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 While writing an as-yet unpublished novel, I played late sixties to early seventies music constantly, to set my mind in the time period.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.

Look at Me! (But I Don't Want to be Famous)

Hi, I'm Shelley! Nice to meet you. 

If there’s one aspect of this writing life that wickedly grins and winks it’s baleful eye at me, it’s promotion. Some authors might dream of being invited to appear on Good Morning America or give a keynote address at a mystery convention, but the idea leaves me cold as Maine frost on a tomato vine in October.  

There are authors who play around on Tik Tok with wild abandon, revel in each new trend on Instagram, and joyfully post to Facebook in hopes of scoring a big viral hit with a reel or meme, even if it’s off-topic, in order to gain name-recognition and maybe a following. They fantasize about big-time fame along the lines of Stephen King or J.K. Rowling. 

I get it. When I was younger that kind of recognition appealed to me, as well. I enjoyed “sharing” my life with people. I didn’t mind being an open book. In my 40s, I took to blogging with abandon. It felt like writing in my journal, only in public. Facebook was fun. I liked connecting with my friends and family and meeting new people to “friend.” Even Instagram seemed enjoyable with all those photos and slick aesthetics.

Eventually, as I became more focused on a writing career, gaining a following seemed a feasible way to make sales once I had books to sell. I thought it might be fun to be a little famous, to be a little bit Stephanie Meyers walking the red carpet after her books-turned-movies shot her into the stratosphere. 

But now? I just want to write. And get paid for it.

That’s the rub, isn’t it? In order to make any sort of living as a novelist (even a substandard living that doesn’t even compare to working the counter at a fast-food joint) we must promote ourselves. Most of us can’t hope to find our readers if we don’t put ourselves out there in some way, and the most cost-effective way to do that is to set up free social media accounts and post madly day after day after day. 

So I do it. 

I talk into my phone to make videos to share on Instagram and Facebook. I create little graphics on Canva to hopefully draw eyeballs to my “uplifting and encouraging” Monday Motivation posts. I share photos of my trips hither, thither, and yon in hopes of “engaging” my audience. I add music to snaps of pretty flowers and foliage. I share my book covers, review quotes, even photos of my “outfits of the day” because my female sleuth character, Olivia Lively, is a private investigator with a closet full of fashionable clothes and accessories. 

LOOK AT ME!” I scream with the rest of them online. Inside, however, I’m whispering, “But I don’t want to be famous.” 

Maybe it’s time I start honoring the whisper more than the scream.  

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Note: Thank you to the Type M for Murder community for inviting me to share my thoughts on the writing life. I’ve been working on my craft for 40 years, since about age 16, when I decided writing books for a living sounded pretty sweet. The industry, meanwhile, has gone through a huge transition to ebooks and indie publishing, aided and abetted by the rise of social media companies, and the older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve come to understand how publishing works and for whom. I’m happy to share what I know, what I’m thinking about it all, and my ideas for navigating the waters. If there’s a topic you’d like to know more about, drop me a line at shelley@shelleyburbank.com and I’ll take a stab at it. 

To learn more about me in the meantime, check out my Substack newsletter, PINK DANDELIONS and at my website ShelleyBurbank.com

Preparation

by Catherine Dilts 

Gardening and fiction writing both begin with a dream. In writing, it’s the spark of a story idea. In gardening, the dream is often born in the depths of winter, with a yearning for warm days and neat rows of green things. For either of these dreams to come true, you have to prepare.

What might sound surprising is that the preparation phase in gardening is not about seeds and plants. Not quite yet. Before ever putting a shovel in the ground, you plot out a garden. Measure your gardening space. How much room do you have? How many plants can you grow in that space? What variety will produce the number of tomatoes you hope to harvest? Will you really pick and use cilantro or dill? A certain amount of planning is prudent.

Fiction writing requires preparation, too. Writers have likely heard of the Panster versus Plotter techniques. Pantsers start on page one and just write, letting the story flow under its own steam. Plotters outline their story, like a driver marking their route to a destination on a map.

I have learned through trial and error that I need to outline heavily. Otherwise, I write myself into a corner. I spend hours returning to the beginning of the story to install the clues and red herrings needed in a good mystery. Outlining helps me avoid that.

Most writers aren’t 100% a Pantser or Plotter. Every Pantser I’ve talked to does have, at bare minimum, an idea of where the story is going. And although I tediously outline my stories from beginning to end, they frequently diverge from that carefully crafted path, taking a surprising and unplanned route.

Preparation to plant a garden or write a story can be agonizing for me. But tossing a handful of random seeds onto the ground will be unlikely to produce the vegetables I want. Likewise, throwing words onto my computer in any kind of order usually results in an unreadable mess.

Once the preparation is complete, and I have a map for the garden or the story, the next part of the work starts. Now the real fun begins.

(Note on photo: With preparation, I was able to start a second crop of lettuce in late August after harvesting zucchini.)

