Encouraging Your Muse

 Catherine Dilts

Waiting passively for “the muse” to whisper in your ear is like sitting in a dark room waiting for someone to turn on the lights. There’s a point at which you need to stand up, walk across the room, and flip on the light switch.

There are periods when writing fiction can feel like slogging through a murky bog. Other times, the ideas rush like a clear mountain stream drawn downhill by gravity. There’s an undeniable ebb and flow to creativity.

What happens when a writer has gone days, weeks, or months without a visit from their muse?

Creativity can’t be forced, you might say. To which I counter: people do all kinds of things to trick their brains into being in the right state to perform various tasks. I recall finding my younger daughter sitting in her room with a text book and a candle. She explained that she was training herself to be focused to study whenever that scented candle was burning.

Ah, a physical cue. Like brewing coffee in the morning as you get ready for work. The smell of the coffee, even more than the caffeine, is a signal for your brain to switch gears.

Routines and triggers can cause you to anticipate an activity, but can they make you feel creative? Yes. I believe you can trick your muse into showing up, just as you can steer your brain, if you consistently use the same techniques.

All of the techniques. Because your brain is a crafty creature, and dull routine can sap creativity. So change things up.

Routine: Yes, I just said dull routine can sap creativity. But a routine is essential for convincing your brain that it’s that time of day. Time to write! Use scent, sound, and scenery cues. Like my daughter’s scented candle, smell is a powerful trigger. Some authors need the sounds of a coffee shop, while others need noise-cancelling headsets, or certain types of music. While writing an as-yet unpublished novel, I played late sixties to early seventies music constantly, to set my mind in the time period. 

Confidence: Believe in yourself, your message, and your skillset. There’s no greater drag on creativity than self-doubt. If you falter, “fake it ‘til you make it.”

Keep going: When you think you’re stuck, or become bored with a project, push just a little bit longer. You might make it past that speed bump and get rolling again.

Step away: The polar opposite of the above advice? Not exactly. The step away technique doesn’t simply mean quit writing. Work on a different story, writing-related social media, promotion, or research.

Touch grass: the youngsters use this phrase to mean “step away from your electronics.” Get off social media, peel your face off your computer/TV/phone screen, and go outdoors. Sunshine and fresh air have wonderful healing properties. Get grounded in nature. Or focus on a different type of creativity. Crocheting, painting, tying flies, or cooking, like making a batch of my annual gingerbread dinosaur cookies shown in the photo above.

Lately, I’ve been experiencing an upswing in creativity and energy. I know this feeling isn’t permanent. There will be times when my desire to hammer away on my keyboard flags. This time of year, there’s no grass to touch. But if I hit a slump, maybe I can touch snow to jumpstart my creativity.

The Magic Lever

While we writers like to portray ourselves as servants to the Muse, as mortal scribes channeling Inspiration, we gotta pay the rent and that means selling books. That and riding herd on the day job. Every established writer gets hit with the question: How do I market my book? Which is another way of asking, How do I make money in this writing gig?

The easy answer, Sell lots of books. Be on notice that if I had my hand on the magic-selling-books-lever, you can be sure that I wouldn't let you put your toner-stained mitts on it. So how to sell books? What helps is getting your name out in public. Let me share my experience of what happens when you don't. Last year I cut back on my touring schedule, appearing only around the Denver area. However, I did keep tabs with my fellow writers working the Bard's Tower booth, formerly the WordFire booth, as they dragged the setup from comic con to comic con and greeted metric tons of people. Make no mistake, working the booth is an effort. Set up and tear down is a real pain, and holding court on the exhibition floor keeps you on your feet for a solid twelve hours. The upside is that you're meeting new readers and occasionally, even fans. Paying for travel and meals takes a bite out of your wallet and even if you sell out stock, which I've done, you won't come close to covering your costs. Even so, I missed the excitement of the shows, the comradery of hanging out with this gang of misfits, and the chance to see a new city. But more importantly, a consequence of not touring was a downturn in my royalties. Not good.

This year I signed up for as many gigs with the Bard's Tower as I could fit into my schedule. Though I haven't appeared in many shows, what I've seen is a lot more traffic to my Facebook book pages and more engagement in Twitter. We'll see if that translates into an uptick in royalties. Stay tuned.

Dreams, Inspiration, and the Muse

I pride myself in being a nuts-and-bolts type writer, meaning I'm not much for the woo-woo stuff. Having said that, I do admit that I've had story ideas come to me in dreams. I know that dreams are seen as the interpretations of our subconscious, but I'm convinced they're more than that. Some insist that dreams are another form of inspiration given to us by the Muse. Most dreams we forget, unfortunately, but once in a while these sleep visions stick with us. If the images were particularly strong, sometimes upon waking we're confused about where we are and what's really happening.

