The Absolute Truth about My Muse—as Far as You Know

by Jordan Dane
@JordanDane

Every time someone asks me about my muse, I lie. (If you write fiction for a living, is it really lying?) I tell some people it is my two rescue dogs Taco and Sancho or I blame my weirdness on my peculiar rescue cats. There are days these aren’t lies exactly, but they’re not entirely the truth. Today I’m finally coming out with the truth, as best I can figure this out. My muse is a seven headed hydra with a flying horse body. There, I said it. And it looks something like this.

 

 

 

The flying horse comes from my love of anything HORSE. That love turned me onto reading as a kid in elementary school. I read every book in my school library that had a horse in it. I love westerns, but my favorite horse book was a fantasy with a flying one. I actually worked to buy my first horse and ended up with my family owning several. Noble creatures.

The first good-looking hunk (head) on the left is actor Eric Etebari who played the dark assassin, Ian Nottingham, in the short run TV show on TNT, Witchblade. I became so enthralled with his character of a noble assassin that I wrote fanfiction on the show for six months. When the show got cancelled, I could have shriveled up and forgotten about my writing, but it was the best thing that could have happened to me, as I look back. I made up my mind to write original stories after that.

Next to Ian Nottingham is Zig Ziglar, motivational speaker who flipped a light bulb over my head when he said that he wrote his non-fiction book doing it a page a day. I thought, “Hell, I could do that” and made up my mind to try. Zig isn’t a motivational speaker for nothing.

Next to Zig is Robert Ludlum (RIP), the master of espionage thrillers who wrote the Jason Bourne series and many other great spy novels. He amazed me with his style and pace. Even as a reader, he struck me with his amazing talent and still does when I replenish my writer’s soul by rereading books of his from my personal library. He made me a crime fiction author for life.

The Cyclops dude represents my crazy family. It takes a village to raise a writer and I was no exception. I still call my mom everyday and read her what I write in its raw form. My siblings are all very supportive. And my husband is my number one fan, but not in a creepy way like Kathy Bates and he axe. (In the book Misery by Stephen King, she used a turkey carving knife. Read it and you will never see Thanksgiving the same way again.) My husband clears the way so I can focus on my work every day and is my brainstorming partner when I need a level head.

The Grizzly bear is my memory of Alaska where I lived for ten years. My heart is still there. Whenever I get lonely for it, I contact friends I have who still live there, but I can also write about it. My books EVIL WITHOUT A FACE and ON A DARK WING are set in Alaska.

The dangerous looking woman on the right is my love for strong empowered women in the books I write. Even when these women have incredible emotional baggage, like my bounty hunter Jessica Beckett in my Sweet Justice series, they find a way to survive and thrive. Creating the right man to deserve them is a bonus.

But perhaps the most important muse is the one who reminds me why I started writing in the first place. The central woman with a book in her hand is YOU. With every book I write, I start a circle (my journey), but that journey is only half complete. It takes a reader to take that trip with me and complete the circle. Hearing from my readers, especially in the wee hours of the morning via email, can absolutely lift me to a higher place. No lie.

So as you can see, I am surrounded by my muse every day and it’s a seven-headed winged horse Hydra. Did you really think my muse was a puppy? Pffftt. Wiggly puppy tails and the smiley faces of my rescue dogs feed another (no less important) part of my soul, but my writing muse is a beautiful magnificent beast.

What about you? Do you have a hydra of influences in your closet…maybe wearing a jet pack?

Those Boys in the Basement

Ever have those moments when you've slaved all day over a hot keyboard and gotten in all your pages and so you think, okay, I deserve a break today? (And, no, I don't mean a Big Mac and fries.)  Or let's say you've been fretting all day and you just can not, for the life of you, figure out how to tweak something to make that plot go?  In either case, you get up, walk away, head out to the gym--and then <DOH> it hits you, that Bart Simpson moment: how you're going to have to go back and tear up about five of those ten or twelve pages because you messed up.  Or that messy plot point unravels for you?  Or there's something even better you coulda/shoulda/woulda written if you've only been THINKING?  

Ah, but the trick is: you thought of it because you didn't.

In BAG OF BONES and ON WRITING, King calls it the boys in the basement.  Other people call it: muse, the subconscious, the unconscious, the artistic impulse.  Me, I call it both a Bart Simpson moment and a necessary ingredient to creativity: those instances when you have relaxed your conscious attention to a task and, Eureka, the answer--or a reasonable facsimile--presents itself.  For it to work for me, I need to be exercising or out in the garden, out in the sun, or hiking--doing something outdoors.  I have a writer-friend who routinely takes a nap if he comes up against a plot point that just won't fix itself.  Stephen King goes for long walks, and so does his protag in BAG OF BONES.

