Tricking the Muse Into Showing Up

Please welcome Keith Cronin to the blog today. He’s tackling a problem we don’t often like to acknowledge: despite our best “butt in chair” efforts, sometimes if the Muse doesn’t show up, the writing just doesn’t happen. Here he offers some tips on how to work our way around moments of writer’s block.

I’d love to tell you that I write every day. A thousand words, rain or shine.

But I don’t.

I write when I feel like it. And if the Muse doesn’t show up, I stop.

I’m not suggesting that this is a good approach. But the truth is, when the juices aren’t flowing, I don’t try to write – probably because I’m overly conscious that anything I write could end up lasting forever. (Hey, it could happen…)

That said, I’m not willing to wait forever; after all, I’ve got work to do. So over the years I’ve found a couple of ways to trick that annoying Muse into showing up.

An Inconvenient Muse

I doubt I’m the only one who has noticed that inspiration strikes at the most inconvenient times. Give me a free weekend, with nothing to do but write, and what do I get? Nada. Squat. Zilch. But put me in a car, late for work? The ideas start to flow like freaking Niagara. And I often get bursts of inspiration when I’m in the shower, another location where pen and paper are not exactly close at hand (and where a laptop would pose the threat of electrocution). This leads me to suspect that the Muse has a bit of a mean streak.

But it has also caused me to recognize a pattern. I posted about the Muse’s habit of showing up at the worst possible times at the Backspace forum, an online community that has been invaluable to me as a writer, and I received a very interesting response from novelist/publisher/psychotherapist Billie Hinton, who offered this observation:

“I learned when I studied hypnotherapy for my work that there is a phenomenon called ‘highway hypnosis’ – it’s a mild trance state many of us go into while driving because we drive so much, and the movement is conducive to induction. Given what we know about trance states, it makes total sense that these creative epiphanies come while driving/riding in cars.” Billie went on to recommend that when driving, “keep an open notebook and pen on the seat beside you!”

It sounds so simple, and yet it works. I followed Billie’s advice, and ended up figuring out several key scenes for my novel Me Again while driving aimlessly around South Florida. But the notepad on my passenger seat went largely unused. Instead, I made many calls to my answering machine from my cellphone while I drove, and transcribed the results when I got home.

And the showering thing? It works, too! Sometimes I’ll take a shower even if I don’t need one, just because I want to get the creative side of my brain (is that the right or left brain? I can never remember) to click into gear.

So that’s my recommendation to you. Are you blocked? Is the Muse nowhere in sight? Then grab your car keys – or a bar of soap – and trick that pesky Muse into showing up to help you write your book!

Author of the novel Me Again, Keith Cronin is a corporate speechwriter and professional rock drummer who has performed and recorded with artists including Bruce Springsteen, Clarence Clemons, and Pat Travers. Keith is also becoming informally known as “the title guy,” having provided the title for Sara Gruen’s blockbuster Water for Elephants, as well as Susan Henderson’s HarperCollins debut Up from the Blue. Visit him online at keithcronin.com or facebook.com/keithcronin.

photo credit: roctopus