Oh muse, bugger off. Or, a diarrhea of ideas.
Posted: November 21, 2010 Filed under: writer's block Leave a comment »The opposite of a writer’s block is when your muse suddenly arrives, apparently and always from another timezone, expecting you to be on your knees in praise, with welcome slippers in your mouth and a cup of freshly made hot chocolate in your hand.
After two days of physical labor, my mind was on snoozefest and my brain has shown no signs of creative activity whatsoever. Until tonight. When everyone else in the house is asleep and snoring in rhythm, when all the Christmas lights of the neighbors have all been turned off, when I am ready to call it a fantastic, deadline-free weekend, my muse arrives bringing all her siblings with her.
A noisy and nosy lot. I can’t shut them off even if I wanted to, once they’ve settled, there’s no cure, the mind is completely awake, so awake it can almost see into it’s past and future, it let’s out an apologia one minute and an homage to Howl in the next. Grammar is thrown into the cliff, the internal editor has been drugged, gagged and, for good measure, clubbed.
When you ask for it, when you practically beg for it to show even the hem of it’s clothing, your muse simply has other more pressing things to do, like perhaps watch you rip your hair out of your head from trying to find the right words to write.
Now, it feels like they have ransacked the filing cabinets in my brain, rearranged, re-indexed (is there such a word?) and created a whole other system of filing ideas, thoughts, memories and musings, that now they all seem to have other things to say, other meanings, other insights that simply must be let out. A diarrhea of ideas.
Freud would be happy, or grim, to say that I probably was abused in my childhood since I keep relating my non-physical ailments to shit and anuses. First I had emotional constipation and now a diarrhea of ideas. Well, Freud, bugger off.
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Amazing how a few hundred words can keep the idearrhea (wording the obvious, ugh, mortal sin, but this is my blog and this is my late night writing so bugger off) at bay. Now to bed, and tomorrow, let’s hope I don’t wake up with my mind having ruined the sheets. Hopefully by daylight my muse has moved on from fishing metaphors out of the toilet; it’s getting smelly, my writing.
Quits of Wisdom
Posted: December 6, 2007 Filed under: mavic, quips of wisdom, writer's block, writing, writing process Leave a comment »When I have no idea of what to write my fingers kindly begin with ‘there’ as if pointing me to something right in front of my face, dangling like a snake from an apple tree, a quip of wisdom, which at the moment is seductively hiding in the weaves of ether and is beyond my mind’s grasp.
There, there. My fingers strike the keys with familiarity, muscle memory, and an eager dog’s tail wag. There the ther t there are. On and on, typing and deleting. I play a game of charades with my fingers, they must have their own consciousness, my brain must have delegated quite ingeniously. I am not good at charades, the last time I played it I answered ‘The Longest Lilo and Stitch’ instead of ‘The Longest Yard’ and I had to go through ChikkaStop, ChikkaLord, ChikkaGo before I reached Chicago. The tail wag has now lost intensity.
There, there. It has now become a pat in the back. The ether has thickened and the snake has slithered into its depths; the sinister whiteness of the virtual page is the evil twin to the pallor of my brain.
A cup of coffee. There, there.
There’s always tomorrow to start writing.
