So I hear
things are getting serious with you and your muse! You’re getting together more often, things
feel “right,” your writer friends refer to you as a unit rather than two
disparate entities ... it’s a wonderful feeling, isn’t it? Well, listen up, because here’s where it gets
tricky. When the fairy dust wears off,
and everything you two do stops seeming sparkly and wonderful just because you’re in love, things are gonna get real, and life is going to happen, and it’s way too
easy to stop having that lovin’ feeling.
I’ve got your back: follow these steps, and you’ll be able to weather
the hard times like a seasoned pro.
1. Be attentive.
A day or two
goes by where you can’t devote as much time to your muse. They sidle up and try to get your attention,
and you wave them off because you absolutely have to finish this load of
laundry, or arrange a celebratory dinner, or do your taxes. Life gets busy, it’s true, and sometimes you
don’t have a choice other than to take things down a notch.
That being
said, you can almost always find the time and energy to write a note from your main character to their love
interest, or to edit what you wrote yesterday.
Find a way to show your muse that they’re still important to you, even
if you can’t devote as much time to them as you’d like right now, and they’ll
recognize that you still care, making them far more likely to stick around.
2. Define boundaries.
While it’s
important to be attentive to your muse, you also need to establish some
boundaries. This will depend on the kind
of relationship you want. Maybe you’re
happy spending hours together each and every day - some of it dedicated writing
time, some of it just dawdling through brainstorming and reading books together
- or maybe you’re better off with something more defined, more strict, like two
hours a day, from 1:00 to 3:00 PM, Monday to Friday, and you spend your
weekends doing other things.
Don’t define
your relationship with your muse by what works for your best writing buddy:
this relationship is unique to you
and your muse, so the boundaries that
work for you will be different, too.
3. Have date nights.
Once you’ve
defined the boundaries of your relationship with your muse, you’ll have a sense
of the routine that works best for you.
With that in mind, you can mix things up once in a while, do something
special. This isn’t just for the benefit
of your muse: this is for both of you.
It’s a special thing you have going, and it can be easy to take that for
granted, especially once you slip into a routine that feels so terribly comfy.
Have a date
night with your muse once in a while.
Write somewhere you’ve never been, have a writing marathon,
go hear an author speak and take copious notes.
Make the effort and your muse will return the favour.
If they don’t,
if they’re a little tired and maybe not all there, that’s okay, too: they’ll
still appreciate the time you put in, and you’ll reap the rewards in future.
4. Don’t crowd or pressure your muse.
With all
this talk about being attentive to your muse and spending time with them and
going on date nights, there’s another point to be made: crowding and pressuring
your muse is BAD. Like we talked about
earlier, your relationship might bear up to six, eight, ten hours a day doing
writing and writing-related activities, or it might be more along the lines of
an hour every morning. Don’t try and
make the relationship something it’s not, and recognize that relationships go
through phases.
If you’ve
spent three months writing for five hours a day, every day, without pause, and
your writing is starting to feel bland, your muse might be feeling a little
worn out. Give them some room to
breathe. Spend a few days freewriting,
art journaling, filling the well.
It’s
important in times like these to show your muse that you’re there, that you’ll
be waiting for them when they’re ready, and that you’re prepared to support
them and bear some of the load in the meantime.
5. Know when to be playful and when to get serious.
The best
relationships are the ones where we can be silly, where we can do something
goofy without worrying we’ll be looked down on or made fun of. Don’t be afraid to run amok with your muse, adding space dinosaurs to your work-in-progress or gallivanting
through bizarre prompts. I’ve started
keeping track of my favourite prompts on Pinterest, so I can find them easily:
Seriously. Have fun.
Treat your muse like it’s the Doctor, standing at the console of the
TARDIS, asking if you’d rather have tea with the king of the hamsters or see
the Beatles in concert, and say “YES!” with unbridled enthusiasm!
Just as
there’s a time for silliness, though, there’s a time to buckle down and get
serious. Keep things light for too long,
putting off opportunities to dive deep with a new story idea or with your
work-in-progress, and your muse is going to start feeling like you’re not all
in. They might stick around for a while,
or their gaze might start to wander, and you’ll start giving each other the
silent treatment, and one day you’ll wake up and realize that you feel like you
don’t really know each other anymore, that it’s hard to trust, to reach
out. It’s a painful situation, and the
best way to avoid it (as well as following the advice throughout this post) is
to commit to regular writing sessions where you dive into your story and write.
Use prompts as a warm-up or when things feel stale, but don’t let it
become your default for too long.
6. Play fair.
It starts
innocently enough. You’re talking with a
writing friend and they’re gushing (rightfully so) about how their latest WIP
has been flying off their fingertips.
They talk about how well it’s working to write in the early morning, so
they have the rest of the day free to focus on their day job and spending time
with their kids. You think, Wow, that must be nice. Because things haven’t been smooth sailing
for you and your muse lately. You’re
scratching out more than you’re writing; and time to spend with your kids and
spouse? Forget it.
And then
things turn a little more bitter. You
start to think how inconvenient it is that you can only write at night. You snort as you remember the cold shoulder
your muse gave you the other day when you tried to talk to them about that new
character. It ain’t pretty.
It’s easy to
accuse your muse of being flighty and forget your own part in the
relationship. It’s easy to forget it’s a
partnership, that you’re equally as responsible for how it goes, if not
more. The fact is, if you lash out at
your muse, if you rail at them for never being there when you need them, you’re
only going to drive them further away.
Be
kind. Look at why things aren’t
working. Go back to the earlier points
in this post and see what you’re missing.
If writing at night isn’t panning out anymore, change your schedule
around to try an hour in the morning and two in the afternoon. If you’re struggling to move forward with
your work-in-progress, set it aside for a little while and work on a fresh
project, giving yourself a deadline by which you’ll return to the other.
Whatever you
do, though, play fair. The grass isn’t
always greener. Remember how, a month
ago, that same writing friend who was just telling you how head over heels in
love they are with their WIP was crying on your shoulder about how nothing was
working, they couldn’t write anymore, they just didn’t know how to string a
sentence together in a way that could possibly matter?
Yeah. What goes around, comes around. You’ll get through this. Just don’t give up. You and your muse are in this together.
7. The little things matter.
Okay, that
last point was a little heavy. We’re
going to end things on a sweet, light note now, but no less important, so listen
up.
A crucial
key to courting your muse is to pay attention to the little things.
Think about
it: if you’re always focused on the date nights and grand gestures, the writing
marathons and the plot outlines, things are going to peter out pretty darn
fast. You’ll lose steam. How could you not?
We’ve
already talked about putting in the effort and making things fun, but let’s
talk about how that applies to the little things. It’s about narrowing your focus. It’s about giving your mind a break from the
big stuff to do something like reworking one of your scenes to make it fresher,
more lively;
(re)developing one of your characters to ensure they pop off the
page and into your reader’s lap; or using the Pomodoro technique every day for a week to revamp your writing routine into something more
manageable.
If you’ve
been focused for a while on writing 3,000 words a day, this could feel
painfully slow, and like you’ll never get anywhere. It might even feel like it doesn’t
matter. But it does. The little things, in concert with the big
and the middling things, are going to keep you and your muse together in a
happy, healthy relationship for decades to come. Just wait for the golden anniversary
party. It’s going to be a hoot!
If you enjoyed this post, you might also like Ten Ways to Regain Your Writing Mojo and 14 Easy Ways to Bring Your Scenes to Life.