Hello Muse

My muse disappeared while I was preoccupied with the Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year holidays. With all the additional To Do's that time of year brings, writing time was pretty much non-existent so I didn't even notice when she took off for parts unknown.

I discovered her absence when I sat down to write the first Monday in January. She'd stuffed all of my ideas, lines of dialogue, and the conflicts of my hero and heroine into her suitcase and taken them with her. I tried to struggle on without her, managing a sorry page count of 3 whole pages that week.

Thinking if I spent the weekend on some Me time filling the well so to speak, I'd entice her to come back. I didn't know it at the time, but I was deluding myself. The next week, she never showed and I eked out a few more pages. I was now well behind my 100 page goal for the month of January. I started to panic. What if she never came back? What if I'm never able to finish another manuscript?

After spending that weekend trying to figure out how to lure her back, I got mad. How dare she leave me high and dry when she knew how important my writing is to me? I decided then and there I was going to write the 25 pages a week that I'd set for myself come hell or high water. Monday I sat down and wrote 5 pages. They were horrid, needed more revision that I could possible describe, but I had 5 pages. I did the same thing Tuesday and Wednesday.

Guess who showed up Thursday in a snit. How dare I write without her? She had all my good ideas, I needed her. I told her to get lost, I didn't need her after all. She stamped her foot like a 5 year old and stormed around the room muttering to herself. I ignored her and kept writing.

She stood next to me, her arms crossed over her chest. "That's really bad, you know."

"I know," I said, "but I can fix it."

She started offering suggestions, great lines of dialogue and description. I couldn't move my fingers over the keyboard fast enough. She perched on the edge of my desk with a smirk. "I guess I showed you. You need me after all."

I just smiled and kept writing because her disappearance taught me something -- I don't necessarily need her. I can write without her. It may need a lot of work, but that's what revisions and rewrites are for. 

Having a muse is nice. But not being held hostage to her whims or having to wait for inspiration is even nicer.

Word by Word

Last Monday I vowed to go hunting for my wayward muse.  I found her quite easily the first couple of days, but there were times when she proved elusive.  A writer friend mentioned that maybe I need to stop trying to force the words to come, and focus on just writing. She suggested I write about anything that comes to mind instead of spending my writing time struggling to make headway on my novel.

I found a great book titled A Writer's Book of Days: A Spirited Companion & Lively Muse for the Writing Life by Judy Reeves.  It's divided into sections, one for each month of the year, but more importantly it gives writing prompts for each day for writing practice. The writing prompts are sometimes general such as "Shadows" and sometimes specific such as "Describe the contents of someone's closet."

While I'm still planning on working on my novel during my regular writing time, I'm looking forward to trying some of the writing prompts later in the evening to try and entice my muse to come back and stay for a while. I'll keep you updated on how things go.

Finding My Muse

Those of you who follow my blog know I've been struggling for some time to get words on paper.  Not just good words or great words, but any words at all. Someone once said, "you can't revise a blank page."  Truer words have never been spoken.

I've never been a big believer in writer's block. I've always felt if you sit down at the laptop or computer and write anything even if it's garbage you know you're going to delete anyway, the right words will come even if it takes a few writing sessions before that happens. Needless to say, I'm now a big believer in writer's block.

I've had a great deal going on outside my writing life lately that made it hard to even get to the laptop after the day job. It seems my muse decided this was the perfect time to go on vacation and not bother coming back. Starting today, two of the major causes of stress I believe killed any type of creativity I may have been able to muster will be gone. Gone.

This writer's block has gone on far too long. So, today I'm going hunting for my muse. I'm going to find her and bring her back, kicking and screaming if necessary because I'm determined to get back to work spinning stories and dreaming dreams.