hear more and more from fellow writers, from poets, from artists of all types, how hard it is to find their muse, much less get that inspiration flowing.  We can blame it all on the pressures of modern society - on information overload, or the variety of stresses in our lives.  Or we can blame it on the muse herself.  I say the latter.

And I say we train her.   This idea surfaced during a conversation with a fellow writer a while back - commiserating in late-night conversations on social media (when she was in London and I was in Oregon), we proposed that there needed to be a training school for a bad muse - just like there is for bad dogs.  (Well, she can be a bitch, can’t she?)  

The McKenzie/Ferguson School for The Muse would have lessons paralleling some of the common lessons for errant dogs.  Like Sit, Speak, Stay, Roll Over, Play Dead (no, let’s forget that one), and, above all, House-Training.  Let’s train the muse to Sit with us while we write, to STAY (for the love of heaven) with us while we work on a piece, to Speak regularly with the words we need to hear, to Roll Over and show us the real underbelly of a story, and, (also for the love of  heaven) to not find that spot in our story and in ourselves where we are most vulnerable, and make a no-no of self-doubt there.  

And, of course, she can be trained - like everything else in our lives - it’s up to us to do so.  She may be a bitch, but she’s our bitch, and we need to take charge.  So, my writer friends, sit, sit at your writing desk, stay there, speak on the page, and when those no-no’s happen within you, scoop them up in a doggie-bag (a muse-bag?) and dump them - and get back to work.

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Dedicated with affection (and shared misery) to awesome H. Ferguson

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For your edification, Homer’s invocation of the muse:

Speak, Memory – Of the cunning hero

The wanderer, blown off course time and again

After he plundered Troy’s sacred heights.

Speak Of all the cities he saw, the minds he grasped,

The suffering deep in his heart at sea

As he struggled to survive and bring his men home

But could not save them, hard as he tried –

The fools – destroyed by their own recklessness

When they ate the oxen of Hyperion the Sun,

And that god snuffed out their day of return

Of these things,

Speak, Immortal One,

And tell the tale once more in our time.

(Stanley Lombardo Translation)

Giving Up On Words As a Route to your Story

“When words don't come easy, I make do with silence and find something in nothing." ~ Strider Marcus Jones, Poet

Long, long ago, I was at a conference in Tacoma, Washington.  It was the third day of a three-day conference, and, near mid-day, I found myself sitting in the back of a lecture hall filled with people, not listening to the lecture.  I don’t remember why I chose to go in there, and to this day have absolutely no memory of what the lecture was about.  In the previous three days, I’d been to workshops and seminars, panels and lectures, brainstorming sessions and break-out discussions.  There had just been so many words.  Don’t get me wrong, it was a good conference - intended to explore the methods for bringing women’s studies and studies of minority groups effectively into the curriculum at public institutions.  There had been inspiration, there had been connection, there had been just a hurricane of ideas.   In that same year, on the campus where I worked and taught, I’d met and befriended a young Apache artist who had told me of a tradition in his tribe called “giving up on words.”  Sitting in the back of that hall, surrounded by whispering people with the words from the stage blaring from speakers overhead, I gave up on words.  On the pad in my lap, I began writing about silence.  Not the kind of “being silenced” that had been discussed so much those past three days, but a welcome silence, a silence of choice, a silence of awareness.

Silence is seldom discussed when talking about writing - words, both spoken and written, are our stock in trade, not absence of words.  But words alone will not drive you to a story.   In the end, you have to know what it is the story is truly about.  There must be, for a story to be real, to connect to readers in any way that matters, a truth to it.   Those stories, those pictures of life as it is, are the stories worth writing.  And this means, that, as the writer, you must be paying attention - which is hard to do when you’re swimming in words.  

I believe that, in the development of the story, there are two essential tasks - finding the character, and finding the truth of her/his story.  Often that means, as I wrote in my last post, immersing yourself in the character - knowing that person as well as you know yourself.  At other moments, it becomes more important to know where they are going, and why.  There’s a story, possibly apocryphal, that John Steinbeck used to, in writing a novel or a story, put on the wall in front of his writing desk a slip of paper with a one-sentence statement - a statement of what he wanted the reader to feel or think after reading the story.  In the circles of writing statements, it came to be known as “the Steinbeck Statement.”  I still encourage my students to write them.  

But what you find to center your story, to center your mind and your purpose in the writing of the story, doesn’t always have to be a statement - for me, sometimes it’s an image, sometimes a few bars of music.  The search for that thing, that heart of the story,  can be long and frustrating, but if you don’t know the heart of your story, how can you expect your reader to respond to it?   Pay attention - listen to the things you hear in public, what’s coming over the radio in your car - look at things you might not ordinarily notice, pay attention to things that fall unbidden into your hands - if they speak to you, listen.  Perhaps just sit in silence, attending to how that feels, how it sounds.   Pay attention to the world, to people, to the lessons of silence, to your and your character’s heart.  And then write.