I am my own Muse
Whenever someone writes about (or worse, talks about) his muse, I cringe a little. Then I feel bad. I mean, who am I to turn up my nose at how another human being characterizes the creative process? I mean, it’s just a metaphor, right?
Well, yes and no. The dangerous thing about muses is that no matter how we talk about them, think about them, complain about them, draw them, hate them, loathe them, yearn for them — they are still THEM. Not us. Separate. Distinct. Other. Unownable. They elude us, hide from us, tease us, leave us, love us. They are outside us.
Muses are so bloody Tennyson as well, so draped in chiffon and hair. Very vaseline-on-the-lens. Oh, the artist sighs, if only my muse were with me today! What great things I could have created. Other people seem to have a kind of Kujo muse with lots of needle-sharp teeth and a very bad reaction to being ignored. If I had a muse, that’s what she’d look like because she’d be mean as hell and wouldn’t give a crap how I felt or what mood I was in or whether I had ten hours or ten minutes.
But dressed in silk or dressed in leather, a muse that exists independently of me is just a way of distancing myself from my own creativity, pretending that I am somehow not truly the owner of my own imagination, that it is something with its own agency that I must attempt to entice — or that I can accidentally scare away.
No. It’s up to me whether the next half an hour is productive or not. It’s up to me to sit in the chair, stay in the chair, write when I would rather not. It’s up to me to plan, prepare, work and practice. I never never get to blame my fear or my laziness on my muse’s coy absence. I am my own muse. I am the writer, the artist, the creator. What I need is within me, both inspiration and execution. No amount of lounging around in linen blouses, no amount of red wine or laudanum is going to make me a better writer. Any time spent waiting for my muse to visit is time I could have spent writing. And I know which is more likely to get a book finished.
I don’t care if it worked for Byron. I don’t have that kind of time.
“It’s up to me whether the next half an hour is productive or not.”
You got that right. And accolades go to you for what you produce, not to your muse.
Maureen Johnson said it best when she called muses “credit-stealing parasites.”
I merely followed a link here (the power of twitter) and I’m glad I did – have you read R.L. Stevenson’s “A Chapter on Dreams,” by chance? This discussion of muses and inspiration somehow pulled it from the far reaches of my memory… or rather, “small theatre of the brain.”