Jean Said
Guidelines for A Relationship with Your Muse(s)
I’ve been coping with my muse(s) for years. I’m not certain how many I have. I may have one muse with shape-shifting skills and multiple personalities, or a horde with very distinct skill sets and ideas. I suspect my muses are both of these ideas.
Muse(s) can be fickle. Having employed some mechanisms that helped me get along with my muse(s), I thought I’d compile some brief, general guidelines. These are recorded to help me in the future, but since I’m typing them up, I thought sharing them might help others when they’re dealing with their muse(s).
- Shelter your muse(s) like kittens, puppies, kits, and fledglings. They’re cute, tender, and impressionable, and need to be fed, protected, and nurtured. They depend on you for everything.
- It helps to act like you’re handling a fourteenth-century Ming dynasty vase when you’re conversing with your muse(s). They’re rare, fragile, and irreplaceable.
- Regard your muse(s) like they’re famous geniuses such as William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Stephen Hawking, Jackson Pollock, Maya Angelou, or Frank Lloyd Wright. They have a lot to offer, and you should pay attention.
- Behave with your muse(s) as you would with family that you enjoy having around, and respect and interact with your muse(s) as you do with family that you must love because they’re family, but you have no idea why they do the things that they do.
- Follow your muse(s) like they’re a famous performer, like Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Mick Jagger, Janis Joplin, Aretha Franklin, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Beyonce, or Kanye West, or a movie star like Jimmy Stewart, Sir Lawrence Olivier, Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks, Dwight Johnson, Jerry Lewis, Casey Affleck, or Bruce Campbell.
- Care for your muse(s) like a favorite elderly pet who seems to be fading.
- Obey your muse(s) like you’re a child and they’re your parent(s).
- Nurture, protect, and teach your muse(s) like you’re their parent(s) and they’re your child, perhaps a two-year-old, or a sixteen-year-old. They could be both from moment to moment. Part of the fun is understanding which one they are.
- Interact with your muse(s) like they’ve been convicted of being a serial killer who escaped from prison and is standing in your bedroom.
- React to your muse(s) like they’re the monsters under your bed. You’re not sure if they’re real, but you keep hearing noises, and it’s really, really dark.
- Embrace your muse(s) like a bolt of lightning during a thunderstorm. It can be painful and illuminating, but rewarding, if you survive.
- Finally, have fun with your muse(s). Pretend that you’re all celebrating graduating high-school and becoming an adult by getting drunk.
Employing these simple strategies have rewarded me with the same sort of wonderful relationship that I have with a stranger that I bump into at a parade. With a little observation and effort, you can have the same kind of relationship.
Good luck!
I Find
The first two parts of Entangled States, ten chapters, are like reaching a coast. The direction doesn’t matter. You hit the stretch where the land and sea meet. It’s turbulent, with crashing waves and hissing, seething waters. Taking it all must be done in pieces. There is the sea and the land, and there’s also the sky. Each exercises its own elements, colors, and behaviors. Once you pass this borderland, you’re released from the complications inherent to progressing from sea to land and freer to relax and take more in.
Now into part three of the book, it settles down again. I remember writing all of this, and recall thinking about the parts, and the placement of these chapters and scenes, and how they’ll interact. At that point, it was like being too close to a pointillism piece of art. Distance is needed for the colors to blend and become something more than blobs.
Wild, to think, while writing it, I saw these blobs and strokes, and applied them, and now I need to step back to comprehend the whole. I was realizing the whole on one level while I already saw and comprehended it on another level. Then, not so wild, as I write to help clarify and understand what I think.
Nerves
I’m nervous as I’m editing this second book in the Incomplete States series. The series’ first book, Four On Kyrios, was straightforward for the most part. This book, Entangled LEREs, is well-named, with entangled stories and characters. It reminds me of Slaughterhouse Five meets The Sound and the Fury, Cloud Atlas, and Lincoln in the Bardo. Editing becomes intense for me. I imagine readers asking themselves and the book, “What’s going on? I don’t understand.” Makes me want to revise it to make it clearer and more linear.
The muses push back against that impulse and insist that I don’t change anything. And there it goes, I’m cringing and sweating, thinking, what am I doing? “Trust us,” the muses urge. In response, I hold my head and rub my forehead and temples, and think, pitting desire to change things against the muses’ directives.
The muses remind me, “You’re in the middle of the series. Don’t make any major changes until you’ve gone through all four books.” Right, because the mud settles later, and it all becomes clearer. These are mysteries in mysteries, all part of the concept and story. Yes, I remember writing these chapters and battling the muses about it back then.
Man, it makes me nervous, though. My jaw hurts from gritting my teeth. Should a writer have such a love/hate relationship with their muses and the novel in progress? I remind myself that I was going all in, that, yes, I knew when I was writing it that it would be way out there. I remember those battles with myself from back then. I hope readers can get through it and find the effort rewarding. Even as I nurture that hope, I remind myself, I write for myself. I’m my only guaranteed audience.
I think it’s time to call it a day.
Going On
Have you ever seen a movie or read a book about a prisoner who uses a spoon or other small implement to chip away their rock or cement prison and eventually escape? I was thinking about that the other day as I was editing Entangled LEREs and realized, that’s not how it feels editing the second book in the Incomplete States series.
It also doesn’t feel like I’m struggling to move the needle. Nor does it feel like I’m climbing a mountain or swimming an ocean.
It feels pretty damn good.
I miss writing like crazy each day, truly. I resent, too, that it’ll take sooooo looong before these novels will be published. By ‘sooooo looong’, I mean like months or more. Yes, I’m indulging in some hyperbole to expose my natural impatience.
I’m not good at this persistent, slow stuff. I eat fast, drive fast, think fast, and talk fast. I like doing things fast. I like being intense and immersed.
But, I’m enjoying this leisurely editing and revising. I’m reading other books as I edit, novels that are best sellers or prize winners, prizes like the Man Booker, Peabody, and Pulitzer, or books by authors who won a Nobel Prize for Literature. I used to avoid reading such lofty others while I’m writing or editing. Correcting myself, I used to avoid reading most published literature while I was reading and writing because I often felt that my writing could never achieve such heights, and it depressed and demoralized me.
I’m more confident about it now. While I still enjoy and admire the aforementioned sort of books, I’m not cringing from my efforts when I go back and forth between the two. More often, when I find something special by someone else that I’m reading, I pause to understand the passage’s impact on me and explore what the author did and how they did it, hoping that I can learn how to do it.
The process has helped. I can see improvement in my writing. I sometimes find beauty or insights in my work that startles me.
Like many writers, I’ve found that writing is a progression. With a little talent and heavy loads of persistence and determination, we can improve what we’re revealing and how it’s revealed as we tell the stories that flow through us. This progression shines in the editing process. Further away from the fiery crucible of creativity where the flow is so intense, I can apply the lessons that I perceive. I’m more mindful. While I’m doing this, my appreciation for the diverse processes of writing/creativity and writing/editing/revising increases. As with many facets of our existence, it’s a spectrum.
Of course, on the obverse of this coin, when I read portions of my earlier published works, I cringe. There’s a plan afoot to edit and revise some of that stuff stirring in my head. What’s that? Don’t look back? You might have a point.
Time to resume editing like crazy.
