Muse Gone Wild

January 16, 2013 by Cassidy Frazee | 4 Comments

The cold is on the wane, but only in the same sense that it’s January, and that means spring will be here in two months.  I’m sick, but not as sick as yesterday.  Maybe seventy percent better, but that’s almost a hundred percent more than I was Tuesday.

The night found the time of writing had come about, and I started.  I had a bit of a spinney head, and there was a beverage by my side—if you know your Dude, you know what I mean—but that wasn’t going to stop me from getting the word out onto the computer.

Not when I had something very particular to say.

See, in my story the muse is trying to bring something out in her charge, and the only way to do this is through example.  Without going into detail, she’s a naughty girl, and she’s trying to do naughty things with her charge while he’s at work.  Don’t worry about her being seen:  she’s a preternatural creature, capable of standing next to you without your notice, which means she can do just about anything and not worry about drawing an audience.

So she’s doing something with her character in the lunch room, giving him a show and asking him to tell.  It’s a thought exercise with living picture, and she’s drawing upon his imagination to paint a picture that he can later turn into a story.

Which means I’m painting a picture with words so I can tell the tale of this particular story.

I’ve never actually worked on a story that had a writer as one of the main characters.  Well, I have another character that has done some writing, but this is a writer and his muse, and the focus is on them, and what she’s doing to get him out of his creative shell.

As I said, though, she’s a bit of a naughty girl, and some of the things she’s going to do are what one might call “non-standard”.  Like what she’s doing in her charge’s lunch room:  it’s not the sort of thing one would expect a muse to have you do in order to get some experience writing a story.

Maybe she’s into method acting?

Whatever it was, as she drew words out of my main character, she was also drawing words out of me.  Before I knew it I was a thousand and fifty words closer to the end, thought Chapter Four is still not finished.  That will change tonight, because I’ll complete the scene I’m working on in maybe three, four hundred words, then get into Chapter Five and bring another character onto the stage.

And if you think my muse is naughty . . .

The interesting thing that happened to me last night was how I wrote.  I’d do some writing, then check.  Oh, three hundred words.  Well, I didn’t feel great, but that seemed low for an evening word count, so I wrote some more.  Checked, and I was around six hundred words.  Still seemed low to me, so I started writing again, and writing, and writing . . .

That’s how you get your words for the night.  You listen to your muse.

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