the artist at work

yeah, maybe we can do something next tuesday...

there are those who like to tell you that, if you're a creative person, you just have to sort of wait for the muse to come to you, that you can't force things, that you have to wait for that moment where she visits you and dedicate yourself passionately to enjoying every moment spent in her presence, because you never know when the next visit will come.

i used to think that way about creative work, until i was in my thirties and, like a lot of things i used to believe, it struck me as a little bit pathetic. seriously, it sounds like the advice you give someone who has a crush on a person with whom they patently have no chance at all. "just be yourself and if it's meant to be, it'll happen". i am not a patient person as a rule and therefore, i decided that i would do whatever i could to make those creative epiphanies happen.



i made myself start writing down all the ideas that i have. [well, maybe not all, but some of the ideas i have are really, really bad.]

i organised all of my writing files so that they are in logic order and not just a bunch of files called "random idea june 2011-1" sitting in a folder called "writing". that means that when i remember that six months ago, i'd had this awesome idea for an opening for something and then decided to "come back to it later", i can actually find it on the off chance that i do want to come back to it later.

i try to keep myself in the habit of writing. i even started a blog to help me do this. [of course, the problem i wasn't counting on is that writing said blog has become a sort of a creative pursuit unto itself.

teh riters blok. i haz it.

although i no longer keep a journal, i do try to make notes of things that give me the feeling that i might want to write about them, or that give me the feeling that there might be something special to them. [how "special" they are is something i generally work out later on.]

still, there are times when it just seems like no matter what i do, i am just not good enough for that damn muse to pay me a visit and treat me like i'm special. if this were a relationship with another person, i'd move on, but this is a critical component of who i am. i can't just shrug it off the way i would the loss of another person.

i'm stuck at the moment with a peculiar sort of problem, in that everything that i want to work on, all the big ideas i have at the moment are, well, big. they're not the kind of thing i can just bang out in a single night's work or two, but projects that require careful thought and planning. like the ongoing saga of "a definable moment in time", or like the thing i thought of after i had this dream about being a young boy who discovers a sort of portal to a strange utopian but fascistic world and starts taking his family over there and then realises that it's really hard to either survive or get back. [i'm serious, it's a fantastic idea in my head. i even drew pictures of it, which was both a creative way for me to work on an idea and a reminder that i can't draw for shit.] or the second screenplay i've been working on, where everything is already worked out, but which i hate working on because the formatting requirements for screenplays are probably why hollywood writers commit suicide. [and yes, i know that i could get software to do it for me, but i haven't yet reached that point where i'm willing to fork over a few hundred dollars for peace of mind. [i have it in my head that i'm going to change the system and reinvent how screenplays are formatted. that'll be how history remembers me. the screenplay formatting chick.]


so now it's like the muse has conceded that we are in a long term relationship and that we have a future together, but doesn't want to bother with any of the day to day stuff. that's my job.

i suppose that if i really want that relationship to work, i should just focus on it.

not the muse calliope

as in, not watch dom killing his way through ravenholm for the fourteenth time. [particularly stimulating when one of the cats brushes against my legs, which seems to be julia's thing at the moment.]

as in, not swinging through the vines of the internet like tarzan waiting to find something that amuses me. [although if i hadn't, i wouldn't have found out about beyoncé the giant chicken, which would be a sad.]

as in, not assuming that writing on the blog is going to put me in a frame of mind to write quality fiction just because the two activities happen to look the same on the surface.

oh, yeah. i guess i have to go now...