Show up for the muse
(with thanks to Elizabeth Gilbert for the title (and so much more))
Following the myth I’ve read about and what I’ve seen on TV, I used to sit up late at night at the kitchen table with a piece of paper in front of me, a candle throwing flickering light across the white pages, a huge shadow on the wall of one hand holding a pen, the other cupping my chin. I’d stay in that position, gazing out into the darkness through the small kitchen window, waiting for the muse to arrive.
She rarely did. To be honest, she only turned up if I’d been out with friends and had a few glasses of cheap wine. That’s why so many writers were alcoholics, right? Not that we measured our consumption in glasses, the bottle going around the circle, followed by a joint. But that is a different story for a different time.
I often though that the muse just didn’t like me, that I lacked the necessary mental or emotional constitution to be worthy of her. Until I started listening to Elizabeth Gilbert. She saved me from myself and my romantic notions of writing and what it means to be a writer.
Late-night sessions, alcohol-fuelled, luring the muse to my candle-light window? All wrong, Gilbert says. You need to show up for the muse every day. Every day! And you don’t lure her with an alcohol-soaked mind and badly lit pages. You lure her with hard work!
That is obviously not romantic – hard work! – or enticing to anyone except a Protestant from the Cromwell age. But being annoyed with my own non-productivity and the possibility of liver cirrhosis, I gave it a go. What did I have to lose?
Only a few hangovers.
I allocated an hour to writing each morning. I got up earlier and sat at that same kitchen table, sans the candle and alcohol in my blood stream. And wrote.
The beginning, like all beginnings, was hard. But Gilbert’s voice did not let up. ‘You can’t give up the first time or second time, or third time, …,’ she droned. ‘Keep writing, even if it is your shopping list, just keep writing.’
So I did.
Liz Gilbert says it’s OK to just sit there. If you need to. But do not, under any circumstances, grab your phone or reach out to your friend Google. Just sit there, write about whatever comes into your head, or simply stare out the window. No other activities allowed. Once the allocated time is over, you can get up and get on with the rest of your day. But make sure you return the next day, and the next, and the next.
And I did. Every morning I’d sit there for an hour and oscillate between staring out the window and writing about what a shit writer I was. By day four, I was ready to start writing about what had happened to me the day before and what how I felt about it. And I set myself a new goal. I would write two pages each morning, no matter what. Even if I repeated the same words over and over again, I would reach the bottom of that second page. Even on my worst days, when the two pages turned into a journal of self-flagellation, I kept writing. In my darkest moments, when I was the harshest critic imaginable, when my self-abuse reached new depths, I could still hear Liz’s voice, ‘Keep writing! You will get there, I promise!’
And so I kept writing, about my hopeless self mostly. But more and more often, I wrote about my family, friends, people on the train, on the street, in meetings, sketches of nature, observations I’d made - about how that boy smiled when his mother entered the room, how the manager’s words were a mismatch with his actions, how the lily pad was a perfect hideout for the fish, protecting it from the stork.
There was no magic in those words; there were no twists or sudden breakthroughs. But I noticed how I started writing less and less nonsense about myself and more and more short character studies and inspired descriptions of nature, analyses of feelings. Amongst all the shambolic doodling and half-formed sentences, one clear theme had emerged. I kept writing over and over again about the mother-daughter bond. It seems to me to be the most complex relationship, one that goes through so many stages, starting with total dependency at one end, then changing and transforming into relationships that goes from friendship and love to distancing, resentment, sometimes complete estrangement, although only rarely lasting for a long period of time, only to end up where it all started – total dependence, once again, but this time the other way round.
When I made the discovery of my central theme, I knew I had been visited by the muse. And I knew I had found my North Star. James Baldwin said:
‘Every writer has only one story to tell, and he has to find a way of telling it until the meaning becomes clearer and clearer, until the story becomes at once more narrow and larger, more and more precise, more and more reverberating.’
Since then I have written two novels and am currently working on a third where the central relationship is that of mother and daughter. The setting and plot changes, but the central theme is the same. And in some of my non-fiction pieces, I have written about my relationship with my own mother.
The muse had visited without me noticing, dipping in and out of my pages. But I had only been visited because I kept writing.
So, please, whatever you do, do not wait for the muse to show up! You need to show up for the muse!
Happy writing!
Happy daily writing!
Resources:
If you want to be inspired by Elizabeth Gilbert as I have been, please read her book Big Magic and/or watch the YouTube videos of her talking about the muse or creative genius, as she usually calls it.
I would also recommend Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, a fabulous book that is more encompassing (and that I refer to and defer to all the time). It starts off with the fundamentals:
‘If there is a single tool that is the bedrock of my creative life – and any creative life – that tool is morning pages.’