Life on Fire

This has been an exhausting summer for us at Chez Casey. My husband has been dealing with doctors, hospitals, procedures, infusions, ad nauseam. He's through the worst of it, at least as of now, but omg how tiring. I, on the other hand, have been plagued with headaches that ruin entire days. My ENT doc thinks it has to do with high pollution. I note that I get these headaches a few days after my husband has some sort of health problem. I either have to move somewhere that doesn't have high ozone warnings or go see a psychiatrist. That's the problem with living a long time. Your vehicle starts to break down.

Like many young people, I was immortal once. I remember it well. I feared nothing because I couldn’t be killed. I could eat poison and jump off cliffs and never for a minute expect to suffer harm. But the most wonderful benefit of my immortal days was that I had time. The line of my life stretched out before me clear to the horizon and disappeared in the distance over the curve of the earth, no end in sight.

Oh, no, you may be saying to yourself, she’s going to wax philosophical about mortality. Never fear.

Okay, I’ll admit that I started out driving down that road in a shiny red Maserati which after a quarter-million miles is looking pretty dinged-up and the check-engine light is on, but that’s not the point. What’s changed is the road. In fact, it is beginning to dawn on my that the entire metaphor is wrong.

My artist friend Cher

Many years ago I had a friend whose entire life was a work of art. She was a fine artist, a painter. But everything she did - making a pie, sewing a dress, growing a garden, even cleaning the house - was done with as much care, eye for detail, and even reverence, as were her paintings. I still think about her with awe and maybe a little envy. She approached life in a way that I’ve often wished I could. She didn’t wish that things could be other than they were. She wasn’t moving toward a goal. Nor did she think that she had plenty of time to fool around before she lived an authentic life.

I’m not exactly saying carpe diem, though one should. That “seize the day” philosophy is what motivated me to finally take the leap and write stories. I love being a novelist, too, even though I don’t love all the stuff that goes along with it. Being a writer can be glorious, but sometimes it's painful, too. I achieved a life goal, and it isn’t what I expected. In fact, I’ve achieved a bunch of life goals, and none of them has turned out to be what I expected. Every one is much worse in some ways, and infinitely better in others. Is that the point, I wonder?

Life isn’t what I thought it was. I’m not driving anywhere and there is no road. My new metaphor is that life is a wildfire, and we’re all standing right in the middle of it with no way out. It’s overwhelming heat and light, it has no shape or substance. It’s scary as hell. It consumes everything around it in an unstoppable rush and a roar, and eventually it even consumes itself. You just know this isn’t going to end well for you and it’s going to be painful, to boot. But it’s still endlessly fascinating and incredibly beautiful, all the way to the end.

A Bad Writing Day and a Good Review

I had a good writing day yesterday. Today, not so much. To begin with, I awoke to an infestation of ants in my kitchen. There are very few things more disgusting that finding ants all over everything in your sparkling clean kitchen. It’s a little bit cooler today*, and overcast, so I’m thinking the ants are taking advantage of the fact that they can emerge from their den in the daytime and not be instantly crisp fried.

So I spent half an hour or so moving all my utensils and spraying the little buggers with fruit wash, which is lemony and kills them dead while making my kitchen smell lovely and not poisoning me at the same time. Then I have fifteen minutes of cleaning up the carnage with disinfecting wipes, after which the toaster oven, can opener, and their friends go back into their places. The fruit wash is used up, so I’m off to the store to buy more, and for good measure, some ant traps for the window sill.

I have two blog entries due over the next two days, so after fixing a bit of lunch for my better half and myself, I spent an hour on the computer writing up one post, followed by finally checking my email and social media and responding to everyone who needs a response. By this time I have become stiff and sore from standing in one place (not to be left off the latest health fad bandwagon, I’ve been writing standing up). I took some time to pay bills, and noticed that one long-standing bill has gone up for some reason not explained. Like an idiot, I called the billing department to find out why.

Forty-five minutes later, I am informed that this is an across-the-board rate hike for everyone in Arizona, and she’s so sorry that I didn’t receive a notification.

It is now 4:30 p.m. I still have to finish this entry before Don gets home and supper needs to be made. I’m almost done! I may have an hour to get some work done on the WIP!

So, to end on a high note, I’m appending an excerpt of the first review of my November release, All Men Fear Me, from the August edition of Kirkus Reviews. It was a very good review, much to my pleasure and satisfaction. I hope this is a harbinger of things to come.

“When the U.S. enters World War I, hate and suspicion triumph over rational thought…Naturally, Alafair is worried about her sons being drafted, but she never suspects that a visit from her brother, Rob Gunn, will cause problems with people she’s known for years. Rob is a union organizer who’s lying low after his release from an internment camp for his involvement in an Arizona miners’ strike. While everyone waits to hear whose number has come up in the draft, strife breaks out between the pro-war patriots, who think anyone with a foreign-sounding name is a spy, and the anti-war socialists, some of whom want to march on Washington and take over the government… Casey’s skill at making you care about the injustices of a time and place not often covered in history books is second to none. The admirable mystery is the cherry on top.” Kirkus Reviews, August 17, 2015

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*“Cooler” is 102º. I live in Arizona.