My last blog was about Rule #1: Go toward what scares you. The second of my 7 Rules to Write By has to do with the Muse.
Some people wait for the Muse to show up. Albert Brooks, for instance, in the film The Muse. He’s a film writer who’s lost his edge, but fortunately a friend happens to know the Muse, and she’s available. In this clip, he gets a call from the Muse (Sharon Stone), who happens to be a very high-maintenance source of inspiration.
Maybe you already know better than to wait for inspiration. You know you have to put your butt in the chair. But do you still engage in Muse-ical thinking? I did. I used to believe I couldn’t do the kind of sustained work required for a novel unless the time ahead of me was like the shots of the prairie in Days of Heaven: immense, stretching forever, plus it wouldn’t hurt to have Richard Gere around. (This Muse thing is putting me in a filmic mood.)
In prosaic terms, I figured I needed four hours a day for, say, three years. But, at the time I was contemplating doing the project that scared me, I was juggling newspaper assignments and teaching gigs-all with deadlines, so clearly they were important and non-negotiable. I’d just have to wait till my schedule got less clogged, I thought with relief. Then my friend Sara Lewis Murre said that was b.s. Sara is the author of warm, funny novels, and, in recent years, she’s also become a hypnotherapist and creativity coach, a job she was born to do. Sara pushed me to start working on the novel, and she made a suggestion so simple I was sure it couldn’t work: Use a timer, and try to write for just an hour a day.
I doubted I could do more than warm up my engines in only an hour, but what the heck-I had a timer, a basic West Bend kitchen variety. I set it for an hour, two hours if I could, but sometimes just for 20 minutes. Like a factory worker, I was on the clock. If I got up to use the bathroom, I stopped the timer. If I checked e-mail, I stopped the timer. I found out that, for the way I work, I needed to do my novel-writing first thing in the morning. If I used that time for a newspaper article and told myself I’d work on the novel later, it didn’t happen. But the timer trick worked. With the continuity of working on the book almost daily, I did write page after page-or, at the glacial rate at which I produce, at least word after word. And the words finally added up to a 120,000-word novel.
Your best writing time may be after midnight. Or maybe it works for you to produce x number of pages a day. The crucial thing is to consciously carve out the time to write, instead of waiting for the Muse.
RULE 2: Do the work. Do it now, in the midst of your full, messy, wonderful life.