A bit Greek to me…
In the beginning, the writer’s muse started life as nine goddesses from Greek mythology. These ‘sister goddesses’ would meet every four years to have a party at a place called Thespiae, where they would sing, dance and generally have fun being creative.
In modern English, the word ‘muse’ is just a romantic way we like to refer to inspiration, creative thought and ideas.
Personally, I like to personify my writer’s muse, attributing her with beauty, power, grace and brilliance. I see her as the shadow side, the evil twin of what author, teacher and Buddhist Natalie Goldberg calls monkey mind, the inner critic who sits on your shoulder, nit picking at every phrase you have committed to paper until you delete the lot of it.
I mostly imagine my writing muse is curled up asleep on my shoulder, always there, always ready to help me if I want her badly enough.
“Don’t be tossed away by your monkey mind. You say you want to do something — ‘I really want to be a writer’ — then that little voice comes along, ‘but I might not make enough money as a writer’. That’s being tossed away. These little voices are constantly going to be nagging us. But part of not being tossed away is understanding your mind, not believing it so much when it comes up with all these objections and then loads you with all these insecurities and reasons not to do something.”
The 7 superpowers of the writer’s muse
The word ‘muse’ comes from goddesses of Greek mythology – and rightly so, for the writer’s muse has numerous superpowers:
- She will help you find your writer’s voice. Just take one step towards her and then let her lead you wherever she chooses. Explore new genres. Just try it.
- She will help you find things to write about. Your writing muse needs you to pay attention, to be mindful, to engage with all five of your senses. Do this and ideas will fall into your lap. A poem maybe, or an idea for an article will emerge as if from nowhere.
- She will keep you motivated. Stick with your writing muse. She is on your side. Feed her with your own creative thought and put those ideas on paper and she will pick up speed. Her rise is exponential. The more you use her the more she’s there. Like magic.
- She will make you believe you are a writer. Follow her lead, try out her ideas and the more you practise the more you will start to believe you can actually do this. Writers write. Simple. So write.
- She will make you feel alive. If you are a creative at heart, then allowing your writer’s muse into your life will fill you with joy and purpose and, importantly, words you can publish.
- She will banish writer’s block to the background. Go with the flow and you will find your flow again. I promise.
- She will make you write again. Okay, so you want your writing muse to help you write that next blog post, right? But you follow her to a riverbank and she puts the lyrics of a song into your head! Great. Words are words. Writing are writing. Write those lyrics, show your writing muse that you are back and raring to go. She’ll find you that blog post next time.
Writer’s block – confession time
It’s been three years now since I published my last book. Monday Morning Emails, the memoir I co-wrote with Terry-Anne Wilson. It documented the real dizzying highs and crushing lows of 30 years living and moving round the world with our families, and came out in February 2018. It was my 32nd book, written in the 32nd year of my writing career. A book a year. That’s what I always did.
Since then – nothing. I have not written another book, and it pains me. I feel like a fraud. I spend my work life inspiring, mentoring and teaching new writers and authors to give birth to their own books ,yet I am not writing one myself. Shame on me. Did I have writer’s block? Or do I have a good excuse (we moved countries, moved house and saw the passing of three of our four parents)?
I believe that writer’s block can be beaten, but that it takes effort. It takes time. It takes application and intention. After three barren years it was time for me to refriend my writing muse muse. I also believe that excuses are just that – excuses.
Did I have writer’s block? Well, I wasn’t overtly feeling like a dried up well in Inspiration Wood, but I wasn’t writing for fun or for me. I’m a writer. I always write for me. Until I don’t. Like now.
The first thing I had to do was to take a break from work, leave the magnetic lure of my desk and get out there. For me, I believe you can find your writer’s muse in the most unlikely situations but it rarely comes when I sit on my backside answering emails.
I’ve done it before. I can do it again.
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Free Find out moreHow I refound my writer’s muse
It’s funny how we know what’s good for us and yet we perpetuate our lethargy.
I know full well that nothing gives me more of a spring in my step than those magical moments when I allow myself to move towards creative thought. The times when I find the words of a poem begin to bud in my mind, or notice how the rosemary, the herb that represents remembrance, grows wild and pungent on the Croatian landscape the day my father dies.
