Over the course of the last three and a half days, I've been fighting with the worst migraine I've had the joy of dealing with since sometime in mid-February of this year. It hit me hard in the middle of the night Sunday night rolling into Monday morning and the evil little brain cramp has been my dear friend and travelling companion ever since. Hopefully this little slice of hell will be gone by tomorrow, but I digress.
I know that everyone who deals with multi-day migraines has differing experiences. Mine usually cycle from one or two days of oh-dear-God-turn-off-that-damn-light pain and nausea into several more days of oh-look-everything-has-halos-and-it-hurts-to-think. That's where I've been sitting now for about a day, generally fatigued from lack of sleep and ineffectual medication, when all of a sudden a few hours ago I got the urge to try to sit down and write.
I swear to all of you that I literally sat here, in front of this laptop, for almost two hours with the following typed on the screen:
asdfjkl;asdfjkl;asdfjkl;
it was a dark and stormy night, again
the quick brown fox jumped over the fat lazy dog
goddamn it i'm supposed to be good at this
hey cock waffle, pour genius from thine fingers or go get a real job
Yeah, it's that bad. It then occurred to me that I've never really tried to write before when I've been dealing with a migraine. So, being the ever inventive moron I truly am, I took another pill and begin to ponder the notion of inspiration, writer's block, and various other tripe until my foggy little puddle of brain gravy focused on a conversation I had a few weeks ago. A new acquaintance and I were discussing where writer's find sources for inspiration when a rather attractive and highly well put together young woman walked by. The acquaintance made a crass joke as to the myriad things that she could inspire then made his goodbyes and went on his merry, presumably to get back in his panel van and start trolling for high school girls.
All of this got me pondering the notion of muses and how they truly relate to a writer's work.
For those unfamiliar with the term, a muse in ancient Greek mythology was any of the nine daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne. Each was thought to protect and / or patron an individual art or science. In writing parlance, a muse is usually the source of a writer's inspiration, oftentimes denoting a person to whom the writer has some form of strong emotional connection.
I've known writers throughout my life that were absolutely devoid of talent without a muse present in their existence. I had a friend in college who was absolutely brilliant, at least according to my creative writing professors, as long as he was with a woman who challenged him. The second he grew bored with her - BAM - the poor guy couldn't write his way out of a paper bag. I know of a very happily married author now who has written over ten novels who channels her need for a muse into men that she meets that she develops a crush on. They serve their purpose for the duration of a book and then she moves on to the next crush and the next book. The most absurd case I know of involves a writer friend who can only write well for the week following the first hook up with a new woman. I swear to all of you that should you familiarize yourself with this woman's writing, it becomes so obvious when she's hit a sexual dry spell that she may as well change the font on what she's attempting to write.
Again, everyone is different and find inspiration in varying places. I will admit to having had several muses in my life. Instead of providing me with a massive impetus to write and seemingly unending resources of talent, however, they gave me more of a deep understanding or insight into something I hadn't been exposed to before. What's sort of amusing to me about the whole subject is that while I would consider the relationship with each of these women to have been intimate, in no case would I describe it as romantic. It was something else entirely. Of course what's also fairly odd about those relationships is that while each was responsible for a creative work of mine, they each also left a mark on me that has sort of stuck around. My penchant for Jack Daniels, my interest in Anne Rice novels, my tolerance of old MTV animation, my love of the Highlander television show, my fascination with honey, even my appreciation of cigars to an extent: all of these things sprang from one of these women. Of course I can also credit them with seed materials for both of the books I've published, hundreds of pages of short stories, and character model pieces that are not only sprinkled in my current books but in at least four of the six I have progress currently. The insane part is with only one negative exception that I use to help create female characters I dislike, I have never been inspired to write by a single romantic relationship. Yes, I'm well aware that little admission / omission will probably fetch me an ass-kicking from my wife but, as long as I'm being real about it to begin with, I might as well continue down the same patch of road.
It has also occurred to me that, with the completion of my second novel, I no longer have a current "muse," at least by my standards, that I'm in contact with. I find it interesting that I'm still able to create without that kind of an influence in my life, but then again I have to be honest and admit that while I may not have those people in my life to that extent anymore I still feel like I have a wealth of material to work from.
This all leads me to a final question of sorts: to all my fellow creatives out there - do you have a muse currently? What do they give you / how do you receive inspiration from them / who are they? I'd love to hear your stories as well.
For now, apparently the pill is finally kicking in and it's time to go fall down somewhere soft and try again tomorrow. G'night all!
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