Working with Your Muse: A Cycle of Creativity

May 15, 2014 By 1 Comment

What is it about the “Muse,” that other great invention of the Greeks, that allows the idea to withstand twenty-two hundred years of human history?

Rene Magritte, The Return

Rene Magritte, The Return

I think it’s because the Muse allows us to make personal both “aha” moments and that otherwise unnameable force which fills our minds and bodies and then flows freely out again to make the work we do sing.

The Muse knows no bounds. The Muse is never blocked. The Muse surprises the hell out of us.

The Muse can also be elusive. Many writers have talked about how to invite the Muse, from scheduling the same times every day to do your work so the Muse knows exactly where and when to find you ready to put in your time. Steven Pressfield in his wonderful book, The War of Art, uses The Invocation of the Muse from Homer’s Odyssey each day before he writes.

For me, my small studio is much like an altar,

studio

filled with things that have personal meaning, from my strange old dolls to cards from my daughter and husband, to stray pebbles and shells.

 

Finding your way, trying ideas from others, hitting upon something that works just for you–is one of the best journeys you’ll ever take.

Part of my own journey was being fortunate enough to be in a workshop with Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes (Women Who Run with the Wolves). She talked of a cycle of manifesting creativity. Here’s a page from my notes:

estes cycle

Here’s the interpretation for the many of you who won’t be able to decipher my writing. At the top is the Zenith, which might happen just as we’ve achieved something good. After that, a post mortem depression can set in which leads to E, for Entropy, losing energy. Next is D, for Death which we can see as La Calavera, the dapper skeleton, the night between two days, part of the Life-Death-Life cycle. In other words, it’s a place where we might despair and feel deadened. The Nadir follows. This is the dark before the dawn, when you question yourself (this is a lousy idea…I can’t do this…). Yet this is when you have the seed of a thought, you’re pregnant and aren’t yet aware of it. After the Nadir is the Quickening–the new idea begins tickling the lining of your brain, the inside of your gut. We nourish it from inside.

To manifest in the world what is inside we Labor. When we get stuck here, it is because we forget our angel of destiny, why we are here in the world. Squint and you can see the Muse as the angel of destiny. Labor with the Angel/Muse, and you dedicate yourself to your Voice. We call the Angel/Muse, the Angel/Muse calls back and we get Energy Rising. You make your string of pearls, one by one. Dr. Estes suggests the prayer to these forces is simple: I will do your work. I am ready and open to do your work.

Dr. Estes went on to say that because we are porous vessels, sometimes those forces don’t always understand human limitations, which can push us into creative fatigue and/or wanting to do too much, to fragment yourself. The key to this is to stay on your unique way, in your unique voice. So I’d add to the above prayer: Help me tell my story in my unique voice.

What ways have you conjured the Muse? How does the Muse work with you?

 

 

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Writing from the movie in your mind

March 17, 2014 By 1 Comment

You sit down at your computer, and the threads of all those ideas you had just as you drifted off to sleep or were singing in the shower evaporate. A vast white space fills your vision. It’s terrifying, a place of nothingness that you, you and your imagination, must transform into words that will tell your story.

It’s jumping off the white cliffs of Dover, across the face of the moon, or staring for hours at the inside of a gum wrapper, or whatever goblin gets you when it comes time to actually type.

We each have our own peculiar ways to get started. Hemingway’s is great: stop writing in the middle of a scene that’s going well and where it’s clear what will happen next. I’ve also used index cards, like Nabokov, but mostly for ideas and notes for continuity as opposed to entire books and scenes, pulling them out when I’m stuck to get going. I lo-o-ove prompts (in a shameless act of promotion, please see my book, A Writer’s Group Companion: A Twelvemonth of Prompts and Recipes, http://www.amazon.com/Writers-Group-Companion-Deborah-Auten-ebook/dp/B00H6TQP02/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1395006754&sr=8-1&keywords=deborah+auten).

movie in your headBut the biggest tool I use is the  book-movie I play in my head. Sometimes I start the movie with a mind’s eye view of the setting, other times with a character or two. I let the scene take shape.  To use an example, one of the two books I’m writing now, my Evie-book, is first person.  Here’s how I begin:

I am Evie, standing in front of a waterfall that hides an opening into a hidden hollow. What am I wearing? Am I chilled or sweaty? Have I been there before? What’s the water doing? How fast does it flow? Do I catch the hint of sunshine on droplets? What color is the rock? Are there smooth pebbles in the stream below? Am I crowded in by trees or in a clearing? What is it about this place that allows Evie to see what others don’t?

