{"id":229,"date":"2012-01-02T06:00:26","date_gmt":"2012-01-02T12:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/?p=229"},"modified":"2012-01-02T06:00:26","modified_gmt":"2012-01-02T12:00:26","slug":"flogging-the-muse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/?p=229","title":{"rendered":"Flogging the Muse"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cSing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns, driven time and again off course\u2026\u201d \u2013 Robert Fagles translation of Homer\u2019s Odyssey<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I am not the sort of man who waits for his muse to sing.\u00a0 I put a quarter in the jukebox, and if the music doesn\u2019t start, I kick it like a roid-raged Fonzie.<\/p>\n

I keep my muse on her toes.\u00a0 I don\u2019t give her time to rest.\u00a0 I keep a constant stream of input flowing to her from any source available, about anything I can find.\u00a0 Each new string of thought strikes her, like a whip upon a plow horse, driving my muse through the muddied earth of imagination, in hopes that something new might grow from the shattered pieces of inspiration surrounding me.<\/p>\n

Whether it is real life or art, I expose her to anything.\u00a0 But I also have several tricks I use when that fails.\u00a0 Here is one of my favorite techniques to try when story prompts, current events, and plain old creativity fail.<\/p>\n

I love stealing phrases from poetry.\u00a0 Poets are forced by their medium to make every word matter.\u00a0 Every phrase is an image.\u00a0 I use poetry that mirrors the tone of my writing and steal favorite phrases.\u00a0 I have certain poets I read most often.\u00a0 Plath, Poe, and Dickinson are some of my favorites.\u00a0 The Homer quote was no accident.\u00a0 My inspiration sometimes goes\u00a0 back to the ancient tragedies.<\/p>\n

There is a line in the film As Good as it Gets<\/em> when Greg Kinnear talks about a light coming over people that tells him that is when he needs to paint them.\u00a0 That is how I feel when I find the right phrase.\u00a0 I take the phrase totally out of context.\u00a0 Sometimes, I will read the poem backwards to make sure I don\u2019t get distracted by the meaning of the poem.\u00a0 I don\u2019t want the writer\u2019s meaning of the phrase, I want my own.<\/p>\n

The next step is stolen from Ray Bradbury.\u00a0 Type the phrase at the top of the first page.\u00a0 Then, just write.\u00a0 I am a seat of the pants writer.\u00a0 If a story comes to mind, I\u2019ll write it.\u00a0 If I have nothing, I will write about the phrase.\u00a0 When the story shows up, I\u2019ll run with it.<\/p>\n

I will never wait for ideas.\u00a0 I don\u2019t have time for that.\u00a0 I take a blue collar approach to writing.\u00a0 Clock in, work, and clock out.\u00a0 Ideas, be damned.<\/p>\n

You don\u2019t have to be a poet to try this technique.\u00a0 I don\u2019t write poetry, and I rarely read it for pleasure.\u00a0 Yet, I have found poetry to be a gold mine of inspiration.\u00a0 Give it a try.\u00a0 Go pick up a couple of poetry anthologies.\u00a0 Get big, thick ones, and bludgeon your muse with them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cSing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns, driven time and again off course\u2026\u201d \u2013 Robert Fagles translation of Homer\u2019s Odyssey I am not the sort of man who waits for his muse to sing.\u00a0 I put a quarter in the jukebox, and if the music doesn\u2019t start, I kick […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[114,534,721,856,904],"class_list":["post-229","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-process","tag-bondage","tag-ideas","tag-muse","tag-poetry","tag-ray-bradbury"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=229"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=229"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=229"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.confabulatorcafe.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=229"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}