Gigi's Muse is Fickle

The muse is fickle.

That's correct; I'm not one of those people who can write every day. I need to be inspired.

Luckily for me, a lot of things happen to inspire me.

Castle ruins perched on a cliff. That'll do it.

Too remote? It's true that stumbling across ruins doesn't happen every day. At least not for those of us in California.

Then how about San Francisco on a foggy day. That'll do it, too.

Perhaps that's not quite inspiring enough for a bad day, though. Then how about a moss-covered statue at a cemetery.

OK, so I've been inspired...

Now what? I know it's hard work, so I really do try to sit down and write -- even when the mood doesn't strike me and I feel like the muse hasn't found me. I do get some work done when I force myself to sit down. It's just that it isn't always writing that happens.

Sometimes I bounce around plot ideas. Other times I finish research that needs to be done. But if I'm not inspired, I can't do more than that. I need to find that place where my characters talk to each other, writing their dialogue for me.

I play the odds. I surround myself with inspiring mystery-related art in my office, like this Sherlock Holmes poster. I also know the muse tends to appear in the morning, so I've arranged my schedule to fit in morning writing. (Since I'm a slave to this fickle muse, I might as well go with it.)

Last week I finished the revised outline of a new book (whew!). The reason I was able to do so was because I was sitting in my writing nook while this furious storm beat down outside. A storm, like fog, is inspiring. I hope the storm continues through this weekend. Who knows how far it'll take me.

If not, I can always take a break and watch a kick-ass TV heroine for inspiration. Here's one of my favorites.

-- Gigi

Finally! Martha Finds A Way To Write Off The Satellite TV Bill

Two hours ago, I didn't think I had a muse. I was flying high on my own mojo. My flashy high-concept ideas were all mine.

Then I got an email from Friend J reminding me of our fan fiction days. Yes, you read that correctly. Fan Fiction. Off the X-rated variety. (Hey, it was college - we were all experimenting.) By X - I mean:

The X-Files

Oh yes, I have co-authored Mulder-Scully Fan Fiction. Stop judging me.

This reminder led me to the muse I didn't even know I had - kickass women on television.

When The X-Files came out, Scully was an anomaly. The skeptic physician to the flighty, flirtatious crazy guy. I LURVED HER.

Around the same time, I developed a massive girl crush on Buffy.

Ah, young folk have never known a day without interesting female leads on television. BUT I DO! And man, was I angry about it. (I'm still a little angry, to be honest.)

Now I'm awash in them - everywhere I turn there's another female lead to fall in love with. A couple more favorites:



These women are complex and, best of all, damaged in a way that made them stronger.

Ask people who have read my work (friends, crit partners, agents, editors) and they'll tell you I'm a high-concept plot-oriented gal, not too strong on emotion and character. I think it's because I failed to recognize this part of myself - the part that wants to explore how trauma makes women blossom, grow, and overcome.

So look out world, armed with my newly recognized muse (thanks Friend J, co-author in crime), I'm taking you by storm.

Lisa says, "Muse, Shmuse".

I don’t believe in a muse.

Writing is work. Fun work, challenging work, exhilarating work, excruciating work. Our brains are constantly connecting neurons, rejecting or accepting plot lines, motivations, character traits, settings. And when we’re stuck, it is easy to say our muse has deserted us.



I reject that theory. We’re subconsciously working through a glitch in the manuscript. A hiccup in the flow of words. A working writer doesn’t shrug and think the muse is on vacation. A working writer writes around the blockage. We research, we write scenes in other points of view, we write backstory, we write pages and pages of extraneous description that will never see the light of day, we stare out the window (laptop on and in our lap) at the leaves letting our minds wander, we make color-coded charts and note cards, we revise and revise and revise.

Equally important, when the work is really pouring out of us, I refuse to embrace the concept of some nameless mythological entity bestowing their generosity upon us. We worked hard to get to the point where the story vomits out in giant technicolor bursts and the revisions will be minimal because every aspect that we normally labor over seems to be miraculously right. Giving the credit to someone else (unless it is a critique group for un-sticking us) rubs me the wrong way.


I own my work habits, both good and bad. And no stinking ‘muse’ is gonna take them away.





Lisa

Breathe It In

L.G.C. Smith

I'm writing in a Pens vacuum. In the last ten days, while visiting my brother, his family, and my parents, when I had time to myself, I wrote. I didn't spend any time online. Hard to imagine for many, I know, but I'm such a dinosaur I can remember when blow dryers were the sparkly new miracle of modern technology. Now I'm home, but my laptop won't connect to my home network. Gah. I feel lost not having read what Sophie, Rachael, Juliet and Adrienne have written about Muse.

What inspires me? My instinctive answer is too simple: Life. Anything. Everything. I need to try harder.

So I made a list of things from which I've taken inspiration, and it's long. Too long. A fraction of it includes: Trees. Rocks. Ruins. Landscapes. Language. Culture. Changes in all those things. Time. Anything unknown that's left clues about what happened before. Space. Stories. Hidden things. Forgotten words. Will. What makes people sacrifice self-interest to do something that makes someone else's life better?

So many things. Life. Anything. Everything.

