My Flighty Muse

How many of you know what a muse is? No no, don't answer that. It's different for everyone. I know someone who calls her muse her broccoli. Another calls it a dolphin, and another calls it a big man with a hammer who hits her whenever she does something he doesn't want. She's a little eccentric, and the best writer I've ever had the good pleasure of collaborating with. I find those two things often come hand in hand.

Anyway--whatever you call it--a muse is just a pet name for a writer's inspiration. Some of them are constant and unwavering, but more often they leap from one shiny new idea to the next will little rhyme or reason. Imagine, for instance, that you're in the middle of a huge project that you're absolutely in love with. You wrote a whole thirty pages in a week, and you're hyping yourself up for more. You're a little nervous about the next scene--you don't know whether to make it a conflict of a well placed letdown--so you watch a movie.

Now imagine that you often write with other people as well. And the character you use happens to be a young woman whom you've always imagined looks like Katherine Heigl. She gets a boyfriend whom you imagine looks like...Lets go with Brad Pitt. Everyone knows him. And you fall in love with the messed up dynamics of the relationship and just can't get enough of it.

Now, you are preparing yourself for this next scene--remember? Yes, that's it. You've tried walking, slowing your breathing, taking a nap, drinking caffeine, and nothing helps. So you give up and you watch a movie. The movie has Brad Pitt in it. You can't help it. You like Brad Pitt. If you're a guy, he's a fun actor. If you're a girl, you just think he's cute. Watching this movie gets you considering the character dynamic between your character and your friend's character. You get this wonderful idea out of the blue, and you start thinking it out in detail in your mind. You dream it, you day dream it, you think it, eat it and really everything except actually writing it. You know why?

'Cause you are no longer able to write alongside your friend.

Oh, and guess what else? You can't possibly focus on anything else until your Katherine muse fizzles out, which is unlikely until you finally write something. You try to get in touch with your friend, but she's either not getting it or ignoring you, and nothing comes of it. Are you screwed?

Well, no. The situation is dire, but there is still hope. There is something--one thing--which you can do. It's ugly, it's grueling. It's depressing, difficult, loathsome and agonizing: You continue to write this story you've been working on personally. Sure, it'll be crap for the first few paragraphs, but once you hit your groove it both speed up and becomes wonderful and fulfilling again. Just don't go back in the middle of your thought process to fix the three of four crap paragraphs. You do that later, once you've left everything alone for a few hours and come back.