How Do I Find My Muse? – WN 044

This is The Write Now podcast with Sarah Werner, Episode 44: How Do I Find My Muse?

Welcome to Write Now, the podcast that helps aspiring writers to find the time, energy, and courage you need to pursue your passion and to write every day. I’m your host, Sarah Werner, and today we’re going to be talking about something that I’ve wanted to podcast about for a really long time, and that is the subject of your muse, but before we get into that conversation, I would first like to say thank you. The Write Now podcast’s Facebook page has just hit 1,000 followers, which is just really amazing. If you want to follow the Write Now podcast on any of the social media channels, you can find us at facebook.com/writenowpodcast, all one word. You can also find us on Twitter at twitter.com/writenowpodcast, again, all one word, and the same thing goes for Instagram, so if you’re out in the social media sphere, come find us. We’ll hang out. It’ll be fun.

Also, speaking of awesome things, I think at this point, it’s really no secret that I love getting email and I love corresponding with listeners just like you. I have two that I would love to share with you. The first one is from podcast listener, Ellen, who says, “Your podcast is inspiring, to say the least. I’ve enjoyed each and every episode I’ve listened to and look forward to the next. Thank you for the kind way that you treat your audience. It’s so refreshing as a writer who feels so overwhelmed at times about it all.” Ellen, thank you. I’m so glad that you’re listening and feeling inspired. That is exactly what I want to happen.

The other email I’d like to share with you is from podcast listener Therese from Sweden, and I really hope that I am saying your name correctly, and if I’m not, I apologize, but Therese says, “I am just writing to you to thank you for your podcast. Since October last year, I’ve been struggling with writing my own novel. I must admit, I thought it would be easier, but over the time, I experienced so many obstacles, not just with writing every day, but also with trust in myself and in my writing, it has been a constant struggle with my doubts and fear. Therefore, I am so grateful for your podcast. Your podcast is like writing therapy for me. Listening to your episodes gives me comfort, it soothes my fears and helps me to continue to write. With love, Therese.” Thank you so, so much for these words. This is once again, exactly, what I want to happen.

Therese and Ellen, I hope that you both are able to continue your writing with renewed hope, and even joy. I think that a lot of times, we get so wrapped up in the fear that we forget that writing is amazing and that we love doing it, so all the best to you as you continue in your writing efforts. If you would like to send me an email or a note, please do so. You can get in touch with me a couple of different ways. First, you can send an email to hello@sarahwerner.com, that’s S-A-R-A-H W-E-R-N-E-R dot com. Alternately, you can go to that very websites, navigate over to the contact page and fill out a little form there. Both of those methods go straight to my email and I would love to hear from you.

Speaking about finding joy and inspiration in your work, I want to talk about this concept that some writers adhere to and some writers ignore and maybe some writers don’t know exists and that is the idea of a muse and that is spelled M-U-S-E and it’s the root word for words like “music” and “museum.” Basically, back in the olden days of ancient Rome and Greece, there were a series of either three or nine muses, depending on where you’re getting your information, and these muses were goddesses who served as a source of knowledge or inspiration to creative folks. There were muses of poetry, music, song, dance, history, comedy, tragedy, and even science. These muses were said to live in the walls of an artist’s studio, and whenever the muse felt like it, because muses were fickle, you see, they would bless the poets, artists, singer, songwriter, dancer, whatever it was, with a flash of inspiration.

A muse was, in addition to several other things, an excellent creative scapegoat, because if you just weren’t feeling it that day, if you had writer’s block, if you were tired or maybe had a little bit too much to drink the night before, you could say, “My muse isn’t showing up today, therefore, I am off the hook and I don’t have to write,” or if what you wrote was bad, or if you weren’t pleased with it. If it was not inspired enough, you could say, “Blame my muse. This isn’t my fault. I wasn’t inspired.”

On the flip side, when you did write something inspired or wonderful, the credit was not entirely due to you. You would have to share credit for your genius with your muse, and to be completely honest, I think that this goes a long way in keeping us from becoming narcissists, for thinking that we ourselves are genius. I sometimes wish that the, shall we say, more ego-inflated members of celebrity society would give a little bit of credit to a muse sometimes.

