The Tortoise and the Abundant Muse

Over the summer, while considering ways to improve Imagination Unbound, many, many, oh so many, ideas poured into my mind, thanks to a highly functioning Muse. And when I say lots of ideas, I mean LOTS.  Capturing every single one of them was impossible. My mind, on the best of days, is like a partially clogged sieve.

Of course, with lots of ideas, comes the arduous task of sifting through the ones you do manage to capture. Which ones do I pursue? Which ones should be tossed aside? Which ones should be implemented first? Where do I go from here?

Thanks Muse. You’ve been very co-operative, and as usual, you’ve placed a muchos taco on my metaphorical plate, to the point where I feel stuffed and bloated and wonder why I indulge in everything you offer me.

My Muse doles out so many ideas sometimes, I have to wonder about her intentions. Her abundance has never been entirely appreciated; sometimes, but not always. Having access to a never-ending resource of ideas has its perks, but it also has a lot of drawbacks, especially if you want to use everything. How do you determine which of all the ideas has the most merit to fulfill, especially when you know you work slowly?

And this is where the anxiety creeps in. Because, ultimately, trying to determine which of the many ideas to pursue truly points to an underlying worry that which ever one I choose will lead to non-fruition. That’s really the problem, isn’t it? Which of these ideas will waste my time or keep me from attaining future goals for writing and for the blog? If it takes x-amount of time to accomplish something, it’d be nice if it could amount to something readable for others when it’s finished.

Trying to understand the purpose of my Muse’s abundance has led to two conclusions. And correct me if I’m wrong, Almighty Muse!

The first is that she is trying to teach me to be selective of what she has to offer. In other words, I need to learn to pace myself and curb my appetite in terms of ideas worth exploring, because I’m a slow writer. Being a pig, so far, has just weighed me down with too many possibilities and choices, which in turn has resulted in non-productivity and a little bit of a potbelly.

The second conclusion is that the many ideas my Muse offers indicates a potential for being proliferate. If I just wrote fast enough, then I could explore that next idea. Learning how to be spontaneous and overcoming procrastination, being more assured about the choices I make, could fulfill this potential and perhaps speed up the writing process somewhat.

Of course, I find this second conclusion interesting, because I am such a tortoise–slow and steady wins the race, or in this case, gets the writing finished and posted or sent out to a publisher. So which conclusion has more merit than the other? I suspect the answer has something to do with both of these conclusions.

Being selective about ideas is important for a couple of reasons.

Selectivity helps the mind dismiss anything which is irrelevant to the project you are working on at the time. Being selective can really fine tune your focus. In its extreme, it can also result in a blinding sort of tunnel vision, where punchy and kick-ass ideas are filtered out as well, leaving your work flat and uninspired.

Being selective also has the advantage of revealing deeper conceptions. By not going ape-shit creative with the first idea that comes to you, your Muse will delve a little deeper and offer themes which are more profound, helping to avoid the pitfalls of stories, characters and settings that are weak, common, or done-to-death-beat-me-with-a-dead-fish-please.

A Digression: Since I can remember, I’ve been experimental with words. The question “Is there another way I can phrase this?” has become something of a mantra. In my mid-twenties, I began to notice in writing and in speech certain word clusters which never changed; I call these conventional phrases. They were standard, common, repeated as if they were some indicator of great intelligence and written in stone somewhere holy. They were the proper way to say things, and if you strayed from these conventions, you were corrected. Over the years, people have corrected me a lot. Some people just don’t appreciate my attempts to shake up language any more than I appreciate their dullness. Conventional phrases fall into the done-to-death-beat-me-with-a-dead-fish-please category. Now let’s get back to selectivity…

Selectivity as a form of abandoning certain ideas–even temporarily–can make working on a project proceed at a quicker pace. This means the sooner a specific set of ideas are exhausted, the sooner you can begin outlinining a new body of work to explore different concepts.

Focusing on exploring well excavated ideas could lead to a really great piece of writing, which in turn results in confidence-building. Believing in your ability, well, there’s simply nothing wrong with that, because it removes the doubt-expletives that have a way of stalling out a lot of artists.

Let me put it to you this way… Selectivity of ideas leads to better choices in writing, resulting in better writing, which in turn boosts ego and confidence and know how. These in turn create a less questionable and doubting attitude about our choices. Less hesitation results in ease of writing and more speed. Writing quicker means projects are finished in a timely fashion. The end of one project means the beginning of a new one, and before we know it, we’re excavating a new set of ideas, and so on and so forth. Final result, prolificity. (If this isn’t a real word, it should be. Wait… consulting dictonary and… it is a real word. Damn it!)

This, of course, is just one way to approach the overwhelmingness of an Abundant Muse. At least, that’s how I intend to approach her ideas for the blog, which included providing podcasts of readings of the articles, or possibly writing and recording radio plays. Other ideas included selling e-novellas and posting some serial fiction. All of these are great ideas, and only a sampling of what my Muse nonchalantly coughed up. When and how or even if any of them are fully implemented, time will tell.

For all the times I came down hard on my Muse, when all she was doing was providing opportunities for writing projects, for learning about writing and myself, I should appreciate her abundance of ideas more. I do. It’s not her fault I can’t keep up or understand which way her guidance is directing me, right?

The fact that she continues to speak to me after years of neglect, and sometimes some harsh words after she’s led me down some questionable paths in life, just makes her a pretty tenacious Muse. For that, I am grateful!