(no subject)

[the_rck]

I seem to have found my muse again after many years of searching. During the last dozen years, the only fiction (if you can call it that) that I've finished has been my LARP scenarios. I've started and abandoned numerous stories. Either I couldn't figure out where to go with them and lost interest or I got nervous about my perceptions of where the story might go. A little bit of "I'm afraid to go there" and a little bit of "I'm not confident that works." It's been horribly frustrating, a kind of continual reaching for something I couldn't quite even see.

Starting that Kenshin fic with LunarGeography seems to have shaken something loose. I haven't written anything new on it in the last couple of weeks, but I've been working on something else. It's dark and depressing, and it works. It, also, is fanfic, based on Weiss Kreuz (aka Knight Hunters). I'm rediscovering the joys of playing head games with fictional characters (Well, I'm not sure I lost it, given that I GM, but...).

Basically, I need to write what I need to write and to forget about what I "ought" to write or what other people have told me they want me to write. I'm doing this for myself because I need to rather than for an audience. Certainly, I'd love to have other people read my work and praise it and all that, but that's NOT why I'm writing.

Now I just need to find a way to silence what LunarGeography's husband refers to as "the inner critic." My brain keeps telling me that my plots are ridiculous and overwrought and... And I have to manage to turn around and tell myself that it doesn't matter as long as I'm having fun.

Comments

[rimrunner.livejournal.com]

Ah, yes, the Inner Critic. She's a bitch, isn't she?

A useful one, though. The trick--as numerous instructors have told me--is to switch her off when you're getting down to the business of actually writing, then switch her on again when it's time to revise. Otherwise she pokes in where she has no business being, and tries to edit your work before you've even written.

Greg Bear has some interesting stuff to say about Muses. Mine appears to be disturbingly Dionysian.

(Totally know what you mean about the "not going there" thing. What I've learned about this is that once you've led the readers to expect that you will go there, wherever there is, you'd better do it. Otherwise, they get pissed.)

[the_rck]

I do find the ability to edit, to simply throw out sections that really don't work, to be an asset. I'm just working on ways to get the lady to shut up at other times...

I seem to have a weird connection between my Muse and my Inner Critic. The Muse gets very shy and tentative (I sort of picture a little girl standing looking at the ground and rolling the toe of one foot in front of her, just short of kicking the ground) while the Inner Critic becomes the superego (which I suppose shouldn't surprise me) and tells me I'd be better off doing something productive like scrubbing the bathtub. If I can persuade the Inner Critic that I'm not going to do anything "productive" until I've written a certain amount, she'll shut up. At that point, the Muse starts tugging on my hand with a sort of "come look at what I've found!" attitude.

So is your Muse Dionysian in the sense that she works better when assisted in running wild or in the sense that she goes places most people miss by being too sensible?

As to "there," at the moment it mainly has to do with levels of sex and violence. I have a certain sense that it's dangerous to let other people see that I can conceive of such things since my public facade leads them to suppose otherwise. I'm managing to do it, and it's some of the best writing I've done in years. Now I just have to find the courage to let other people see it...

Some of that reluctance also comes from knowing that what I write makes some of my family and friends uncomfortable. I suspect that it's the disconnect between my public persona and the places my imagination has always gone. I just haven't generally pushed anyone to see that my masks aren't all of me.