In fact, there’s a longstanding tradition of giving credit to muses. You can find this in the first book of Homer’s Odyssey. You can also find it in Shakespeare’s 38th Sonnet, when in fact, instead of giving credit to the muse, he’s actually kind of upset with his muse, and he says, “How can my muse want subject to invent while thou dost breathe that pour’st into my verse, thine own sweet argument too excellent for every vulgar paper to rehearse?” Again, from Shakespeare, you have his play, Henry V, in which the opening chorus to the act one prologue reads, “O, for a muse of fire that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention.” Essentially, they’re saying, “Well, hey, if only we had some divine inspiration, this play might be awesome, but instead you’re stuck with this play.”

You also hear the muse crop up in Milton’s Paradise Lost. Again, in the very beginning of book one, so absolutely very, very beginning once again, and it says, “Of man’s first disobedience and the fruit of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste brought death into the world and all our woe, with loss of Eden till one greater man restore us and regain the blissful seat. Sing, heavenly muse, that on the secret top of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire that shepherd who first taught the chosen seed in the beginning how the heavens and earth rose out of chaos,” dot, dot, dot. I’m not going to read the whole thing to you, which you’re probably grateful for, but I love that all of these writers take the muse for granted. They just interpret it as this normal thing that the audience understands and the audience will forgive if the muse was not present when such and such was written.

You can also hear an invocation to the muses in the second canto of Dante’s Inferno. This is the first part of his Divine Comedy, of which there are three parts. He says, “O muses, O high genius, now vouchsafe your aid. O mind, that all I saw hast kept safe in a written record, hear thy worth and eminent endowments come to proof.”

Once again, I love that all of these poets and writers are essentially, by invoking the muse into the work that they’re currently writing, breaking the fourth wall, so they’re bringing the audience in on the fact that they are, in fact, writing something, so they’re like, “Hey, just FYI, I’m working on something. I’m asking for inspirations, so bear with me here. Okay, now that I’ve invoked the muse, I’m going to go back to writing this thing that you are reading and it had better be pretty good.” I don’t know why I think that’s so hilarious except that we see fourth-wall-breaking as not done today, or when you do it, it’s edgy. I just think it’s really funny that while we laud a movie like Deadpool for having the courage to break the fourth wall, Shakespeare and Milton and Dante were doing it the whole time.

Speaking of Dante, I want to point out one more thing that’s really interesting to me. If you’re familiar at all with the Divine Comedy, you are familiar with the figure of Beatrice, or Beatrice. Unfortunately, I only speak one language and it’s English and so I’m not entirely sure how her name should be pronounced, but she is an incredibly prominent figures throughout not only this work, but some other works of Dante’s as well, and she serves as this sort of incarnation of beatific love and you can hear the relationship between her name, Beatrice/Beatrice, and beatific love, or pure love, or holy love that leads you to God. In fact, she is the person, or the vehicle, if you will, who guides and leads Dante into paradise or heaven.

But Beatrice/Beatrice is more than just a literary figure, she was also a legit, real-life person. Legend has it that she and Dante met in Florence when they were both nine years old and I think he saw her a grand total of like two or three times in his entire life, but the first time he saw her, he was just enchanted with her. Today, we might call it a little obsessed or maybe unhealthy, but back in the day, it was seen as very pure, very chaste, one-sided, unrequited relationship, so he spent all this time thinking about her and dreaming of her, and he really ended up using this woman that he didn’t really know as the inspiration in writing the Divine Comedy as his muse, if you will.

This takes us into the territory of another sort of muse, and this is not the Greek goddesses or incarnations of them or their spirits, but people as inspiration, people as muse. You read throughout literature, F. Scott Fitzgerald had Zelda, not the video game character, but the woman who eventually became Zelda Fitzgerald. You have the young poet, John Keats, whose unrequited love for a woman named Fanny Brawne inspired him to write famous poetry, such as La Belle Dame sans Merci. You even have the more modern example of John Lennon and Yoko Ono. This particular interpretation of the muse as another individual has really sort of died down. We see others not just as blank slates to be projected on, but actual people whose stories we want to learn.

Okay, so we have all of these writers and poets invoking and thanking, and even sometimes berating muses, whether real or imagined, whether physical or spiritual, but what does this mean for us today? Does this mean that when you’re beginning your next novel, that the first paragraph should begin, “O muse, please guide me as I write this book and develop this awesome murder-mystery that may or may not include dinosaurs and laser rocket ships and all sorts of sweet, sweet things”? I don’t think so. I don’t think that we are in any way intended to begin our novels, our works of arts by asking for inspiration within the work of art itself. I think it’s okay that that trend is over.

