The Fickle Muse

[Clutch]

So I've been spending my time recently trying to gestate an idea for the next story contest and my muse is dangling moldy carrots.

What is it about the creative bent that is so elusive and fickle? Is there some sort of "idea reservoir" that needs topping off before drawing down again?

Do I not develop the ideas my muse provides and so inadvertently offend it? Her? They? I just don't get it.

Music and writing was very similar...some days I could pick up my guitar and a new-born bouncing baby song would plop out onto the paper, other days I would disgust myself with my complete lack of talent. "How dare I even attempt," my muse would scoff, smirking all the while.

When I want to write...when I 'feel' creative...I'm not. When I'm in the shower or driving down the road....Bing! Pow! ShaZamm! Ideas are hitting me like bugs on a windshield on a hot summer's eve.

I think being a muse must be dull work. I'd probably change it up too occasionally I suppose...wait until some writer is on vacation and about to skydive out of a plane and hit him with a War & Peace-level idea.

It is a well-known secret that Muses...err, Musii? Musa? (What is the plural of Muse?) Anyways...Muse all around the world absolutely get a kick out of waiting for a musician's relationship to break up. You know...that good old Grade-A, tears-in-the-bottom-of-a-bottle sort of heartache...and then hitting them with brilliant ideas.

Maybe it is the notion that happy ideas simply don't sell...but what does that say about the consumer? And who does the Muse really work for?

Who does the muse really work for?

 

[Louanne Learning]

Well, if your OP is any indication, you are a very good writer, writing interesting things!

I don't know why the muse sometimes plays hide 'n seek, but it's the same for me. I just had a good run, writing a couple of stories in a few days, but I can go for weeks drier than the Sahara.

Reading tends to help me. I can spend a whole day reading, all kinds of different things. In fact, the wider the variety of sources, the more the muse comes out of hiding. And I usually spend at least a few hours - sometimes a day or two - just thinking, before I am ready to sit down and pound the keys to begin a new story.

I think maybe it comes with the territory of being a writer - the feast and famine of output - at least it seems so, for me.

 

[Madman Starryteller]

The musings of a muse do bemuse me.

My own muse is very strange. Often I've had a hard time getting down on my butt to write, but when I do, I usually know what I want on the paper/screen. However, once the first draft is done, I often ponder it and come up with more ideas and things to include. It's like my muse gives me a skeleton of an idea, then fills it up with meat the more I think about it.

And I believe thinking is probably half the work.

 

[Pyroglyphian]

I guess many creatives have made a study of their creativity to some extent, but I’ve been fascinated with it for years and had the opportunity to study it formally as part of an innovation qualification some way back. There are many different viewpoints as to what creativity actually is, but the one I favour was taken from the ‘computational theory of creativity’, named by its creator, Teresa Amabile; anyone who wishes to geek out for a bit can find a brief summary here (links to a publicly available PDF hosted by Harvard Business School). It’s frequently applied in an organisational/managerial context, but it offers much general insight. Reducing something I consider to be almost ‘sacred’ to the level of management theory does make me feel a bit dirty – and not in a good way – but I’ve resolved to try to understand the mystery from different angles.

A book that has helped me with a capricious muse in the past is The Artist's Way, by Julia Cameron. She explains creativity as an internal wellspring that needs to be restocked from time to time, and the book offers very practical advice for achieving this, which I found effective.