Sometimes I see the irony in a shop sign, like my favourite Docoments Tpying Centre in downtown Dubai. Maybe there’s a joke or pun that leaps out at me or I find myself in a landscape I feel compelled to describe. For me, the writer’s muse is as much about seeing something differently because I paid attention as it is about being motivated to sit down and write that next book at long last.
It’s struck me in the last week how easy it can be to engineer writing muse-inducing moments that can be a source of inspiration and creative energy that fill the heart and make me feel like me again. Bigger, brighter. More alive. Perhaps some of these ideas will inspire you to do something similar and start to fill the creative well that feeds your writing muse.
Join me on my journey of the last few days and see if you start to see what I mean.
Five places to find your writing muse
1. Go to a place charged with emotion
Highgate Cemetery, London
More than 30 years ago I lived a stone’s throw from Highgate’s East Cemetery, one of London’s first purpose-built Victorian cemeteries, created to be enjoyed by more than mourners. Back then the gates were open to anyone and I would love to wander between the lichen-encrusted tombstones, find names I knew, like George Eliot and Karl Marx and sink into the sound of birdsong and rustling leaves.
The West Cemetery recently opened to visitors for the first time and for a fee of £10 we were allowed an unaccompanied visit. This was something else. The energy of souls at rest and the enduring love that accompanies all those who venture behind the high stone wall and iron gates is palpable. It’s unkempt here, unruly. Nature has been allowed to encroach upon the graves and I could have sworn my heart beat more slowly here, the leaves had learned to whisper and the roots and tendrils that broke free from the confines of a more manicured space could wander free.
The sweet scent of white jasmine mixed with the sharp tang of box and privet. Bare branches like the slim limbs of lithe adolescents embraced pale tombs with octopan hugs. Headstones leaned in close to converse with neighbours or lie back among the baby’s tears and undergrowth to sleep, hands folded over their chests.
Why not visit a sacred space and supercharge your writer’s muse? Notice everything, sense it, hear it, smell it and imagine what something looks like, how it makes you feel and what memories of your own may surface.
2. Go to a place of creativity
The Turner Contemporary, Margate
A night away in Margate and Sam (my eldest son) and I visited the art gallery that erupted from the end of the wide arc of beach in 2011. We’ve visited many times because my uncle lives in the neighbouring townlet of Broadstairs. JMW Turner, he of the amazing skies and dubious morals, adored the Thanet light that changes minute by minute and never fails to entrance. But this is a modern gallery, and exhibitions marry old and new in ways that twist my brain into pretzels as I think my way into finding meaning.
Place, Space and Who fills the vast white walls of the atrium. Its creator, Barbara Walker recently had a residency there to explore identity and belonging, using five African women who have made their homes in Margate as her inspiration. Steve McQueen presents Ashes, two videos on a double-sided screen that shows the young man known as Ashes at his home in Bermuda at two very different stages of his life.
All are thought provoking and put an electric charge through my synapses as I work things out in a way that has meaning for me.
Why not visit a gallery and immerse your writer’s muse in whatever random experiences present themselves to you?
3. Go sit among happy people
Broadstairs beach, Kent
Few things can beat spending time on a beach on a sunny day. Life descends on the seaside. Visitors sparkle with excitement as the sunlight glints on the lapping waves. There is so much to look at: the young families with buckets and spades, the tattooed millennials showing off more ink than bikini and drinking warm cocktails from cans. Just to sit and watch is entrancing.
There is so much to grab the attention, from the bright white slabs of cliff to the unfettered fling of a piece of seaweed that makes it look like a Viking ship, a mermaid, a treasure island. No one needs a book or a phone to distract them here. Just sit and people-watch. Absorb. Invent stories. Imagine their backstories and conversations. What if you were their friend? What if the two red and yellow tee-shirt and shorted lifeguards beneath their red and yellow umbrellas. What else can you think of that is red and yellow? Do you know why they might have chosen red and yellow? Strawberries and custard? The Shell pecten logo?
Paint a picture with your pen. Can you? Flex your description muscles and try to recreate the scene before you in words.
