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.