So here I am, staring into a blank screen while my muse stares back. He’s in a bad mood. Been in a bad mood for a while now—thirty years or so. Some of my writing friends might be surprised to hear that I have a muse because I don’t talk about him much. I don’t say, “My muse is lazy today.” Or “my muse is not moving me.” I have always said that I can’t have writer’s block because the electric company doesn’t have billing block.
But...and it’s a big but; I cannot lie...sometimes I have nothing to write. Okay, that’s not true. What I have are scraps. Sentences without context. Funny dialogue with no mouths to speak it. Fragments of poems flittering across the room. When this happens, I have an image of a muse—a sullen, cigar-smoking, carb-gobbling, butt-scratching muse—who would favor me with a smirk except he’s too busy watching horse racing on Channel 1007 because he has a Benjamin riding on Blue Whirlaway in the Fifth.
It’s annoying, but I do have ways around him. Maybe you also have a reluctant, annoying, smirking muse. Maybe some of the things I do might help you. In no particular order, they are:
1. Chores. I have discovered one of the quickest ways to jolt my muse into action is housework. It has to be a mindless chore, though. Vacuuming works. Dusting. My body can do the chore with muscle memory while my mind is free to wander places.
2. Music. Fast instrumentals for the most part. No slow, beautiful pieces unless I want to sit down. And nap. I try to make the music match what I’m writing. Upbeat for humor, flowing for nonfiction, mysterious for mysteries, of course. Right now, I’m listening to Bach. I want a nap.
3. Taking a walk. Being away from the computer can often energize me, particularly since I detest walking almost as much as I detest turnips. Walking is good for my health and I have a step goal, but really, I’d rather be carried everywhere by a robot litter.
4. Indulging in fictional slaughter. I kill everyone in my work-in-progress. Raging dinosaurs falling through a rift of time, monstrous comets littering the atmosphere with hungry microorganisms, murderous volcanoes with a grudge against humanity—we know what we did. Or the gentle, sweet grandmother in my story will load her famous Christmas cookies with strychnine to let her family know how she really feels about being stuck in assisted living. Something about the slaughter wakes the characters up as they realize I’m nuts and they had better perform if they want to make it to the last page.
5. Reading craft books. I keep several near my desk so I can grab them when I need to. If I’m not going to write, by Shakespeare’s blue bonnie, I’m going to learn about writing. I also use them to research a particular problem I’m having. Someone else has had the same problem and solved it.
6. Drinking caffeine. Coffee. Tea. And Diet Dr Pepper. Don’t want to be dependent on anything, thank you very much, but sometimes a nice kick in the brain is needed.
7. Changing projects. I typically have two or three projects going on, a couple of nonfiction—have to pay the bills—and a fiction one. A poem or two. I find I can write myself into a hole on one, change to another and write that one into a dark alley, and surprise, surprise, my subconscious has found a rope to throw down to the first one.
8. Talking to fellow writers about writing. Not their lives, which are absolutely engrossing, mind you, but writing. How to handle dialogue tags. The cliché that haunts their work. Which-hunting and well-seekers. Best paragraph they’ve read lately or written. Book that showed them how to solve a plot problem. Struggles they’re having in their writing. How they roped and branded their muse, yee-haw!
9. Imagining the book is done and I’m being interviewed about the book or article on PBS. Really, this one works for me. I can’t explain it.
10. Acting out the dialogue and the action as much as I can. I stand with my pages and pace around my room. I shout, I plead, I cry, I laugh. Treating my work as a play (movie!) seems to catch the muse’s attention if only because he’s never seen anyone behave that way before.
And sometimes, I write about writing and my struggles to get a few words on the unforgiving screen. Like now. I have three projects waiting, and while two remain stalled, I see a way forward on the third one. So I must go but want to know: What do you do when the words won’t come?
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