Screw the Muse: Some Creative Scaffolding

I don’t believe in the muse, never have. I’m a creative person but I was raised with a farmer’s work ethic. It’s affected my writing thus: I believe you need to write every day whether an idea has descended upon you or not; I believe that some days what you’re going to produce is likely going to be crap; I believe writing is work, a process.

But sometimes, the ideas just won’t come.

These days, I still write, I still work, but I’m not as happy with what I produce. I might change the piece I’m working on, or scribble in my journal, or blog. Changing it up often yields the break I need to get back in there and start at it again.

But then there are the days where that doesn’t happen.

These are the really frustrating days. But recently I discovered a new way to force the muse.

I was camping with one of my best friends, and we were walking in the woods with his dog. He’s a photographer, and one of the more creative people I know. Very often we’ll use each other to sound out our creative ideas—even though neither of us works in the same medium. It’s been valuable in the past, and this time I was having a bit of a crisis.

I told him about one story I was writing about two brothers and a fairly mundane situation I had turned on its ear. I expressed my frustration at what I thought was a great idea not coming together.

“Tell me about it,” he said.

So I laid it all out, and he listened. Then he told me that the second brother, the one I had sort of set up as the foil, was the one that mattered in the way I was telling it. He didn’t tell me to swap points of view, but I got the idea from what he said. And it worked.

“Speaking of brothers,” he said as we continued walking, “what if Abel was the evil one?”

Insert thunderclap here. The whole thing unfolded in my head within a half hour. I needed to get home and make some notes. In the morning I re-read that part of Genesis to refresh myself, came up with a plan of attack, and then in one sitting fired off one of the better short stories I’ve ever produced.

He’s not my muse, he’s just a concise voice outside of myself. I value the people who can approach our thoughts in an uncompromising manner and say something we can never think of in our own muddled minds. But when it is said to us, it makes so much sense. It’s like having your ideas streamlined by someone else’s mind.

I'm lucky enough to have a few creative people in my life who can inspire me in this way. I'm thankful for them. I say screw the muse, what really works is being around other artists.

Generation Lost

Oh sure, there have been dozens of "lost" generations, but how many were so-titled on purpose?

Getting lost is good. I'm from a pretty weird generation. We’re the tail end of Generation X. Let’s see: our grandparents were the Greatest Generation because they survived the Depression and fought World War 2; our parents are the Boomers, whose sheer numbers mean that our culture is always defined by how old they are; we’re this forgotten generation that offers nothing but Doc Martins and flannel as a fashion statement. Generation Y is the multi-tasking, tech savvy, ADHD and utterly selfish crew. We sorta slip through the cracks. We’re lost. But we’re avid students of the world. One feature I’ve noticed is we go to places with no particular plan, we often just let things happen. Sometimes the greatest thrill is ending up in a strange place with no sense of direction. Some of life’s greatest lessons are learned when you take that wrong left.

I like my undead evil, thanks.

I like monsters—that doesn't make me unique. I like vampires, werewolves and zombies. That makes me a cliché. But I'm a purist, a traditionalist, I like my monsters evil, bloodthirsty and loaded with metaphor and satire, just as their creators intended. I don't like pretty, sensitive vampires with sculpted abs that confuse how to use their mouths on their victims. Zombies are slow, shuffling and mindless. Werewolves are cursed beast-men. Upshut with that "lycan" bull. Monsters are meant to reflect the fears of their times, and though I don't mind taking an old theme and applying it to your own era (after all, that's where these guys came from in the first place), you have to maintain some sense of what these threats are supposed to be about.

Two weeks ago, the University of Hertfordshire hosted a conference on vampires. It was in an attempt preserve the integrity of the classic, Stoker-inspired literary vampire, obviously in reaction to the new sissy-vampires found in Twilight and its thousand and one rip-offs. I know, intellectuals often have a bit too much time to split hairs on the heads of perceived crises.

Bram Stoker took a continental folk legend and developed the most famous of all counts—a being of pure evil with a much more interesting toolbox of horrors than Edward or even Lestat possesses. Dracula was created in protest—a reaction to the stifling atmosphere of Victoria’s Britain. This creature charmed, hypnotized, overcame and then penetrated and sucked, taking the life source of his victims—their innocence and purity—making them as twisted as himself. In a time where it was naughty to write about kissing, Dracula was pornography.

Werewolves are our bestial side, a symbol of our struggle against Nature. Don’t feed me that crap about a man who can change into a wolf at will and maintain all of his faculties. A werewolf is man out of control, cursed; he is primal, raging and lethal. He isn’t cutesy. This is the abusive husband or father, the dude with road-rage. This is man at his worst, giving in to a desire to go back on evolution and behave like an animal. Lunacy—thus the link to the moon.

Zombies are death. They are the certainty of our own mortality, always coming, persistent. They move slowly because they’re unstoppable. You can avoid and avoid but there is no escape. The shuffle and moan and they will eventually get you. I got so annoyed when I saw the new version of Dawn of the Dead because the zombies were sprinting after their prey. NO! They’re the living dead. George Romero, who, like Stoker, took a folk tradition—in this case voodoo—and used it as a satire of his own society, has been applying zombies to mock us for nearly fifty years. Dawn is his most brilliant, a commentary on consumerism, but he’s used the brain-eaters steadily for decades; recently he took a stab at our narcissistic Youtubing/blogging nature with Diary of the Dead.

I have neither read nor seen Twilight, and though they hold no interest for me, I’m not going to bear an uninformed opinion. My worry is that these classic monsters are not being used properly, as societal foils. Anne Rice—who wrote some good books, just missed the point—and the thousands of other monster fan fiction writers need to understand that the monster is a machine. It serves a purpose. It creeps us out because it also reveals truth, it exposes what is under the rocks of our consciousness—it tells us what we know is true but what we don’t want to hear.

When you take the monster and you make it cutesy, or you make it merely a source of entertainment, you lose the essence.