Question When the Muse Calls

I don’t really know why I’m writing this, or if anybody will care. I just feel a need to share, to ask. Tonight I had one of those rare experiences. I’m a writing who, more often than not, plans out part of what I’m going to write. I calculate what makes the most sense intellectually, not intuitively. I consider whats, whys, and wherefores quite a bit. I don’t do aso much off the cuff writing as a result, I guess. I do some. I frequently don’t have a full plan laid out when I start writing, but usually I have some degree of a plan greater than 12% of one.

Tonight I just wrote from emotion, from need, from muse. Tonight, as I was working on something else, I was feeling depressed. I’m not entirely sure why, and I what I think I can guess at isn’t just my own to tell. It belongs to a very dear friend of mine who I desperately what to understand and help, even if I don’t know how or the best way.

Still, that doesn’t change that I felt… depressed. Weary, tired, aching. I just… I couldn’t focus. I didn’t want to write, to think, I just wanted to go sleep, but I couldn’t. I was at work, you see. I’m still there as I write this. I work night security, so I have lots of free time to work on things, even at work.

I felt… lost, drifting. The writing project I was working on was itself a touch of the spur of the moment, but that one came to be as a matter of almost academic interest and boredom. It lacks an edge of emotion.

I’ve been working for a long time on bits and pieces of story revolving around a character I cannot share to the world, yet I feel compelled to. She is my oldest character, in a sense. My beloved first dungeons and dragons character. Her story, the campaign, continues even today, and has for almost nine years now. It began in the summer of 09. To her I have given heart, soul, spirit, ink… all that I cannot do for her is give her flesh.

Tonight, I was drifting in depression, slowly growing weary, tired, and I had been rereading old writing material, short stories written for my beloved lady. So I opened up a new one.

A piece of the puzzle slid into place. “She smiled.” She smiled and something broke loose. It wasn’t very long, but something poured out. I wrote, and I wept and cried for her, for her joy, for her smile, for her happiness. It felt like a long time coming, but for a brief moment, my dear lady found pure joy and bliss and I cried, and my muse demanded I take action.

Does that happen to you? Does it just… walk up and smash you over the head with a two-by-four? Does it blindside you and bludgeon you? Your muse, I mean. Does it take you at that moment between giving in and taking action, and DRAG you into doing something constructive?

It did tonight, and I feel… cleansed, just a bit. I feel better. I’m smiling again, and I’m not depressed.

Would you share your story with me, of some times when your mue just had its own ideas? Good ones? Something unplanned, unrestrained, where even you have no idea what’s going on, where you are, or what happens next, and you’re the one writing it?

Maybe not as specific or as fulfilling as your own recent experience, but when the muse decides to visit, I learned to always give her her due. Because if you ignore her, it might be a while before she drops another epiphany on you.

Unfortunately, mine seems to prefer early mornings, during my morning routine when I'm trying to get ready for work. Or in the car, when I can't write.

If she makes me 10 or 20 minutes late..."Deal," I tell myself. I quickly rattle off the key lines she graced me with into a text document and dash off to work.

She's also the reason I never finish anything. New ideas, whether they pan out or I waste several days when I should have been working on something else. But that's part of the game. You have to put in the work in the lean times, and she'll drop by and give you five straight hours of writing sometime later. It helps now that I've switched to OneNote for drafting writings, so I can work from anywhere, even if it isn't very fun typing a lot of text on a smartphone.

The time in the car was a fun one. Not. I had just left the parking lot, starting my forty minute commute to my old place, when she dropped an absolute gem on me. It's still one of the longest segments I've written in one session. The problem was I had nowhere to put it to paper or type it down. I just knew I was going to forget its exact wording if I didn't do something drastic. So I snapped off the car radio and repeated the two or three lines over and over for 35 minutes, dashed to my computer when I got home, and wrote for three hours straight.

The darkness. It calls for me with my waking. A blackened ooze seeping deep within beyond my reach, beckoning.

Resistance so futile, its temptation runs deep within my soul. Shunning even with its lingering touch proves ominous. A fight I will never win, letting its seductiveness feed off the fear boiled down within as with what is proffered. To loss ones' hope, straddled by overwhelming grief and despair.

Oh, where I long for a day of its nonexistence, with its influence wasted away. Tangled roots long withered by decay, it tendrils long fallen off turned to dust, freed from its immense clutches knowing the soft caress of once more to be touched by light and happiness. Alas with the start of another days coming, it's not meant to be.

I know not where this darkness first came, or how it grew in strength. To only know do of its immense power to lay claim over me.

The darkness, feeds off my once bright daily life with its manipulative manner of bringing out the worst despair seeming to control me with the thoughts it harbors. To stifle ones sense of self with its lure of want. Oh, to have bygone days of bliss for I recall those lite caresses of joy in full splendor as I feed its hunger. Those days so few as comes the waning of the moon with the last sliver of light to fade away as it must go forth into the darkness.

And as I sit in the night I hear the whispers of my master call forth to me once again, its tendrils inching their way over my very soul as it savors my demise. To hear it whisper its name to me over and over never willing to release me from its grasp having found the book so deathly hidden away meant to never see the light of day. To have read the words that allowed his passage to my very being with the calling of its name long ago forbidden lost in the recourse of time.

And as I whisper its name beckoning it forth I welcome my master once more calling him out from where it seeks release.

Once more I welcome it into my very being.

Welcome its presence listening once more in the darkened cavern with the passing grate of granite pushed away as I reach within.

To visit its dwelling as I step once more into the void, the bridge meant to keep him prisoner outside our realm.

To welcome the one who commands me in doing it's bidding with but the mere mention of its name: Cthulhu.

My muse comes in the form of a redhead from Canada. I can put on a Loreena McKennett CD, and listen and ideas just start flowing.

I suppose, I'm at the other end of the spectrum, for I rarely plan out beyond the most broad of brushstrokes what I'm going to write. If it is a new project, I may sit and think for several minutes about what is that I want to write, but mostly I try to think about the emotion of the tale that I want to tell. In most instances, I will put on music that has the emotional beats I want to recapture.

But if I am returning to characters I have already established, in a world that is already established, such as Whateley, Then I will just open a blank page and start writing, and in many ways I'm frequently as surprised you are where the story goes.

I usually start writing with a single scene that does something that appeals to me. Then from that I can usually find a goal scene to finish with and a starting scene to begin with. Then its the hard slog of getting all the scenes between them.

Most of my stories end up "stuck" because a beginning, an emotional high and an end isn't quite a story outline

I've been trying to put into words what cannot be described.

The feelings that move me when i am playing music, improvising, and being carried by the music to somewhere else, where my body is the instrument, and the music is what is playing me.

The patterns of movement that arise when i am juggling and sparring, where the movements happen spontaneously, arise from nowhere, and then return.

That feeling of reaching out and plucking a design from the deep, and realising it in a physical form. And knowing that it will work, even though i have to go back and study it to work out why it does what it does.

The limits to what i can say with words annoy, but that is why i so rarely use the written word to express myself, and why i admire the people who can do this well.

To quote two of my favourite writers,

"Gnomisms, puzzlements.
Names are but the robes of fools,
And words, the death of thought.
The Realm lies not in matters tools,
but in what the song has wrought."

"Life is not a puzzle to be solved. It is a mystery to be experienced."