The Bible mentions dreams and the most famous sleep vision in Scripture comes from Genesis 41, when the pharaoh dreamed of seven fat cows being eaten by seven emaciated cows, and seven plump stalks of grain being swallowed by seven thin stalks of grain. Joseph (he of the Technicolor Coat) is summoned to interpret the pharaoh's dream, which he does by explaining that seven good years of harvest will be followed by seven years of famine. So forewarned, the pharaoh appoints Joseph as his second-in-command and is tasked with storing and managing surplus food to prevent disaster.

As writers we're cautioned against using dreams in our work because dream sequences are regarded as narrative cheats. What happens is that characters wake up and nothing has changed. However, dreams in stories can be useful to build tension and foreshadow plot twists. We know that dreams can be symptoms of a troubled mind and in a story, an immersive dream sequence can illustrate the interior turmoil of our characters as they contemplate danger.

A dream that I used for a recently accepted story was one in which women suddenly stopped getting pregnant. I have no idea why my subconscious stewed on that horrific notion, but the takeaway was the global terror upon realizing that we as a species now had an expiration date. Lately, two other dreams had to do with me getting older, so it's pretty obvious what's behind that inspiration.

Another source of dreams are hallucinations from drug use. Here in Denver, we have Initiative 301, in which we get to vote on decriminalizing the use and possession of psilocybin mushrooms. I've known people who've indulged in "magic" mushrooms and then shared their mind-blowing experiences, which by the way, included plenty of vomiting. None of these psilocybin tourists ever got around to writing anything, so the best way to cultivate inspiration remains to sit at the keyboard and hammer out what the Muse delivered.

The Church of the Writer

Last Sunday I was drinking beers with some buddies and one of them asked if I had read the Ernest Hemingway book on writing. I said that I had, and we talked about the letters Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald shared about writing. Our conversation turned to discuss my writing process since I was the only one at the table who has been published. Another asked where my ideas came from. I'm afraid I disappointed my fellow beer drinkers when my answers turned flip. I don't like to talk about the writing process because it's easier to talk about writing than it is to write. When asked how do I write, meaning how do I approach the daunting task of writing, I replied that I sit at the keyboard and start writing. I don't regard where I write as a sacred space; I tend to think of it as a sausage machine. There's a lot of work to be done, and unless you turn the crank relentlessly, nothing comes out. I think people who don't write--or try to write--want me to say how the Muse kisses my forehead and the words magically flow. They don't feel the Muse's kiss and therefore, they don't write.

I get a similar impression at conferences when new writers crowd around us published authors like we're the chosen anointed, holders of the secret key that will unlock the hearts of agents and editors. The truth is that if I had such a key, I'd be at the top of all the bestseller lists, winner of every freakin' literary prize, and so rich I'd hire Stephen King and E L James to entertain me with pie fights. But there is no such key. And even more irksome, the path for every writer's success is different. After Hugh Howey, author of the mega-hit Wool, punched the sweet spot with a Reddit Q&A, untold other writers have since tried to leverage that venue for similar results...and zilch. Using a different tactic, one writer used Instagram to gather an army of followers. Others have Tweeted their way to stardom. Countless others have tried to follow their examples and their efforts became exercises in futility. So what works? Who the hell knows? You have to blaze your own trail.

On social media, it's an echo chamber of advice for writers. Lots of scribes post all kinds of aphorisms and you-gotta-dos. Most of them are trite or vague. Once in a while someone twists the obvious into something that sounds profound and other writers pile on with the Hallelujahs. It's like church, and we behave like backsliding, guilt-ridden Baptists turning to the Holy Scriptures for comfort. And like church, we seek the company of fellow believers, those with the precise kind of faith. Ever notice that shopping for a critique group is much like looking for a congregation? In either case, we want a close-knit community who understands us, who welcomes us, who shares our parochial view of the world. Within the sanctuary of that group we make ourselves vulnerable to criticism in the struggle to improve our souls.

But don't think that I'm cynical about the need to gird yourself. Writing is an intense, intellectual process. It's easy to quit out of frustration. It's easy to stare at the screen and feel like your head is an empty balloon. It's easy to pour yourself onto the page only to see your writing appear like a confused mess.

What's the best writing advice? First, gain command of writer craft and understand storytelling. Read. Read. Read. If you're serious about writing, then it's got to be a priority in your life. And lastly, because writing--as much as we say we love it--the act can be a pain in the ass. With that in mind I share these powerful, illuminating words from Steven Pressfield:

"Our enemy is not lack of preparation; it's not the difficulty of the project, or the state of the marketplace, or the emptiness of our bank account. The enemy is resistance. The enemy is our chattering brain, which, if we give it so much as a nanosecond, will start producing excuses, alibis, transparent self-justifications, and a million reasons why he can't/shouldn't/won't do what we need to do."