I have a friend named Jan who is a talented writer and an absolute slave to her muse. Now I do not mean this in a negative way, it is what it is. When she feels inspired she writes, and writes, and writes until the inspiration has let her loose. In many ways I envy the way she gets pushed around by her muse, forced to put the words to screen, and creates incredibly imaginative fiction. On the other hand, the limited amount of time I have for writing has forced me to learn how to write in short spurts, so if I were driven the way Jan is I would be in bad shape. Picture me sitting at work, twitching, maybe drooling a little, while my muse breaks out the cat-o’-nine-tails and flogs the bajeebers out of me.
My muse is tightly leashed and under control, or so I tell myself. I don’t normally fall prey to the, “need,” to write, but I do run into occasions where I sit down to write and the stubborn wench just won’t cooperate until I switch directions. I have been letting my muse get a little fat and lazy lately. I have been spending most of my time editing, as opposed to writing, so when I tried to write my InMon post last week my muse rebelled. She refused to do what I told her. Typical. Rather than fight it, I’ve let my imagination go a little more and the word have started to come more freely and I’m reasonably pleased with the work.
On another note, my 100-Word challenge piece has taken on a life of it’s own. For the longest time I tried to keep the word count per day as close to 100 as I could manage, but lately I’ve been giving myself a little more freedom to write more. I’m averaging two to three hundred words per day, but I’m still posting only the rough 100. My original plan was to post the first year’s worth of posts as a novella, but I’ve decided that it deserves to make it to full novel status. It will be a short novel, not much more than 50,000 words, and I still plan on writing sequels, but this story has the potential to be my first finished novel.
So what does this mean? Well I’ll keep posting my daily 100, but I’ve built up a bit of a backlog. I have been posting edited chapters, one week at a time, for the last month, and what I’ve decided is that once I reach my official one year mark, I will start removing the old posts from my blog as the chapters go up. Of course, once I am ready to publish the book I will have to remove all of it, but that is still a little ways away.
It feels good to do more writing, even if it is slowing up my editing process, so maybe I should let that muse of mine run free a little more often.
Related articles
- Musing Upon Shitty First Drafts (12novels.com)
- Got a call from my muse (datanode.net)
- For Your A-Muse-Ment (poetaofficium.wordpress.com)
- Writer Without a Muse (never2late2write.com)
- Muses Found! (never2late2write.com)
- A Muse or To Amuse…. (joehinojosa.wordpress.com)
- writing (patheticapathetic.wordpress.com)
Virginia
My muse has been in a semi holding pattern for a few weeks while I research my back story – but she is itching to get out. She has an extremely loud voice, it’s very hard to ignore her! Thanks for the ping 🙂
Eric Swett
You are more than welcome. I hope the two of you can come to some sort of an understanding.
Stephanie
Ray Bradbury has a fantastic little chapter on the care and feeding of muses in “Zen in the Art of Writing.” He advises feeding it by reading a lot of everything, and otherwise pretty much just letting it be. He has a very interesting take on the writing process.
Eric Swett
Sounds interesting. I’m going to have to look that one up.