THE PROBLEM WITH MUSES
EPISODE 009: THE PROBLEM WITH MUSES
Tempting as it is to wait for inspiration and blame the muses when it doesn’t show, creativity is up to us. You don’t wish for creativity, you do the work. Let’s talk about it.
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FULL TRANSCRIPT
In ancient greek mythology there were 9 muses, responsible for the worlds of literature, science and the arts. They were the sources of inspiration, minor goddesses who could be credited and praised for the best of our creative efforts, and I suppose, blamed when it all went to shit and nothing was flowing.
I have to admit, I’m not sure which is more appealing to me, having a muse to get me rolling or having someone to blame on the days when everything I do just feels like it’s not working. If I had a muse, beyond the symbolic one I spend much of my time pleading and cursing with, I suspect we’d spend most of our time in couple’s therapy.
I’m David duChemin, and this is episode nine of A Beautiful Anarchy, The Problem with Muses.
Music/intro
The problem with muses is that they aren’t forces external to ourselves. They are neither our creative salvation nor the ones responsible for whatever version of writer’s block applies to your specific creative endeavours. The problem with muses is precisely that they are us and we are them.
Our ideation, the processes that create the ideas that become our eventual creative output, is entirely an internal thing. It’s a function of the brain. I don’t understand much more than that on a scientific level, but I do know that the implications are exciting for those of us who rely on the way we think to make our art, make a living, or both.
Accepting that we are the source of our own ideas, and that we have the responsibility for the care and feeding of the muse, means we can reliably control the factors that get us closer to flow and productive creative work more frequently.
It means that we can stop relying on inspiration and the hope that maybe today the muse will stop screwing around and finally do her job. It means the whole thing, while still a little unpredictable in terms of which ideas will bubble to the surface, isn’t magic.
By far the hardest work I do as a creator is coming up with ideas, refining them, and seeing where they lead me. I can write for days but write about what? I have often found myself sitting around staring into the black surface of my coffee willing an idea to come into my head, hoping in vain for inspiration, before remembering I don’t believe in inspiration, at least not in the way it’s usually thought of.
I’m in good company in this particular heresy. The painter Chuck Close said “inspiration is for amateurs, the rest of us just show up and get to work.” Picasso, aways a little bit contrary said “inspiration exists but it has to find you working.” The poet Charles Baudelaire said “inspiration comes from working.”
The myth of inspiration is a dangerous one because it encourages a wait and see attitude. If the best creative minds in the world get their ideas in the shower after late nights with too much alcohol and sleeping in till noon, and all our slacking off never gets us so much as a funny instagram caption, where’s the hope?
The hope is in doing. It’s in recalibrating our understanding of inspiration, which begins with the word itself. Inspiration means to breathe in. When something was an inspired idea it was something we breathed in from the gods, the muses. We can still rely on breathing in, but these days we have to provide the air ourselves. It’s up to us to expose ourselves not only to as much air as possible but the right kind, understanding some air will feed our brains and some will make us dizzy and giggle suspiciously. Some air is toxic. I’m a scuba diver and there is a lot of attention paid to what’s in the air we breathe. The air we breathe is not just oxygen, in fact it’s only about 21% oxygen, the rest is mostly nitrogen. Screw with that mix too much, and without a sense of how to use it and you’ll kill yourself.
So it is with creative breathing, if we can call it that. I’m not for a moment suggesting we all just need to increase our inputs wildly. I’m suggesting we be much more intentional. Sometimes the thing we need is not more oxygen in the mix, but a little less.
So, abandoning the metaphor, what I mean is that it is our job to choose what our brains feed on. Any idea our brains come up with will be a combination of the other ideas we let in there. The news we watch, the tweets we read, the books, the movies, the podcasts, the conversations with friends, all of it goes into our brains and combines, incubating over time, and the quality of the ideas we expect to come out relies largely, if not entirely, on the quality of the ideas we allow in.
I know I’ve been harping on social media recently, but this is one of the reasons I find an unintentional use of social media so scary. When we expose ourselves to a great many voices, all of them saying the same things, because so many of us only listen to those with whom we agree, creating the so-called echo-chamber effect, we are not exposing ourselves to new ideas. Nor, for that matter are we necessarily exposing ourselves to good ideas, ideas that are well thought out, ideas that challenge and create more than just a knee-jerk response.
But it’s not just social media, it’s the algorithms. Amazon does this. Order a book and it’ll show you what other people like you are reading. Netflix does this. iTunes does this. And soon people like us, whatever that means, are all reading the same things, watching and listening to the same things.
We are becoming more and more homogenous in our inputs, and that isn’t helping independent thinking nor encouraging individuality. Is it any wonder then that our creative output looks less and less individual? If we want to thrive as creative people we need to be much more intentional about the inputs. We need to expose ourselves to new ideas, and ideas from carefully chosen sources. We need to surround ourselves with people that challenge our thinking not just reinforce our existing thoughts and beliefs. That’s one way to find so-called inspiration, to feed the muse.
