Writing Muses: An Introduction

Writing, particularly writing for myself, is a weird gig. At work, I’m given a topic, an approach, and an audience and can write a paragraph or a page or an answer to a question in less than an hour, typically.  It requires no inspiration, no deep thought, just some facts that need to be included in a message and my own mind to organize them into a cohesive whole. At the beginning of my career, there was a lot of fretting about what my bosses wanted, about whether it was good enough, about whether it hit the mark. 

Now, 20 years into a career in technical and business writing, I don’t worry about whether it’s good enough. If the approach can go a few different ways, I add a few comments to the document with text explaining the options and let it go into the world.  If they want the document to have a more marketing or historical or knowledgeable tone, they can tell me and I’ll rewrite it.  It’s an easy task.

But I’ve spent many, many years honing the Corporate Muse (who we’ll call Barbara). That part of my brain can work on autopilot at this point in my career. That’s not the case with the other Muses.

A large part of the writing process for this 3-book project is to court the other Muses—and in this case there are at least four.  Some are more confident in their relationship with me and some are not.  Some are more vocal and some are not.  These are the main ones I’ve been interacting with so far.

Blogging Muse: She looks like the stereotypical 20^th Century Journalist with glasses and a pencil in her ear, sitting in front of a typewriter. She is smart and opinionated and always ready to step on a soap box and preach to the masses. The Blogging Muse—we’ll call her Jane—has spent a lot of time speaking about what she sees, either in my head or to friends or on my short-lived podcast. She hasn’t done as much writing as Barbara, but the two of them have years of experience working together to get my thoughts out into the world. Since I’ve started blogging regularly, Jane is a happy little journalist, feeding me ideas and making sure they’re written well enough for a blog post. To further encourage her, I bring notebooks with me to work to get ideas down and I spend some time on weekends writing things to post.

Spiritual Muse: The books themselves are about a topic related to my spiritual beliefs and practice. For a host of reasons, I don’t really talk about my spirituality, but it’s deeply embedded into all aspects of my life and this Muse, named Aisling (pronounced ASH-ling), is regularly whispering in my ear. She’s quiet and thoughtful and unused to any attention. She is a creature of the mists, working her magic largely unseen. She is a spiritual guide and so speaks differently than the others—in riddles, in images, in emotions, in song. Because she doesn’t speak in words, it’s challenging interpreting her messages into a useful outline for this project. I must coax her to communicate with Jane or Anais (described below)—Barbara is too much for her—or I need to learn to be better at writing down what I hear and understand.

Journaling Muse: Anais is the Journaler and loves rainy days on a comfy couch or chair drinking tea and pondering life and the Universe. She is very good at exploring her own feelings, at learning what she needs, at finding those things about herself that she wants to work through. Anais is consistently exploring the depths of her own soul, her actions, and her emotions, with the goal of enlightenment, of learning what she is capable of, of learning more about what makes her uniquely herself. I’ve always been prone to journaling so I don’t need to journal every day.  At the moment, I am journaling more than I have in the recent past—maybe once a week—but Anais and I have a comfortable relationship and she knows that when the time comes, I’ll find a quiet spot and get my thoughts out.

(The fourth Muse is the Creative Muse, and she’s complex so warrants a post of her own—look for that soon.)

For the journal and the nonfiction book, Jane, Aisling, and Anais must work together and somehow communicate the specifics of these two books to me.  These three haven’t really worked together before—Anais works well with Aisling and Jane and Anais have worked together before, but the three haven’t quite found their rhythm yet. Because of this, writing feels choppy at present. The goal right now is to set aside my own frustrations with choppy writing and keep writing. I know that, eventually,the rhythm will come.