I am there, I can smell the pine trees, hear the water and the birds, feel the sun on my bare shoulders. I let the movie roll forward, and now I see the flicker of light behind the waterfall. I steeple my hands and walk forward. The curtain of water parts. I walk through the spray and find the passage, let my fingers graze the rough rock walls on both sides of me. I’m scared, I’m excited, I don’t know what’s ahead. There’s the opening. Through it I see…

You get the idea. Inside the movie, I can stop and look around to see what details pop into my particular vision of where I am, where Evie is. I am in Evie, my heart is pumping, my mind is racing, I’m wondering what I’ll find on the other side. What’s my hand doing? What do I smell, touch, taste?

 

(If you want to see the resulting description, click on “Writing/Books” above; the post is “The Evie-Book, an excerpt from the beginning: http://deborahauten.com/the-evie-book-an-excerpt-from-the-beginning/.)

Getting the movie-in-your head to roll smoothly does take some practice, and relies on images you have or can create from experience (or Google street view…). But as fiction writers, we all have the imagination–we just have to nudge it from the verbal to the visual.

A couple of prompts to get you going:

Here’s a prompt my former writing teacher, Jennifer Owings Dewey, used to use in class, and which might be helpful in movie imagination: find an interesting picture (she loved nature shots, but it could be anything that catches your interest). Write a description with a) absolute objective attention to detail followed by b) an imaginative and subjective characterization of the same image, including your emotional response, which could also turn into a story.

And for those days when my characters stare into space, I get the soundtrack going too, a song or tune that comes to epitomize the feel of the book. For the Evie-Book, it’s from the soundtrack of “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”, the instrumental version by John Hartford and Norman Blake of “I Am A Man of Constant Sorrow.”

 

 

 

 

 

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What Keeps Me Sane

July 1, 2013 By 1 Comment

What keeps me saneThe name says it all:  we’re an eclectic group of writers who meet weekly who are lucky enough to live in the arts‑nurturing environment of Santa Fe, New Mexico.  Members write the gamut, fiction to poetry to nonfiction, but what ties us together is the commitment to our writing and supporting each other.

Our format is simple:  someone brings a prompt each week, we discuss it, and write for anywhere from forty‑five minutes to an hour or more, depending on the number of people there.  We try to leave enough time for each person to read what they’ve written, with comments by the group following.  Some writers’ groups have rules about critiquing; some even refuse to allow much discussion.  Since we began as a “class,” we not only allow but encourage comments, but there are two precepts.

First, the discussion should begin with a positive.  Second, the criticism should be constructive.

There’s a third we try to live by as well, and I use the word “try” deliberately.  We try not to interfere with the story itself too much.  Sometimes we get excited and ideas come bubbling up ‑ and some of us enjoy that process while others don’t.   Most of us have been in the group long enough that we tend to know who is tolerant of what! And when someone new joins, we try to make a safe place where we can learn about each other.  To be as long‑term as we are, and we’ve weathered some ups and downs, respect for each person is paramount.

What underlies everything is that this is not just a cut‑and‑dry, read‑what‑you‑got and isn’t‑that‑nice sort of group.  We support each other through the thick and thin not only of the writing life, but of life itself.  We’ve had one member die; a few, sorely missed, have moved away.  We’ve been through weddings and divorce, court cases, cancer, birth (children and grandchildren), and not least, the despair of everyday wear and tear on our souls.

I have been in this group since its inception – it began in January of 1999 as a seven week class.   Even when life ovewhelms me, when I wonder what the hell I’m doing/have done/will do, I know I will sit down in the quiet of Catherine’s living room and for the space of two hours, I will get to write in the embrace of this amazing soup of women.

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