I have heard it said that sonatas, plays, poems, sculptures and even sentences and phrases for our books are waiting for us to find and release them. Apparently, Michelangelo said that he released his David from the rock in which he found him. It certainly looks like the figures in stone shown here are struggling to set themselves free. They are extraordinary.
If you want to find and write by the inspired voice, you need to tune in to it or find the muse that brings it about in the first place. And once you have it, act on it before it is too late. Frieda von Richthofen was the inspiration – and model – for many of DH Lawrence’s female characters, including Lady Chatterley. Robert Graves had a succession of female muses and Dickens had Nelly Ternan, a teenage actress.
In the days of the #metoo movement, these female muses seem old-fashioned or even sexist. And yet, there are famous examples of the male muse, for example: Jean Marais was muse to film director Jean Cocteau while Oscar Wilde apparently needed Lord Alfred Douglas to set his creative juices flowing.
However, there are many well-known writers who pooh-pooh the whole idea of muse, claiming that writing is just a job like any other. Sit down at 9.00 and finish at 5.00 in the afternoon and then have dinner.
As far as I am concerned, I am schizophrenic with regard to writing. Some of my best passages come from a place outside my consciousness so that, when I read them later, I have no idea where the passages came from or how I dreamed them up. This usually happens when I am writing something I feel strongly about (the word "passion" comes to mind here but I am reluctant to use it). But mostly, I am very present when I write. Anyway, I don't write books, I rewrite books. This means that revision is the key to the door and in order to open it you cannot afford to drift away with the fairies. You have to scrutinise every word and every line for mistakes and then, correct or rewrite them.
This is not to say that the muse is complete rubbish. Something has got to stimulate your creativity and if that "something" is an individual or an object of some kind , then so be it. It may even be the case that the individual or desired object is somehow out of reach - Dante's Beatrice for example or Gatsby's green light twinkling and winking at him from across the water. And where do those unexpected and best passages come from, those passages that seem to appear from nowhere? It is probably from within, from our very own subconscious.
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