Waking Up My Muse

I knew this day would come the day i woke up and found i was suffering from acute writers block. Writers block or exhaustion. Some mornings i wake up and do my computer thing (i.e. check soccer scores, surf craigslist, glance at my email) while drinking coffee and i can not keep my eyes open. This is one of those mornings. I don't like it. I don't like being tired and fighting a battle to stay awake and alert. All i want to do right now is retreat back to bed and sleep deep into the morning. That is the "now" in my brain talking, the real me knows that i don't like sleeping in and fights the urge to go back to sleep.

What I've just written is a consequence of my writers block. In the past, during sustained periods of committed writing, I've done free writing exercises to help over come writers block. The idea is to write regardless of limited brain activity or inspiration but to create a practice of writing that helps overcome those occasions. Writer's block has been the thing that has derailed my attempts at writing over and over and over and most likely will again. That is, of course, unless i can figure out a way to maintain my writing.

This is something Steven King writes about in On Writing. No writer will ever live a life full of inspiration, creativity oozing out their every orifice, and a Midas touch at the computer. It doesn't work that way, much to my dismay. Being inspired, for me is ideal, it is an effortless pathway to a productive day of writing. Being inspired happens so very rarely that writing is almost always an effort. To ease the effort, I've gotta keep on writing and make sure my muse is awake more often.

My muse (we all have one) is a rather lazy young man who drinks to much and doesn't like to socialize. He sits in the dark and reads, he is fond of the darker authors and books on my list and others I haven't mentioned. My muse is hard to motivate, hard to communicate with, and won't work for too long. I've let him go to seed, bye and large, let him off the hook for too long. I can feel him becoming a bit more active in this process of blogging. The thing about my muse is that when i call on him he has to reply, he has no choice, he's mine. He grumbles and comes to work slowly and with a bad attitude but he works when i insist and when i insist writing happens.

I've decided to write, that is part of what i want my future to be. That is why I've started this blog. So, my muse and i will overcome writer's block on a daily basis and write, here, on this blog. Hopefully we will write other things too and one day I'll look back on my blog and sigh and think that this was a catalyst for going forward with writing, a sort of shallow record of my life and experience in a time of big changes and new futures.