What To Expect When You’re Expecting Your Writing Muse To Show Up
First Trimester:
In this trimester, you will get used to what it feels like to wait for your Muse. While waiting, you may find yourself going on a cleaning spree. This cleaning spree will be less of a cleaning spree and more of a force of nature—you become the unstoppable force—and you actually move the immovable object and vacuum under it. This is called “nesting” and it’s completely normal.
Next, you may find yourself insatiably curious. About everything and everyone! At first your curiosity will take you on grand adventures investigating little known facts on the internet, then it will branch out to investigating people you know but don’t know very well. You may find that you want to get to know everybody just enough. This takes time, valuable time, as you track down everyone you slightly know through social media. And LinkedIn. Don’t forget LinkedIn. You’ll need to know what’s going on in everyone’s career. It’s been awhile!
The reason for this great interest in the lives’ of others is the hormone oxytocin, not to be confused with oxycontin which is a drug. But in truth, they are both drugs because when you are high on the hormone oxytocin all you want to do is bond with people on the internet. That’s what these drugs are for—for bonding with people and preparing your heart for the arrival of your Muse, because in this trimester every moment is pregnant with meaning! Until you try to write—then everything becomes useless and meaningless and stupid, stupid, stupid.
But, do not despair.
This up and down emotional roller coaster is normal. One moment you’re high as a kite on oxytocin, the next you’re lying on the couch staring at dust mites in a shaft of sunlight.
Wait that rhymes! You feel something happening inside you. Maybe your Muse is here!
But it is too soon, you are only in the first trimester.
Second Trimester:
In this trimester you may struggle with patience as the waiting drags on. Perhaps you notice that your mood is dysregulated as you beat your desk senseless, then hug it, sobbing, promising to never hit it again with a closed fist.
And all the friends you reconnected with in the first trimester you now unfriend for no other reason than it gives you something to do while you are not writing. When you do write ideas… no come smooth… writing act all choppy… words no look good together… what go on? Bye words. Me find time to grieve.
While on sabbatical from writing, it is good to focus on your health. The Better Odds Diet will prepare you for that blessed moment when your Muse does visit you.
The BO Diet as it’s called, can in fact cause body odor because one of the three foods on it is cigarettes. But, if you, like a lot of writers, are a non-smoking smoker, then you will replace cigarettes with either candy cigarettes or any instrument, like a pen or straw that mimics the shape and size of a cigarette. Included in the diet is any food you can eat out of a bag at your desk, whether it’s junk food or healthy food it must be messy and leave stains on your clothes so you can prove to your Muse that you were “at the ready,” sitting at a desk, waiting.
The drink of choice for writers is coffee, but if you are the kind of writer who needs to be drunk to write, then go ahead and drink, but know that alcohol is no longer officially part of the BO Diet since a group of expats living in Paris overdid it in the roaring twenties causing a whole group of Muses to go on strike for better conditions.
Note that the second trimester may bring some physical discomfort. Here are a few exercises that will help to alleviate the mental cramping you feel. One is the finger cracking exercise. To do this exercise simply interlace your fingers and invert them, then press the palms of the hands toward the ceiling or the space directly in front of your heart.
Another exercise is the gentle sweep of the writing space. Using your fingers, softly brush any imaginary particles from your computer or desk in a circular motion, then reverse direction.
And don’t forget to give yourself a special neck massage in order to thin the area around the cervical spine to allow the writing ideas to pass more readily from the brain to the fingers when the time comes.
Third Trimester:
Congratulations! You made it to the final stretch. Now, if all goes well, the Muse will show up. At this point in the cycle, you are probably literally bursting with ideas and they must come out. But instead, you may find yourself rocking back and forth while you write words like: Muse… still …no want to help make a shapely sentence… please…. Come Gentle Muse, do for me…
While you may not have produced any decent writing at this point in the trimester, you have instead produced a clean work space, limber fingers, and a really nice, smoothed out cervical spine. Which is good because in this final trimester you may notice that all the ideas you have for your writing will drop lower, from your head toward your fingers. Your fingers may even began to twitch a little as you approach a writing implement, thinking to yourself this is it….The Muse is coming. I feel it in my bones. However, these feelings, although coming on stronger and with more intensity, may not be signs of the imminent arrival of the Muse, but rather signs of something else. These are the infamous Braxton-Hicks Band, a marauding gang of fakery. Don’t believe their lies! They are not your Muse. They pretend to be. The ideas they float look good at first, yet when you put them into writing they lead to nothing but a dead end. After hitting the umpteenth brick wall, the Braxton-Hicks Band moves on to level two, suggesting that you scan the writing of your favorite author to get the juices flowing. You do that. Nothing wrong with looking. All writers read!
At the urging of the Band, you write. But your writing sounds different, less like you and more, or maybe, exactly, like your favorite writer’s writing. Go, Go, Go, sings the Braxton-Hicks Band, as you try, like all great artists, to steal. But stealing is always wrong and you are not a great enough artist to pull it off anyway. The Band will continue to play on, even after you realize that this style of writing will not only keep your Muse away, it will also fend off any readers.
Abandoning that, a writer may follow the next, and possibly worst of the fake inspirations and turn to Artificial Intelligence. And then realize, after playing around with AI, that AI is the worst plagiarist of all, taking not just from one author, but from every author.
Abandon all hope, ye who abandon me! AI screams at you as you move to shut it down.
At this point a writer may lose hope.
And that is a good time to go on a walk. Walking during the third trimester is the most effective way to stimulate the onset of writing. This will happen at the exact moment your Muse shows up. One thing to keep in mind (if you can keep anything in your mind at this stage) is this: when that happens, you are going to want to be near your writing materials, so stick to a familiar route close to your base.
This cannot be stressed enough.
The Muse could suddenly arrive while a writer is driving on a lonely highway at night with nowhere to pull over or sitting in a boring work meeting. If this happens to you, don’t panic. Calmly bring yourself to a safe environment where you can write furiously without or crashing your car or losing your job. Typically, when the Muse shows up in these situations, the writing will often gush out in a torrent. Do not be alarmed. In many cases, the longer the wait, the more forceful the release. All how nature intended it to be.
Apres moi, le deluge, as the French Muses like to say.
Or as you may shout lustily: I write therefore I am!
Finally, please remember to never question the Muse’s timing. The delay allows a writer time to flush out the false starts, excess baggage, and dead weight. While you may see the delay as a form of rejection—the Muse sees it as a form of protection. Your ideas may not be fully formed yet and if they are put into writing they may be too weak and unsure to live in the wild.
Muses have their reasons. In the end, what is important is that you have not labored in vain, with help from your Muse, there will be writing, a good chunk of it that you can marvel over and say well, hello there writing! And the writing may answer you back. It might say something like, me needs editing.
If this is the case, you will find yourself embarking on the wonderful journey that is editing, a journey that has its own unique challenges, requiring a different set of skills, and yes, a whole separate Muse for that. Your Writing Muse, having midwifed the writing out, will be at this time off on a well-deserved vacation.
hilarious and brilliant - as always!
Very insightful... and better yet, very funny! Thanks.