Dear Writer: The Muse Is a Lie

Many years ago I took a playwriting class that consisted in part of discussing great drama and reading aloud our own pieces, but mostly consisted of our professor giving us pep talks on the literary life. “No one’s going to care if you stop writing,” he declared, explaining how since family and friends didn’t understand what we did, no one would be concerned if we took a different route. “You have to do it for you.”

Another truth he upheld was, “There is no Muse.”

I thought these insights from a professional writer were great. I was still too young and inexperienced to have thought them any more than an appealing philosophy, a manifesto I should hold on to. But now that I’m older and have chalked up the miles as a writer, I can say, well, first, no, people don’t care if you stop. (That’s another post for another day.) But I can say definitively, “There is no Muse.”

The Muse is a lie.

In other words, don’t wait for inspiration to roll around to write.

The Muses were the goddesses of artistic inspiration, traditionally understood to be the daughters of Zeus. Each one embodied something of the arts, either poetry, music, or dance, and would bestow artists with the ability to do their work. Authors like Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, Dante, and Ovid invoke the Muse at the start of their works, not only asking for help in telling the story, but sometimes asking for the Muse to tell the story through them.

The idea of the Muse continued, but instead of looking to the gods for divine inspiration, writers looked to man for inspiration, eyeing physical beauty or other appealing attributes. Fitzgerald’s Zelda, Dante’s Beatrice, even Kerouac’s Cassady are all Muses that inspired literary works.

Yet when a writer is “waiting on my Muse,” it can mean either a tangible thing of inspiration, or the right moment of feeling flooded with creativity. It may happen at any time, or may take days or weeks for the Muse to “show up.” Some writers are superstitious about it and attempt to set up routines and methods by which to prompt the Muse. But once the Muse arrives, wonderful productivity and beautiful words must be on their way. Right?

No. Because the Muse is a lie, and it’s dangerous to think otherwise. My professor was right: There is no Muse.

Here are some ways to kill the Muse and become your own writer:

Read a Lot, and Widely: The best writers are the best readers, because readers pick up on how plotlines rise and fall, what kinds of descriptions make characters engaging, how great setting is created, how words are used, and how to weave in metaphor and literary devices. Reading also engages you with ideas both past and present, and empowers you to interact with the conversation. Prime the pump so that when you come to write, you have topics to write about, craft to work with, and won’t be relying on a Muse to make that happen.

Find Your Own Voice: They say you’ve finished the beginner stages of writing when you’ve written a million words. At that point, you should know what kind of style you write in, what kinds of stories you’re interested in writing, should feel comfortable around language, and above all, have found your voice. Don’t wait for someone outside of you to tell you what your voice should be.

Work When You Can: A lot of writers I know don’t have hours alone to waste away while waiting for inspiration to strike. One of the biggest habits I taught myself was to be able to turn writing on when I needed it, and turn it off when I don’t. Be ready to write by priming the pump with ideas and letting your subconscious brain work away at your creative problems. It takes some training, but it’s the skill that will allow you to be productive in the early morning hours before the family wakes up, on your lunch break, on the train on the way home. or in the stolen moments.

Discover Your Own Motivation: Waiting around for a Muse to make you productive is a lot like playing video games on your computer until your boss appears telling you to get to work. As writers, the desire to create is like breathing. Writers have stories to tell, voices they want to share with the work, news to report, dialogue to add the bigger conversations. It’s a kind of voraciousness that’s hard to quench. Discover the reasons why you love to write and use that as your motivation.

Learn the Business: In the creative writing world, there’s the assumption that if your work is really, really good and inspired enough, agents, literary magazines, publication, and fame will find you. That’s a lie. It’s unfortunately fallen to the writer to learn about the business themselves (most MFA programs will teach you how to write, but not how to sell what you write), but it’s worth the time to learn. Start submitting to literary magazines to find out how that process works. Learn about query letters and contracts. Learn about the changes in author marketing, in self-promotion, in traditional and self-publishing. Learn how bookstores work; heck, go work in one! Once you have this knowledge, you’ll know how to take action — and won’t need to wait for someone to come along and tell you how it’s done.

Put in a little work, practice, and ingenuity, and you won’t have need for a Muse at all.