What do you do when your muse is being a jerk? You want to write. You’re sitting there, pen in hand or fingers
on keyboard; but the creative spark is now barely a fading ember. Your muse refuses to inspire. Don’t despair. The truth is your muse is a figment of your
imagination. He doesn’t exist. The magical creativity-inspiring voice that
whispers inaudibly in your ear… that’s you!
I struggle to maintain this same revelation time and
again. In truth, I find it all too easy
to blame my muse for literary impotence; I have to make a conscious effort to
avoid that particular pitfall. Once you
have given power to a fickle muse, you have given him your greatest asset: your
creativity. Believe it or not… your
creativity doesn’t go away. It just goes
into hiding. No, that’s not true
either. Your own doubts and fears get in
the way. Creativity. Inspiration.
These are not magical rainbows, dependant upon the positions of the
planets and the direction of the wind and a fairy princess with a wand. They are psychological mechanisms. They are controllable.
You sit there, struggling to spit out a string of coherent
words. You have the great American novel
deep inside you, locked up like a political prisoner in some dark dungeon. Yet you cannot find the key to his release. You squeeze your eyes shut. You pace.
You drink too much coffee. You
try yelling at the walls. You even revert
word play and free association. None of
these are working for you and you are becoming frustrated. You are ready to punch holes in things that
don’t need holes in them. You’re ready
to rip up your old unfinished manuscripts and burn them in sacrifice to
whichever cruel god is taunting you.
You’re on the verge of flinging caution and your computer to the
wind. And still… you are stuck.
What now? How do you
defeat your own psychological roadblock?
If the muse is a fairy tale and cannot be summoned, then what hope is
there when your mind is your problem?
The first thing you do is set your resolve to full scale. That’s right; dial it all the way up. Make up your mind that you will not give
up. There is a thing in you that can
only be released through the putting of words into sentences and then sentences
into stories. Set it firmly in your mind
that you will not fail to free that thing.
That idea. Next… write. While you may think that’s a circular logic
for writer’s block, it’s not. Writer’s
block is the thing that prevents us from attempting to write… it is not the
inability to write. If you can sit down and
write your name, you have overcome writer’s block. If you can spit out a sentence about
yourself, even if is a simple paragraph about what kind of car you drive, you
have overcome your dependence on the elusive muse.
Lower your shoulder and push through that barrier. Write anything. Write a long rant about writer’s block and why
you despise it and how you think other people should overcome it. Describe the color of your carpet and why you
hate it. Explain just why you refuse to
carry a bow and arrows to the grocery store.
Once you put words to ideas, you have defeated the writer’s block and
you have broken your dependence upon the muse.
The moment you realize you are being creative when you thought you could
not be is the moment you have become a writer.
That’s when you understand you don’t have to rely upon the whimsical
nature of inspiration and you are capable of creating worlds at will. You can thrust immortals into conflict and
yank them again from it. You can uncover
the deepest secrets of the universe and stir the most profound of emotion from
even the most stalwart of reader. You
are a writer and the universe is in your hands.