When I say “What does this mean for us today?” really, what I’m getting at is one of my absolute favorite things on the Internet, and yes, I am aware that the Internet is a ridiculously enormous place, but one of my absolute favorite things on the Internet is a Ted Talk from 2009 by writer Elizabeth Gilbert. She is the author of Eat, Pray, Love, which became a real runaway success, and despite whether or not you liked the book, I highly encourage you to watch the video. I’ll make sure that I embed it in today’s show notes, and even if you don’t look at today’s show notes, you can just Google the name of the Ted Talk, which is Your Elusive Creative Genius and it should come right up. The video is 20 minutes, which seems like a large investment from the outset, but oh, my gosh, is it well worth your time? I might go so far as to say it has helped shaped the way that I write today, so just check it out. I think that you’ll really enjoy it.

In her Ted Talk, Your Elusive Creative Genius, Elizabeth Gilbert asks us to reflect on the way that we see and interpret muses today. She challenges us to reflect upon what having a muse actually means for a writer or an artist and she notes that back in the ancient days of Rome and Greece, the muse was said to live in the walls of an artist’s studio, and the artist could call upon the muse and the muse could choose to bless the artist with inspiration or knowledge and that would be awesome and as Elizabeth Gilbert points out in that way, the artist or the writer was said to have a genius where the genius was the muse, so back in those days, you were said to have a genius. Chaucer maybe had a genius. Einstein had a genius. Virginia Woolf had a genius. Stephen King has a genius, perhaps.

But we’ve really shifted since then and we don’t talk about people having a genius so much as being a genius, so essentially, the muse has gone from being an external force to an internal force, from limitless to limited, and so then if you wrote something really terrible or if you spent your days trapped in a cage of writer’s block, it wasn’t just that your muse wasn’t visiting you that day, it was that you were a failure, and if you ended up writing something really good, it wasn’t that you had to share credit with your external muse or glorify your muse or God or wherever you felt that inspiration came from, but rather, the artist was glorified as being a genius, which initially sounds great, I mean, who doesn’t want to be labeled as a genius, right?

But there’s something in what Elizabeth Gilbert calls in her talk “our fragile human psyche that cannot bear the pressure of being a genius” and this is where fear comes from, this is where guilt and despair and the burden of having to continually be a genius all the time come into play. She notes that back in the day, when you could be said to have a genius instead of be a genius, artists were a lot more free to experiment and a lot less likely to despair, to plumb their own depths with drugs and alcohol, to harm themselves, because in the days before the Renaissance, you would show up to do the work, and if your muse didn’t show up, then that wasn’t your fault, you still did your work. After the Renaissance, if it didn’t work out, it was on you.

Again, I do encourage you to watch the video. It’s only 20 minutes and it’s worth it and Elizabeth Gilbert is a very spiritual person and she does allude to her own beliefs that a muse, that when you have a spark of creativity, a flash of inspiration, and you’re not 100% sure where it comes from and you’re pretty sure, or at least humble enough to say that it probably didn’t come from just you, she says she does believe that that is when we glimpse the divine.

You may have listened to two Coffee Break episodes that I did a while ago, one with poet, Joanna Vermeer, and one with writer and entrepreneur, Melissa Johnson. Both are available if you want to listen to them, they’re some of my favorite episodes, but in both of those episodes, when I ask where they get their inspiration from to write and to create, both of them say that comes from God. It comes from outside of themselves.

There are other people that you may talk to or listen to or read who will say that the muse is a gimmick and that the ideas and inspiration came purely from themselves and I’m not here to tell you what to believe. You can believe that a muse is a gimmick, or you can believe that a muse is a real thing that does provide inspiration and clarity, or you can be like Stephen King, who says, “There is a muse, but he’s not going to come fluttering down into your writing room and scatter creative fairy dust all over your typewriter. Your job is to make sure the muse knows where you’re going to be every day from 9:00 till noon or 7:00 till 3:00. If he does know, I assure you that sooner or later, he’ll start showing up, chomping his cigar, and making his magic.”

I love that image. Stephen King is just so good with characters, despite what you might think about his work, whether or not you’re a fan of horror or whether or not you think he’s a hack, he’s very good at evoking characters and I love that image of a muse as this little cigar-chomping dude. Even more than that, though, I love what he says about showing up. It hearkens back to the old pre-Renaissance days where an artist would show up and sit down at their desk and begin to write, whether or not they believed that their muse would show up.