I wholeheartedly agree with British actor and painter, Antony Sher, who wrote in his memoir, Beside Myself, that “a drawing is just a piece of writing that has been tied up and a drawing is just words that have been untied.”
The cliffs here are like hunks of cracked white fudge topped with a mousy buzzcut fringe, perhaps? Its feet are darkened by daily paddles in Botany Bay.
Could you take yourself to a beautiful place and then, instead of taking a photograph, let your writer’s muse put down what you see instead?
4. Play with ordinary words – surprise yourself
A Sandwich in Sandwich
Spontaneity is the best friend of inspiration. Sam and I were on our way home, driving south in the direction of Dover, and it wasn’t long before the town of Sandwich appeared on the road signs.
“Shall we go? Have a sandwich?” Sam suggested.
“It’s got to be done,” I replied, flicking the indicator. Fifteen minutes in and we were stopped in a grassy carpark by the river.
Sandwich is one of the Cinque Ports, of which Rye and Hastings are two of the most well-known, on the south eastern tip of England that were formed in Norman times by the French, hence the French name. With such a rich history we knew we were in for a treat.
The deep red brick of the toll gate welcomed us to a delightful hour of wandering cobbled streets with names that set cogs whirring – Holy Ghost Alley, Short Street and Guildcount Lane – gazing at medieval cottages and sourcing the best place for our commemorative sandwich. We rebelled. Finding a French deli called No Name Shop and located on No Name Street close to the Guildhall, we bought baguettes, filling them with the most French of fillings – ham and cheese for Sam. Paté and cornichons for me. The irony made them even more delicious.
Words never fail to entrance me. A sandwich in Sandwich makes me laugh. A baguette in Sandwich is even better. Did the locals refuse to name the street that housed our baguetterie in order to put the tourists off the scent? I love to play with words and the puns and jokes that can be found within never fail to titillate my writing muse.
Why not play with your writer’s muse? Wonder how a place got its name. Look it up on Wikipedia or make up your own answer. That’s usually the most fun of all.
5. Go where other artists go
Shingle beach, Dungeness
Finally, the endpoint of our tour before turning in the direction of home – the grimly-named Dungeness – suitably the home of a Nuclear Power Station and a vast and cruel shingle beach, so bleak it’s achingly beautiful. For us, it is home to Prospect Cottage, the one-time home of film-maker and artist, Derek Jarman.
Cars crunch to a stop as a steady stream of visitors pause to gawp at the pitch and tar wood hut with corrugated iron roof and window frames painted the colour of buttercups. The Sun Rising, by John Dunne, decorates one wall. Its words, black and in relief, were so illegible I had to look it up online.
The cottage stares out in the direction of the Pas de Calais. Cold yet strangely inspiring as if, like the sea, the writing muse is just out of reach unless you stretch yourself, battle the billowing wind and Keep Out signs that force you back from the tideline, ignore the fleshless ribcages of the shipwrecks that litter the landscape like dried up dreams and keep on regardless.
Any writer in constant pursuit of the writer’s muse knows it never really goes away. You just need to pay attention, open your eyes, tune in to the inspiration and the buried stories and reach out. So, will you take up the challenge? Find five ways to find your muse?
What happened?
In truth, this wonderful few days was followed by more fabulous writer’s muse-inducing events: two theatre trips, a visit to a museum, a sunny walk in a beautiful town, a visit to the home of another artist. My cup was not just full, it was overflowing and I needed a lie down! You can have too much of a good thing. After all this I needed to rest and Mistress Writing Muse was yawning loudly in my ear.
So I lay down and let the ideas settle for a couple of days. And as they settled the book ideas lined up. Honestly, they started to form a queue! I had so many ideas I was not quite sure what to go for first, so I wrote them down and have left them to germinate. I have every faith that one will grow taller than the rest and this time next year you will see book number 33.
I promise me.
I promise you.
I promise my writer’s muse.
Writer’s block, like Elvis, has left the building
What’s next?
If you would like more inspiration like this, then why not sign up for my Monthly Inspirer (see footer), a compilation of this month’s blogs? Or check out my Events calendar and sign up for a writing class or writing workshop and kick start your muse with other writers?
See writing courses & free seminars on my events page