What we're all doing is diverting our attention from the task at hand.  We're removing ourselves from the surround and environmental cues that not only dictate how we should be behaving (i.e., hoeing a garden is altogether different from tapping on a keyboard and composing sentences) but create the expectations that we SHOULD both create and be creative.  That is, we're taking ourselves out from under the eye of the boss-man, who'll certainly dock our pay if we take one second's extra break than we're entitled to.

We all know the difference in these styles of thought, too, because we feel them and we feel the transitions back and forth.  (Hinky and unsettling, but true.)  Conscious thought is analytic and derivative; that is, when we're focused on a task, we think about it and make judgments.  We winnow; we parse and pare; we don't encourage the weeds.  Unconscious thought is, of course, much more closely related to dreaming, when the mind makes what feel like bizarre associations on the basis of connections we've forgotten about.  Think of the dream's imagery as the brain's attempt to find near-matches, places where your experiences should be slotted.  Those pathways are not logical; they're not derivative; they're a bit like weedy cross-connections: dandelions that worked their way into your cucumber patch because both plants have yellow flowers.

Allowing your unconscious to help you out is a bit like letting the boys in the basement play.  You need to relax enough to allow them to play, and for many of us, that means distractions: walking, napping, ripping out pesky weeds, breaking up of dirt, cooking dinner, doing the laundry; anything that allows your rigorous control over where your thoughts go to slip a bit.

But creativity is still a two-step process.  Yes, you can let the boys play.  They can come up with an interesting and novel solution.  But then you have to allow that solution to become conscious; it has to translate and transfer itself from the back of your mind to the front.  This isn't trivial either.  If you've ever tried a dream journal (I did, waaaay back when I was in analysis), you realize how stupid your dreams feel and sound and how fleeting they are once you engage a secondary, cognitive process like forming words with a pen or pencil.  What felt so logical or emotionally laden in a dream becomes, well, kind of dumb in the translation--and you also tend to forget if you can't find a way to allow the transfer to occur, and quickly.

For me, that means talking to myself, out loud, especially since I'm usually miles from home.  Yes, I get many strange looks because I have to keep talking, or my attention begins to wander again.  (This is both good and bad.  I may lose what I just discovered, but I may also gain something else.   In the middle of the night, if I jump up after a long period of staring at the ceiling and letting my attention wander, then I have a little tougher time deciphering what I meant if I've written it down.  Hearing my own voice tends to sock it home.  Even then, I still forget, which is kind of a pain.  Not to mention the fact that I'm jumping up and down all night long, and the husband is . . . well, a little annoyed.  OTOH, I have a very understanding spouse who doesn't seem to mind talking for a while in the wee hours.  He understands the value of calming the savage beast.)  I know other authors carry notebooks; some talk into digital recorders or their phones.  We all have our ways of translating that play into the work we've secretly been doing all along.

The important thing is to recognize that not paying attention allows us to solve complex problems--BUT that only works when we actually have a goal.  In other words, if you're inattentive and sort of a space cadet and have no real goal or problem or purpose . . . yeah, you're going to flounder, you're going to drift, and no Eureka moments for you.  On the other hand, if you are engaged in solving a complex problem, then not paying attention--not thinking about what's bothering you--will actually help the boys help YOU find the answer.

Now, excuse me . . . oooh, there goes a really pretty butterfly . . .

My Muse is Gizmo, Rambo Style.

by A.G. Howard

Some time back, I stumbled upon a traveling blog question:

How would you personify your muse?

I knew immediately where to go with that question. The movies. If you've never seen the fabulous and fun 1980's flick, The Gremlins, here's a sneak peak:

Why am I showing you this?

Because my muse is sometimes fluffy, sweet, and cooperative ...

Other times, an ugly, cantakerous, slimy beast.

What better personification than a gremlin? So, from this day forward, I dub my muse Gizmo.

Gizmo shares the same three rules for proper care and maintance as his cinematic counterparts:

1. Keep it away from bright lights.

Gizmo can be shy. He doesn't always want to come out to play. I've found he's most responsive in a dim room with only the computer's glow for company.

2. Don't get it wet.

Getting Gizmo wet (as in too many glasses of wine) causes his ideas to multiply too quickly, to wit my characters meander around aimlessly for chapters on end.

3. And don't feed it after midnight

If I make the mistake of going to bed with WIP on my brain, Gizmo responds with a nasty bout of insomnia. He doesn't care that I have a house to run and children to tote about which requires a full seven hours sleep before my seven a.m. wake up call.

But when Gizmo and I are on the same page, we get along splendidly. I guess I would even say he's my hero.

So, to you Gizmo, I dedicate this song:

And to all of you, how do you personify your muse?