The traditional Greek Muses were born of Zeus and Memory, and I feel Memory's influence keenly in what draws my attention. More than her daughters, she prods me. But more than ancient mythology, a medieval sense of pilgrimage defines how I perceive my inspirations. I've spoken here of writing as pilgrimage; a journey with intention. No aimless ramble, however entertaining. A feckless choice of path, however, can be as inspiring as one chosen carefully, as long as it is traveled with intent.

What kind of intent? For me, most often, it's the intent to learn. To pick up rocks to see what they look like on the other side, and what's beneath them. To poke into the sound and meaning of a word, looking at how the individual components, phonetic, morphological, syntactic or semantic influence all the others and are shaped by them in turn. To delve into DNA analysis to see where our ancestors came from long, long years ago.

So that's my answer. My greatest Muse is Pilgrimage, those journeys undertaken with the intent to learn whatever lessons come along, to traverse paths that welcome mystery and tempt me to discover what I do not know. Memory whispers in my ear as I walk, and her daughters dance along with us, different Muses on different pages of each book, each day, each step.

A Thousand (un)Common Muses

-- Adrienne Miller

Walking down a street in a far off place, there’s a tickle in the back of my head. My curiosity get the better of me. I look through the garden gate and there she is, pulling me closer to my story.

She’s in the signs hanging off the buildings.

The food I buy along the waterfront.

She shows up everywhere. In the words and faces of friends.

Of family.

She shows up in ways mundane.

And mystical.

She’s everywhere.

In the lush.

And in the stark.

There are stories all around, bits and pieces of them hiding in plain sight all through the world. There are a thousand muses in every moment of the day.

Juliet's Amused by the Muse

I was musing about this week's topic, and the Muses (fickle creatures that they are) deserted me. Just like that. Every last one of them.

I found I had nothing to say. I was bemused by this fact, but not at all amused.

(This is related to the fact that I have a deadline looming. Deadline: the kind of line in the sand that is, indeed, deadening to one's creativity.)

So the former academic in me kicked in: I looked up the word muse on an internet site dedicated to etymology, or the history of words.

(This is one of those sites no doubt created and maintained and patronized by word nerds like me. Other people start reading celebrity gossip on-line and lose an hour or two -- I stick my toe into the waters of word history and the whole afternoon's shot. One of my favorite books of all time is The Word Museum: The Most Remarkable English Words Ever Forgotten. Ever heard of "bumwush" or "fatherbetter" or "quank"?)

But I digress. Muse, as we use it in English, comes from the French amuser, which means to "divert, cause to muse." Which might help explain that when the muses fail to show up, it's not a lot of fun for anyone.

Of course the French got the word, at some point, from the Greek Mousa.

The Greek muses were the nine daughters of Mnemosyne. Together, they were supposed to provide not only the inspiration to their arts, but the perseverance to carry such projects through to completion.

The Muses are:
Calliope, epic or heroic poetry
Clio, history
Erato, love poetry and flute-playing
Euterpe, lyric poetry and lyre-playing
Melpomene, tragedy
Polyhymnia, sacred music and dance
Terpsichore, choral music and dance
Thalia, comedy and idyllic poetry
Urania, astronomy and cosmological poetry

(Notice that there's no specific muse for mystery writers, much less painters. Maybe that's my problem...)

According to the etymologists, bemuse maintains more of the original meaning of the French word, which refers to the ability to divert a person's attention, often to deceive or cheat, rather than with any sort of artistic inspiration.

Of course, if you're searching for inspiration you might consider wandering through a museum (a seat or shrine to the muses) or listening to some music, which is a series of coordinated sounds evocative of the human spirit, overseen by the Muses.

Amusing, isn't it?

--Juliet

La Serenissima

I despaired when I thought of this theme. I don't have a muse, I wailed. If I had a muse, I'd have her propped on my desk, hanging in front of my eyes. I'd know about it, wouldn't I?

Oh, yeah. Then I guess I do have one. Just one.

Venice is my muse.

In front of my desk, hanging on the sliver of wall that divides my two windows that look onto our street, is a map of Venice. Not that I need one, though. You could dump me in Venice with no money after travelling for seventy-two hours straight and I could have a place to stay and a hot meal within twenty-five minutes. That's not bragging; that's the happy, happy truth. I love the city with all my heart, and I'm as at home there as I am anywhere in the world.

I know a few (a very few) of her secrets. I've taken people there and said, "Follow me," and turned down back alleys, leading them down labyrinthine trails that open onto astonishing vistas that the normal tourist would never, ever find. I know secret patios and when Marco will give you his homemade grappa (hint: it's when his wife is out of town and don't fall for it).

I know how to be there alone. I know how to smile darkly and how to pretend to be one of her citizens, so that Italians ask me for directions (which I can actually give).

I know how to be there with a lover. I know how to fight passionately after too many bottles of wine and cry alone under the Doge's watchful eye, and I know how to make up and dance at midnight in Piazza San Marco while ignoring the rose vendors hawking their wares.

I barely notice that the map is there in front of me, until I'm sitting at desk, stumped. Bored. Wondering why the hell I took this stupid gig.

Then I think of Venice and promise myself a trip. You know. When I'm Really a Writer. And I am aMused again.

* I took this shot during a solitary trip from a little pizza joint I like just under the Accademia Bridge. Notice what's IN my glass of prosecco? Look closely, if you please. I didn't see her until I got home and developed my film. That's my muse, right there. Yup.