The other is put her to work. The muse doesn’t do well when she sits still, and because she is us, neither do we. I mentioned that my hard work is often just coming up with ideas. What I learned, and it seems I have to keep re-learning this, is that I don’t think in order then to write. I write in order to think.
So if I want ideas, I don’t just think. I DO. I pull out one of my Moleskine notebooks, a big one that is dedicated to ugly scribbles and the generation of bad ideas. It’s the one I hope someone that loves me will burn when I die because the bad ideas outnumber the good ones by a thousand to one. I pull out that notebook and I make lists. 10 Ways to Be More Creative. Go. Don’t think too hard, just write them down. 10 Ways to Make More Money This Month. Start writing. And when you get to the third idea and it’s “kidnap the millionaire next door” or “sell meth to school kids” don’t censor yourself, don’t edit, and don’t judge. Just write it down.
Making lists is about idea generation and for me I need to put the pen to paper to do it. And no, sell Meth to Schoolkids isn’t my best idea ever, and I’m not about to start cooking in my basement, but maybe it leads me to a good metaphor. Maybe it leads me to something satirical I could write, like Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal about eating children so they wouldn’t be a burden. Lots of ideas, even bad ideas, are often the very necessary bi-product of a process that gets you to the good idea. We shouldn’t be afraid of them, we should chase them down and take their milk money.
Of course ideas are just brain sparks and it’s exciting when they happen, but you’ve then got to see where they lead and that only happens in the real world of putting your hands on the keyboard, the clay, the paint brushes. You’ve got to put the muse to work, see where she’s taking you. Don’t let her off the hook because she’s as lazy as we are.
Getting to work isn’t the only step toward greater creativity. But it’s the one that’s hardest to swallow. For many of us it’s easier if we connect that work to a routine or a schedule. I usually write at the same time each day. Some people need the same music, for me it’s Van Morrison. Others need to be in a specific place.
What’s certainly true is that it's different for all of us.
The idea of getting to work isn’t sexy. It’s dirt under your fingernails and hands in the soil more than it is head in the clouds. It’s paint-splattered blue jeans more than black turtlenecks. It’s nuts and bolts more than a bolt from the blue.
The other thing that isn’t sexy is admitting our physical world is tightly connected to the creative one. The brain is a physical thing and while it’s not as mysterious as talk of muses and inspiration, I have found that eating well, drinking a lot of water, and getting out of the house once in a while for a walk or a change of scenery is helpful. I don’t do those things naturally, but when I do my thoughts are clearer and my work is better.
I resumed my yoga practice this year. I do very, deeply, undeniably ugly yoga. But it gets me breathing and when I come back to my work after yoga my brain is firing on cylinders I didn’t even know I had. Maybe it’s all the oxygen, maybe it’s just getting out of my head for a while. But it helps.
It also helps to know your own rhythms. I know some people are super creative in the morning. I work best after or during my first cup of coffee, starting around 7 or 8am. Some people don’t gain momentum until 11pm. There’s no right way to do it except the way that works for you. I’ve found my brain shuts off between 1 and 3pm. So that’s when I do yoga or go for a walk. Or I lie down and “read” which is often code for taking a nap. The brain needs sleep and there’s wisdom in getting your 7-9 hours of good sleep. And if you need a nap, and that nap will make your work better, take one.
The care and feeding of the muse is the care and feeding of you, knowing what works best for you. It’s in increasing the inputs to which you expose yourself, gathering raw materials that challenge you, take you out of your comfort zone. It might also be in limiting or changing your inputs. Would we all be less anxious and more focused if we stopped watching the news, or checking our phones so neurotically? I think the evolution of technology is so vastly outpacing the speed at which our brains can adapt, evolve, rewire, or whatever the right terms. I think we’re becoming overwhelmed and unfocused, and the best thing many of us can do is to stop asking our brains to process so much noise so they can get back to focusing on the signal.
The problem with the muse is we’re still treating her like a goddess when in fact she’s made of more earthly stuff, but that’s also the wonder of the muse. Inspiration is ours for the making, it’s already there in the paint and the clay and words you’re about to put down on paper. How many times have I started to write only to see thoughts come out that I didn’t know I knew? How many times has one photograph led to another until I was making work I didn’t know I knew how to do? The good stuff is already there, but it only comes out when we begin digging, and the shovel is in our hands, not the muses.
I’d love to hear what works for you. Have you found a more intentional use of social media beneficial to your creative life? What kind of strategies or routines keep your brain firing on all cylinders? Or perhaps you’ve got a question or a frustration with your own process. I’d love to hear it and you can do that easily at ABeautifulAnarchy.com. Thanks so much for joining me. Go make something beautiful.
Music in this episode: Acid Jazz (Kevin Macleod) / CC BY-SA 3.0