Samhain Publishing Ltd. Weblog

A New Year's Gift for Writers

Welcome to the New Year. Well, for you, maybe. I’m writing this on New Years’ Eve. While the rest of you are out there whooping it up, I’m at home pounding the keyboard. But if you think I’m whining, you’re mistaken.

Round 'Em Up!

First off, we kill all the Muses. Oh, wait, Shakespeare said that, only it was about lawyers, not Muses. But we can still use it. Maybe not kill them— that could be a little strong. But that doesn’t mean we have to let them get away with everythng.

You know what I mean. They’re nasty little critters that sit seductively on your shoulder, nagging you to drop whatever you’re trying to get done and get back to your writing, then flitting off to parts unknown the minute your computer screen turns to white.

They aren’t there when you need them, but they won’t leave you alone when you have something else you have to do. They whisper wonderful ideas in your ear while you dream, and you wake up brimming with new creativity, then they jerk it all away just as you sit down to type. You’ve got a fabulous plot outline for a new story, but there’s just this one small hitch, which isn’t so small when you think about it since it encompasses the whole dang middle of your story. And your lovely (read nasty, seductive, traitorous) Muse supplied you with everything except that great big hole. Then Muse went on vacation.

I say, let’s rebel! Let’s meet up and form a posse. Mount up and hunt down all the Muses, round ‘em up, hog-tie ‘em and throw ‘em in the county jail. Then we’ll threaten them with the noose at sunrise if they don’t give up and go back to doing their job. Put ‘em on bread and water until they give in.

So okay, that’s a fantasy. But so are Muses. They’re an animation in our minds expressing our creativity. They’re kind of a good idea, really, helping us visualize how creativity ebbs and flows, and give us a sort of fairy-tale justification for the lack of ideas when we need them most. Otherwise we’d blame ourselves. And unfortunately, authors are very good at blaming themselves.

The reality is, creativity does ebb and flow. Sometimes more ebb than flow. Sometimes stories are more difficult to put together, too, or specific parts of our stories elude us. That could be a good thing, actually.

Think about it. What if story-writing were easy? What if anyone who could type could just sit down and write a story, then zip it off to a publisher to have it published? Yes, know people think it’s easy, and it’s probably true that a really well-written, seamless story flows so well it looks easy to write. But we know it’s not, so that isn’t the question.

But if anyone could write your story, would it be worth reading? No, because you’d have nothing to say that people don’t already know. Your story would contain no surprises, nothing exciting. (Odd thing about writers– they seem to think if the story isn’t coming easy to them, they aren’t being creative.) Most of the time, to find those surprises, those exciting and fresh twists and turns in our stories, we have to dig deeply, work harder, sweat bullets and blood. Muses aren’t much help for that kind of work. They abandon us the minute the shooting starts. Or shoveling, as the case may be. Don’t want to get their wings dirty, I guess.

So I say we hog-tie the nasty critters. Throw ‘em in the hoosegow and let ‘em beg for mercy through their bandana gags while we get down to the hard, dirty work on our own. We’ll go after the gold in our mines ourselves. Let’s just accept that sometimes we have to dig deeper and work harder for it. Then when we haul it out of the mine and we’re all grimy and sweaty from our efforts, that bright and shining gold is a real story, something new and unique, something nobody else could write,

Let’s go get ‘em, authors! Hog-tie all the Muses!