Okay, I'm waiting...

In which Jennifer muses about muses!

Photo by The Cleveland Museum of Art on Unsplash

So here we are reading your wonderful short stories, each one of them a unique and beautiful creation, and I have to say that we are amazed by the variety of themes, and the vision of each and every writer we’ve so far encountered. Truly, there are no limits to the imagination, which got me thinking about what it means to be inspired.

I saw a sardonic post on X a couple of years ago that said:

“Writers who wait for inspiration are called waiters, not writers.”

Let’s set aside the somewhat judgemental tone of the post (we all of us have different processes, and if yours is to wait for inspiration, that’s totally cool), and take a look at what it means to wait, and what it means to grab a muse by the throat until she renders forth a glistening opening line or the perfect ending to a perfect story (note to readers: we do not in any way condone violence against muses, or anyone else for that matter).

What I’m really talking about here are the down times, the slumps, the doldrums on the literary sea. Adrift on becalmed waters, we gaze hopefully towards the sails, wishing for the slightest sign of a breeze... Okay, I’m going wild with my metaphors today, but you get the picture.

I endure such periods from time to time, feeling like a total fraud, wondering if I’ll ever write again because surely, this time, I’ve lost the skill I once had. Never mind the story I finished the week before because that doesn’t count. I want a new one. Like an addict, I crave the rush of being in-process, words spreading across the fertile page and filling me with joy. Still I sit there, berating myself for my failure to write even one good sentence.

I’m being honest here; it’s a tough job sometimes, being a writer.

I’m trying to learn to embrace such times as a necessary part of the creative process, during which I can tinker with ideas and forms, do some free writing, read other people’s work, go back and read some of my own, remember my successes, and play golf (but that’s a whole other post). When the right story comes along, it will be out of the blue, perhaps prompted by an overheard phrase in the supermarket, the memory of a past experience or emotion, or a stray neutrino zipping through my brain and sparking a chain reaction.

Which makes me wonder: is the better strategy to wait for my muse to get up off her lazy ass and whisper in my ear, and save myself the headache? Quite possibly it is, especially when I remember that inspiration means not only to be mentally stimulated to do something creative, but also to draw a breath.

Still, the drive to create and keep creating, and to always create a piece that is better than the last one, is hard to ignore.

Your thoughts on this are welcome!

Let me enumerate some of the ways I try to prompt my muse, and tease a story out of thin air so that it flows free and unforced from my fingers.

1. Free writing, as already mentioned, is a great tool. Sometimes I ramble, writing my name over and over, or just spew babble all over the page. After a minute of this, something kicks into gear, and very often a character’s voice peeks out and waves at me.

2. Listening and observing. People watching and people listening can be great tools for creatives, because we’re such fascinating creatures! See a man on a bridge, staring into the water and mumbling to himself? See a harried mother scolding a child in the grocery story? What are their stories?

3. Posing ‘What if?’ questions. What if a gaming-addicted child is deprived of their console, or a gambler wins big? What if a stranger shows up at your door claiming to be your half-sister? What if an old piano in a ghostly house starts to play of its own accord? What if the sky actually does fall, and that darned chicken is proven right? There are so many possibilities we can explore with this simple technique.

4. Using picture postcards to prompt the imagination. This is something I picked up at a Nuala O’Connor prose workshop in 2022, and resulted in a flash story that went on to be shortlisted in the Oxford Flash Fiction Prize, and published in one of their anthologies. So, take a postcard and look deeply at it for a minute or so, then write down ten or more powerful words that come to you in relation to the picture. Then, craft these words into a paragraph, and see where it takes you.

5. Pick three random words from the dictionary as a prompt, and write a story around the ideas they suggest. It’s not an easy exercise, I think, but it does work.

6. Reading poetry. Poems can spark wonderful story ideas, or set our minds in just the right space to go and write a lyrical piece of prose. For me, the poetry of Brendan Kennelly, Allen Ginsberg, Langston Hughes, and my favourite gal, Laura Cooney, are all constant sources of inspiration.

I’m sure you have your own favourite tools, so please do share them with us in the comments.

The other ideas that occur to me on this topic of waiting versus (let’s call it) striving, come from the excellent book It’s Not About The Shark: How To Solve Unsolvable Problems, by David Niven. In it, he deals with problem solving, and proposes many strategies to help, some of which are pertinent to the matter in hand.

The following are some of my favourites:

1. Don’t let the problem infect your thinking. Obsessing about a problem makes us seventeen times more likely to fail, Niven claims. This is because we become problem rather than solution focused, and so get stuck chasing our tails.

2. Trying harder can make it worse. Sometimes, working harder, trying harder, can make problems worse, and solutions elusive. Working harder can not only be unproductive, it can be counter-productive.

3. Look away, take time. Your ideas don’t come on a schedule. They come to you when you’re doing something else, not staring at the problem. I recommend a physical activity as a distraction, such as a walk or, if it’s to your tastes, a round of golf.

4. Trust yourself. You have the skills, you have the talent. They don’t just vanish, never to return. You got this!

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In my experience, nothing is ever wasted in writing. The fragments we create with the exercises above or your own favourite tools will ultimately end up being used in some story or other. Even if it’s a word, a sentence, an emotion, it will turn into gold once we find the right home for it. And once in a while, we can paste fragments together to create a tapestry (but that too is another post).

Let me finish by wishing you a happy and vociferous muse who incessantly badgers you with new ideas. May you always be inspired by her, and may she always be amazed by you!