How to Construct a Muse?

I should mention that I had to have the Muse's threat explained to me by a few friends.

Sometimes trying to write is hard, especially when there are so many amusing things to read that other people have already written.  I haven't done much writing with my newly acquired alone time since Liv started summer school; mostly I've been playing video games, picking up around the apartment, and filling out applications for jobs.  Also fiddling about online, reading articles and webcomics, etc.  I quit smoking, cut out a lot of junk food from my diet, and drink waaaaay less soda.  Needless to say, I feel less like crap.  Yay.  

However, I still haven't written much since I left school (two years ago....eesh).  What I have written, I hate.  I admire people like my husband who work consistently to progress at mastering a skill.  He's been out of school a year and still does graphic design and drawing exercises every week.  I'm one of nature's born slackers who wants to get something right the first time and be awesome right away.  I blame things being too easy in elementary school and being praised for being smart.  That's bad for children, being constantly told how smart they are.  It makes them think things will always be that easy.  Sure, I was socially deficient and couldn't follow instructions to save my life. I'm like that now.  It probably won't change.  Every time I get a handle on one thing, three other things pop up to prove how incompetent I am at things other people grasp innately. I don't care about those things.  The point is, in areas academical I got the concept quickly and tested well as a child.  It made me think everything was supposed to be that way, and if it didn't come easily, I didn't bother with it.

It's interesting that I've chosen writing as my field.  I suppose if I had stuck with science as a teen, I probably would have made out okay.  Science is less convoluted than interpersonal communication.  But science also requires a lot of slogging, and I am not one of nature's sloggers.  My mum is, my husband is, pretty much everyone in my entire family is a slogger.  They can keep their heads down and shoulder their way through repetition to arrive at the end result.  Their minds go through the correct mental hoopery to achieve the kinds of answers most people expect.  It amazes me sometimes to see my husband's mind at work.  He'll find solutions to problems that absolutely confound me, and understand things without needing them explained.  I think I keep him around as a buffer between me and the rest of the planet, to be frank.  He saves me a lot of awkwardness at restaurants, for one thing.  He deals with mechanics.  I imagine in the future he will frequently have to smooth things over with Liv's teachers and quite possibly the entire PTA.

And that's my problem.  As I have told people in writing workshops, bar conversations, and a couple of times when helping Pam teach her beginning poetry classes, writing (along with all other forms of creative media) is about communicating something to the reader.  Expressing an idea to an audience.  If you have failed to make them understand or feel or connect on some level, you have failed as a writer (or artist or musician or whatever).  I often find myself understanding exactly what I mean to say, and no one else does.  I have been told I can be fairly good at putting words together in ways that sound impressive to the average person, but it doesn't always translate meaning to someone reading them.  I endeavor to write in a more... vernacular style?  As one would converse with a friend on a typical day.  Especially on a blog.  My short fiction is just one attempt after another to write in a manner that allows easy communication between myself and the reader.  Poetry is harder, because it's more personal.  If I use my purest voice, no one gets it.  If I try too hard to make it accessible by others, I feel like I've cut out the heart of it.  So poetry is a constant balancing act for me.  

I've been trying to find motivation for writing, and then today realized that's stupid.  You don't find motivation for important things, you just do them.  A lot.  Over and over until you finally end up with something you can tolerate.  This goes back to my instinctual dislike of doing things that way and my absolute dearth of focus; however, as an adult I know I need to actively make myself do things the slow and steady way.  Slow and steady isn't the approach I feel a person should take on their entire life; to quote Jack McBrayer, "That ain't no way to live!"  I understand, though, that it's the correct method to work out some of the more important things in life.  

Apparently THIS is the way to live.  I'm not arguing.

I've been reflecting on the nature of "one's muse".  Creative types can get ridiculous about the idea of their "personal muse" and how it supposedly inspires them.  The idea that inspiration is supposed to come outside oneself confuses me and yet simultaneously entertains me to the point where I've been thinking of making one up, just to have something to bicker with cathartically when writing doesn't go my way.

Allen Ginsberg said that the real challenge for writers is to talk to your muse as you would your friends, to break down the walls between how you really experienced an event and how you express it.  Donald Revell says something very similar in The Art of Attention: The Poet's Eye.  He talks about how the true poet merely pays discrete attention to what is real and true, then stops their brain and its myriad conceits from getting in between that which they perceive and themselves: "Bum and troubadours can have no truck with the intentional fallacy."  So, in this spirit, I feel that my muse should be something I perceive as true, as directly honest and meaningful to myself.  

When I think about writing, I invariably think about Pam McClure.  Pam was one of those wonderful people who not only readily believes in the abilities of others, but causes said people to believe in themselves. She inspired a lot of students, friends, and colleagues in her time.  Her Facebook group calls her "powerful beyond measure", and there are only a handful of people I would describe in that way.  My mum, certainly, and sometimes I try to write about her and how I see her and the things she's been through, but that's closer to home and infinitely harder to write about.  

In a way I think I've quietly and unintentionally made Pam my muse.  I hear her voice a lot when I sit down to write, even if my own internal voice narrating what I'm writing sounds suspiciously like a female Stephen Fry.

How's that for a mental enema, eh?

Because I admire her so very much, I reread Donald Revell's book she recommended to her students often.  Donald Revell was always referenced as "The Great Man", and I have "Composition is taxidermy" (The Art of Attention, p.25) tattooed around a partly-mechanical raven on my left arm.  However, Pam believed in the value of tinkering about with traditional forms of poetic composition and making them your own, so in that spirit I am going to attempt the triolet, villanelle, and sestina this summer.  Maybe another sonnet.  I like those a damn sight better than the aforementioned styles.  I can almost hear her deprecating the fact that I waited until after I graduated and she died to do things her way.  This is a rather extreme reflection of our relationship while she was still alive; she'd say, "Abbey Riley, you should try this. You'd be awesome at it" and I'd ignore her and do whatever I wanted anyway.  Then later she'd hit with me with a book.  I would try to push her into doing things my way with the Ivy Review.  She usually relented, and then later hit me with a book.  We maintained this equilibrium successfully for two years.  


Pam was one of my only real role models, and a beautiful poet.  I hear her voice whenever I see horses in pasture, a country lake, a peacock feather, the sunburned shoulders of teenage girls.  She had a vibrant soul that hummed around the periphery of perception.  I miss her a great deal and find myself talking at her memory in times of confusion.  While I have yet to really understand the nature of muses, I think I could do a lot worse for a muse than Pam McClure.

Much love and gratitude, O Impetuous One.