Wednesday, I wrote about killing the Muse.
If I have a Muse, this is what he looks like:
He’s a short, gruff guy with a big heart.
He wears a yellow hardhat and chews on a cigar.
He has a pop eye and says stuff like, “Come on, kid—get your ass in gear! This building ain’t going up with you sitting on your keister!”
He’s probably named Butch, Salty, or has a nickname like Nails Mahone.
And when I’m done writing, he buys me a cheap beer, tells me I did a good job, and then reminds me to come in early and work hard the next day, ‘cause that’s the only way it’s gonna happen!
So that’s what my Muse looks like.
Let me know what your Muse looks like in the comments below…
my muse is a hyperkinetic ten year old kid with a roll of glow in the dark stickers and some goggles he found in his dads ‘box of old stuff.’
show him a garage full of junk and he’ll salivate. give him a few hours and he’ll have repurposed every scrap with spray paint and duct tape into a carboard shanty town, which he will destroy Godzilla style at the first sign of boredom.
he wants his bike built now, and he wants to use every dang sticker in the roll on it, and he wants to take it out for a quick trip, and then rush back out of breath, demanding additions and modifications, and more stickers.
sometimes i try and slow him down, show if something subtle and beautiful and meaningful, and he’ll actually stare slackjawed with interest for a bit, but then he decides it would be more subtle and beautiful and meaningful if it was shoved in the middle of a dark cave ride in an amusement park, with everything screaming around it at ridiculous miles per hour, making it an oasis of repose in the eye of a neon tornado.
if he has a name, he changes it every damn day to something cooler, and his skin changes color with it.
i like him, but he gets under my skin. he’s demanding and moody and wants instant gratification. he nudges me from sleep at all hours and insists that its fun o’clock and time to play.
and if i tell him its not play, its work, and its hard and frustrating, and makes me more than a little crazy, and why doesn’t he just go take a lil nap, he stares with complete confusion. it wont ever be work to him.
While this is totally your muse, the thing that gets me about your writing is that it’s not frantic.
Sure, there’s something beneath it all–an energy that I know was a big mess of sparks at some point in the process–but what ends up on the page when you’re done always seems to be put down with such precision.
I like that writing will never be work to him. Writing isn’t as easy to me as it once was–it takes more effort to get things down the way I like these days–but I still have fun. In the back of my mind, there’s always that guy in the hard hat, though, telling me to get off my ass and produce.
It worked for Rocky Balboa…
Even if writing feels like work to you, your writing always has a life to it that I envy so much.
I think a lot of writers would gladly babysit your muse for free…