Musing

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

Yesterday I answered a series of interview questions for Literary Lunes Magazine. This happened with a lot of other “business catching up” which had to be done before I go to Portugal, since there I’ll only have intermittent internet access, when I visit my brother’s house. My mom appears to think the internet is the work of the devil or something.

Anyway, among those interviews there was one I’ve never been asked, and which UTTERLY baffled me. “What is you muse?”

I had no idea how to answer that, so I went flip – which, you know, is what I do when I have no clue what people are talking about. I said if I had a muse, she’d wear a toga and lift aloft a clothes iron, because I do most of my ideation while ironing or doing other boring, routine tasks.

I’m still bothered by what they mean. Perhaps they asked “who” (I don’t remember) but that only makes it more baffling. When I wrote poetry, this was easy, since I usually wrote series of poems to someone, normally my crush of the time. (Sigh. Time is the enemy of us all. The young man I wrote 200 sonnets for between the ages of 14 and 18 is now completely bald and looks… well, nothing like he used to. This hurts more than aging personally. Who was it who said something about time making a mockery of our loves?)

But I don’t write poetry and I don’t write straight romance (I don’t write gay romance, either – I mean, as you know very well that I don’t write romance on its own, not as part of a bigger plot.) So the question of a muse doesn’t arise. Or does it?

Of course I fall a little in love with my characters, but not that sort of love. It’s more the love of parent for child, or the love of creator for creation.

Sometimes a book does center around one character, though. It’s not – I think – so much a matter of “love” or even “muse” but more a matter of following the pain. I write to the pain. I go where the pain is.

I think this is because I write to resolve pain – to resolve conflicts within myself that can’t be resolved any other way, starting, inevitably, with the fight between mind and body, but twisting to a lot of other things. And if you’re scratching your head and wondering what I mean by pain – to take an example, I know that I’m not the only one who left her native land behind. Half the members of the Mad Genius Club have. And I’ll admit I wanted to be here, and I’m happy where I live and with my family and friends here. But at the same time, every time I go back, I remember I severed a piece of myself and left it behind – a whole parallel history that was more likely to happen, the person I’d be if I’d married someone there and lived there. It hurts a little not to be able to be in two places at once, no matter how much you love where you are.

But I’m not alone. Even if you never left your birth place and your birth family, I bet the world has changed so much around you that your childhood is as irretrievably lost as my own. It’s part of being a physical, mortal creature caught in the coils of advancing time. No human being deserves that, and all of us live through it. And there’s no way to resolve it, to come to terms with it. Except through art. At least for me. And my art is mostly my writing (the rest being on the lines of a hobby.)

So I go where the pain is. I find the pain in the character, the situation, the world, and the tension that comes from that pain, and I go in and wind the plot around the pain till catharsis happens.

This is the closest thing to a “muse” I can admit to, and it makes me sound like I keep a closet full of whips and chains. (I don’t, though the cats sometimes make me wish for a whip and a chair. Yeah, I know they’d just play with the leather strips.)

So what do you think they meant by “muse”? It made me feel completely out of step, like there was an entire world of writing out there that I not only didn’t know, but couldn’t fathom. After twenty six years of writing, that is a pretty scary idea.

Does everyone but me have a muse? What is a muse in this context? Do you have one?

*Crossposted at Mad Genius Club *

4 thoughts on “Musing”

  1. “Time is the enemy of us all. The young man I wrote 200 sonnets for between the ages of 14 and 18 is now completely bald and looks… well, nothing like he used to. This hurts more than aging personally. Who was it who said something about time making a mockery of our loves?”

    Terry Pratchett addressed this with his version of Helen of Troy in Eric. The best novel lenght exploration of it I’ve read was James Branch Cabell’s story of star-crossed lovers endlessly sacrificing for the other (he goes on quest to merit her love and gets captured, she offers herself as hostage for his release, he frees her but is himself recaptured, and so on for twenty years.) When they finally are able to unite they each find the other somewhat faded by time and not quite what they’d remembered. Can’t recall the title and can’t readily look it up, but like all Cabell’s novels it is a sly delicious hoot of a book.

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      1. Infuriatingly I am unable to provide much help, although I can narrow it to five with a distinct pointer to one of them. The edition I read was one of the volumes published as part of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, meaning it was either:
        Figures of Earth (it wasn’t – but this is a truly marvelous novel)
        The Silver Stallion
        Domnei
        The High Place
        Something About Eve
        The Cream of the Jest

        The one I suspect is Domnei, if only because that is the one mislaid from the others, meaning I read it and failed to re-shelve the volume. Checking the usual suspects (Wiki, Google) fails to turn up anything closely approximating my memory, but as it has been over thirty years since I read Domnei I cannot take this as conclusive. Project Gutenberg offers the book [ http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/9663 ] if you don’t mind your books pixellated.

        Given the voraciousness of your reading I suspect you have come across Cabell ere now (certainly he was a favourite and inspiration of RAH – cited as model for Stranger, Glory Road and Job: A Comedy of Justice) but if perchance you’ve not (or for others looking on here and wondering) Cabell wrote in the post WWI period, with a style reminiscent of Lord Dunsany but with a drollness so sere, so arid as to drive one to drink. As evidence of his humour (and the changes in book-marketing over time) the following quote is appropriate:

        “The early work attracted some praise. Mark Twain himself described the stories in Chivalry as “masterpieces … wonderfully well written.” (Quoted in letter from Eugene Saxton to Cabell, 1920.) But it was typical of Cabell to use his most negative reviews as end-matter advertisements in a later book — for example, assembling several notices of The Soul of Melicent which conveyed that Howard Pyle’s coloured illustrations were the best part of the book, and adding demurely: ‘This Comedy is now issued without illustrations.’ ”
        [ http://www.ansible.co.uk/writing/dlb-cabell.html ]

        Cabell is largely forgotten these days, although an acknowledged and clear influence on Neil Gaiman (for whatever that is worth) so dead tree editions are somewhat hard to come by (cheaply) but many are available online [ http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/lookupname?key=Cabell%2C%20James%20Branch%2C%201879-1958 ] and, if ever you desire to attend Ravencon (or other in the vicinity of Richmond, but I am confident the organizers of Ravencon would happily guest you) Virginia Commonwealth University apparently holds his papers [ http://www.library.vcu.edu/jbc/speccoll/exhibit/cabell/jbclife.html ] and have named their literary magazine for Cabell’s mythic land Poictesme (and the VCU site offers advises:
        “The Heir of James Branch Cabell: The Biography of the Life of the Biography of the Life of Manuel (A Comedy of Inheritances)” by Bill Patterson[ http://www.library.vcu.edu/jbc/speccoll/exhibit/cabell/prize3.html ]. Mr. Patterson’s essay on James Branch Cabell’s influence on science fiction writer Robert Heinlein was the prize winner in 2000. “)

        Well! That is certainly a bad case of letting enthusiasm for an author run away with oneself. I hope you have many fans so enthusiastic about you fifty-three years after your death.

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  2. I think “What is your muse?” is the sister question to “Where do you get your ideas?” It’s a request to elucidate what goes on in a writer’s mind between “Arrg, I need to write but I don’t know what to write about” and “Ah ha, I’ll write on This and That and especially about this really interesting Character.” I think you answered the question well. “I write to the pain” is a good answer.

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