Elizabeth Gilbert notes that, too, in her Ted talk. She says something to the effect of “Whether or not my muse shows up, I’m going to keep writing anyway, because that’s my job.” She’s upholding her end of the bargain and whether or not that flash of inspiration comes from deep withinside of herself or from somewhere else, she’s doing what matters. That’s what I want you to take away today. I want you to strip away that outer layer of fear about not being good enough, about not being clever enough, about all the research that’s ahead of you, about all of the editing and querying you’re going to have to do. Just let that go for now. For now, your job is to sit down and do the work, or as Elizabeth Gilbert says, “Just show up and do your job.”

I’d like to add: Remember, this as a job that you love. You may wrestle with it sometimes, you may curse it sometimes, you may say, “Why did I decide that writing was going to be my thing?” Remember, you started doing this for a reason. You love it. You are driven to do it. You are meant to do it. Sit down and prepare yourself to do this work that you love and when you do that, as you’re writing, open up the door in your mind, invite the creativity in. I believe that fear shuts that door. Fear locks you into a little cage while you’re writing and doesn’t let any of those good ideas in, so cast away the fear, open the door.

If you want to think about your creativity as creativity, or as a muse, either way, sometimes you’ve got to nudge it, sometimes you’ve got to feed it and nurture it, and the way to do that is to listen and to look, keep your mind open. Let your thoughts wander. Go for a walk. Take a shower. Read a book. Read all the books, read all the books you possibly can. That’s how you feed your muse, that’s where you get inspiration, from books and from the world. When you get the inspiration, use your writing skills to shape it into something, shape what it gives you into something meaningful, understand what it reveals to you, and above all, stay curious.

As always, I would like to thank those of you who support the Write Now podcast, especially my Patreon supporters. Patreon is a secure third-party donation platform that allows you to give a dollar per episode, $2 per episode, a million dollars per episode, whatever it is that you feel appropriate. I would especially like to think official cool cat, Sean Locke, official bookworms Matthew Paulsen, Amanda Antonelli, and Rebecca Werner, and official rad dude, Andrew Coons. Thank you all so, so much. I don’t know what I would do without you.

If you would like to become a supporter of the Write Now podcast on Patreon, you can go to pateron.com, that’s P-A-T-R-E-O-N dot com slash Sarah Rhea Werner, S-A-R-A-H R-H-E-A W-E-R-N-E-R, and there you’ll find all sorts of different levels of giving it. It’s kind of like a PBS pledge drive a little bit. There’s cool prizes at different levels and you can choose however you want to do that. If you want to support the Write Now podcast in other ways, first of all, if you’d like to support financially, but don’t want to use Patreon, go to my websites, sarahwerner.com and navigate to the tip jar and there you’ll see options for donating via PayPal as well.

If you would like to support the Write Now podcast, but you don’t really have money, if you are a starving artist or strapped for cash or what have you, I totally understand, the best thing that you can do to help me out is just spread the word. Tell other people about the Write Now podcast. Let other writers know that there is someone out there who is cheering for them and wants them to write and succeed, so let them know about the Write Now podcast, pass along the URL to my website, or let them know how to find me on iTunes, click the Subscribe button, and they’re all set. Thank you so much for wanting to help support this show.

If you would like to get in touch with me, you can email me at hello@sarahwerner.com. Again, that’s S-A-R-A-H W-E-R-N-E-R dot com, or you can navigate to that website and go to the contact page and fill out the little form that’s there. It’s easy to do. It just asks for your name, email, and a message and those do go right to my email inbox, so go ahead and fill that out if you are interested in doing so. I’m happy to answer questions there or address any concerns. I hope you don’t have concerns with my podcast, but if you do, I would love to address them.

Finally, one other thing you can do on my website is sign up for my email mailing list. This is a great way to keep up-to-date with all of this stuff that I’m doing here at the Write Now podcast. You can sign up in a couple of different places on my website. First and foremost, it’s sarahwerner.com, there’s a black bar that goes across the top of the website and a place that you can put your email address. Otherwise, you can navigate to the contact page and there’s a link to it there. Or you can even go out to the Write Now podcast Facebook page and click the blue Sign Up button, which will sign you up for my mailing list, so whatever of those you choose, I hope you enjoy getting emails from me.

This has been episode 44 of the Write Now podcast, the podcast that helps aspiring writers and all writers to find the time, energy, and courage you need to pursue your passion and to write every day. I am Sarah Werner and I want you to sit down this week, regardless of whether or not you feel like your muse or your sense of creativity will show up, open your mind, stay curious, and do the work that you love.