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  • Author unknown

    About Writing and the Muse

    http://hudsonmackenzie.blogspot.com/2008/05/about-writing-an...
    4 days ago in Hudson's Notebook · Authority: 17

    The nine muses dancing with Apollo. My friend Tess has written a post about "muse-ing" that set me to musing upon the whole matter. According to that reliable (*cough* well, not always reliable, but certainly always handy) source Wikipedia, the Muses "are a sisterhood of goddesses or spirits, their number set at nine by Classical times, who embody the arts and inspire the creation process with their graces through remembered and improvised song and stage, writing, traditional music, and dance." From these creatures of Greek mythology, come down to us our present word "muse," which refers to an artist's inspiration, or as Tess writes, to muse upon is to “to be absorbed in one’s thoughts; to engage in meditation”. Tess ends her excellent post by asking her readers how they "invite the muse to visit their blog writing. How much is technique, how much inspiration, how much bloody hard work?" For me, the muse can sometimes “arrive backwards.” There are times when I may sit down to to just make myself write something, with no clear idea in my head as to what. Or sometimes perhaps I have one idea, but as I write a post or a poem or whatever I am writing, it becomes something quite other than what I started to write, something quite surprising and much better than I would have written. And then of course there are the times when an idea fizzles on the "page" right in front of me and goes nowhere. These are the times when, as Tess--in her wonderful and humorous British way of putting things--writes, "that damn muse has packed her bags and gone on a trip and to write anything is a slog!" In noting the particular nature of blog writing, Tess says simply "we aren’t writing novels." True that, but this got me thinking again about something I’ve pondered before. That is that I wonder sometimes how regular blogging changes and impacts one’s writing in other venues, since this medium really has its own sort of dynamics quite different than the solitary pursuit of poem, novel, short story, etc. Perhaps it might be most akin to a regular opinion column in a newspaper, (Does anybody remember newspapers?) but even that doesn’t quite compare. I wonder sometimes if the unique dynamics of blogging are making me a better writer or a worse one overall. Blogging is great in that it can give one an immediate audience for thoughts (not to mention the community aspect of blogging, which is why most of us continue doing it, isn't it?), but if I really want to be a writer and hone my craft, I wonder sometimes how blogging fits into that bigger picture. Well, time will tell, I suppose. As to answering Tess' question of how I invite the muse, well I am really at a loss to answer. I just sort of stumble along and hope that something somewhere will “hit” me in such a way that I want to write about it. I don’t really have a method other than that. Very “inefficient.”