My Muse

One of the most prevailing questions anyone asks a writer is, “Where do you get your inspiration?” Good question.

I don’t know…

In fact just the other day, I was just driving down the road and bam.  I suddenly began screaming as an idea was slammed into my head.  Where did it come from?  I don’t know, but it was a good thing I had my windows rolled up.

More often than not, though, my inspiration gradually develops after hours of pouring into the correct tone, setting, and genera of a piece.

What people don’t realize is that inspiration takes hard work.  You have to work hard to get your muse to speak.

A muse is your inner creative cheerleader.  That little voice that spurs you on to communicate and create.  I think everyone’s muse is different.  Stephen King even said that his muse was a guy.  I suppose I’d agree.  Now that I think about it, mine’s pretty masculine sounding as well…

But the trick is to find out what convinces your muse to open its mouth and whisper that oh-so-addicting idea into your head.

Creative work is being lazy.

Burton Rascoe said, “A writer is working when looking out the window.” Truer words cannot be spoken about my muse.

I am a hard worker.  More often than not, I have to remind myself to take breaks and to rest.  It’s a nasty habit if you ask me.  It is unfortunate because I feel if I rested more often, I’d actually be able to find creative ideas easier to come by.

Nothing thrills me more these days than turning on my angsty iPhone playlist and staring out the window into the night.  It’s the primary place I find myself drafting out scenes.  

I suppose to the outside world, I look rather lazy sitting there doing nothing when I should be doing work of some sort — or maybe they think I’m downright insane since I’m probably contorting my face in weird ways or talking to my characters (what better way is there to practice dialogue?).

However, after doing a long bout of “nothing” like that, I find writing the scene once I get back to my computer much smoother.  Usually my hands can’t keep up my mind is moving so fast.  Not only that, but because I’ve blocked out the general emotions and dialogue for the scene, I can focus on pacing, sentence structure, and fine details much more clearly.

Man, I need to start planning a whole lot of nothing in my schedule…

Ingest creativity.

Stephen King always said a writer should write a lot and read a lot.  Unfortunately, my family growing up didn’t have a lot of books.  My parents weren’t all that into reading.  Instead, our bookshelves were filled with movies upon movies.  And then my sister worked at a movie rental store (let’s see how much that fact dates me).  That being said, my muse speaks to me more through movies and video games than through books, simply because I grew up among these creative mediums.

I also have heard from some communications experts that it is beneficial to take inspiration from mediums opposite of yours.  Graphic designers who create signs and business cards often look at movie posters for inspiration.  Different medium — a movie poster is nothing like a business card — yet it is just similar enough to take ideas from.

My fiction professor takes a lot of inspiration from Opera.  Great.  It’s not in my language, but I tell you what, after watching a few scenes with him in class, now I really want to write a story about a lady with a big costume and an even bigger diva complex.  I see why Gaston Leroux picked such a dramatic setting for his little pulp-fiction novel Phantom of the Opera.

Regardless of the medium in which you ingest your creativity, the primary goal is to feed your creative muse with good food.  As a kid, I’d watch about anything.  These days, it’s not worth my time.  My muse can’t work off of the junk food of reality tv.

Now, if that’s where you get all your story ideas, kudos to you.  My muse runs strictly on a non-reality tv diet.

My diet.

Just beginning my writing career, I found great benefit in playing adventure video games.  The grand and detailed settings s well as the open-ended storylines make for great idea fodder.  Visualizing how your characters and story interact with the setting is half the battle — and when a video game is already so grounded in interactive settings, you’re already halfway there before you even put your pen to the paper.  

Nowadays, I look to video games to create a certain mood or ambience.  I’m an ocean away from dark and stormy castles.  I can’t travel to Europe just so I can get my details right.  So, I’ll just flip on Castlevania and look for those little details that will make my muse sing.  

Most of my inspiration comes from classic movies.  Where would we be without good old Bela Lugosi or Boris Karloff?  Sad.  That’s where we’d be.  I use classic horror movies to understand what made horror so great in the first place.  What was it about Psycho that made people stop taking showers?

Of course, I have to touch on cherry on top that really gets my muse talking.  I am a sucker for the truly awful movies.  What was it again?  Oh yeah, Dracula vs. Billy the Kid.  

Now, my palette can’t stand the mediocre — the things that aren’t really bad, just boring or useless.  But man, do I love a plain bad movie. Movies like Troll 2, Plan 9 From Outer Space, Suicide Squad.  These movies are entertaining in how much they fail.  Not only that, but watching poorly written movies or reading poorly written books help me as a writer become more self-aware, and thus, wittier in my own writing.  It also helps me learn from their mistakes.

My muse is a weird guy.  He has weird tastes, but I do my best to keep him happy.

What is your muse like?  I’d love to hear your thoughts.