Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone? Part 4, Love in the Time of Cholera

I spoke in previous blogs about listening to what your own writing wants. Sometimes this involves fictional characters who have personalities and fates separate from what we might want them to have. A writer has to set his or her characters free so they can determine their own fates. This might sound odd, but let me give you an actual example.

When the Nobel laureate novelist Gabriel García Márquez was writing one of his masterpieces, Love in the Time of Cholera, he had a certain idea of what he wanted the family of the main female character, Fermina Daza, to look like. Here’s what García Márquez said in an interview about how he wrote this part of the novel:

“One of the characters was Fermina, an eighteen-year-old girl living in a Caribbean town in the late nineteenth century. She lived with her father, a Spanish immigrant, and with her mother, who I could not figure out. And there was her aunt, her father’s sister, who I saw very clearly and who had the same name. I just could not grasp the mother. I would seat them around the table and I could see how they all behaved—except for the mother. At first I thought the aunt was in the way. And I took her out and put her back again. But the mother was the problem. I could not see her, not the face, the name or anything about her. And then one day I woke up and realized what had happened. The mother had died while the girl was still young. And when I saw that the mother was dead, she became alive and real. She grew and had a great presence—in the house, in everyone’s memory. It made me so happy to resolve this. I had been stretching the logic of the book. I had been trying to put a dead person among the living, and that was not possible.”

I find it fascinating that a writer as masterful as García Márquez, talking about one of his best works, describes his writing process almost as if he is a spectator to the lives of his characters. His main role as he recounts it is to record what the characters are saying and doing. It is his job to determine what is authentic to the story and the characters, not to make the story come out the way he wants. He has to hold true to what he calls “the logic of the book.” This is where I feel the presence of the muse, because there must be some power that determined that Fermina’s mother had to exit the book as a living character. 
Maybe the muse is another name for what García Márquez calls the “logic of the book.” Even to García Márquez, it did not seem as if he was making this edit himself. It’s amazing that he trusted the creative process so much that he could give his characters the freedom to develop that much on their own. When he discovered what the book wanted, rather than what he wanted for it, García Márquez had what he called in the same interview “one of the most curious and enjoyable literary experiences” he ever had. I think when we are writing at our best, this is how the experience feels to us, as if the muse is powering the writing, and we are the vehicle for her work.

In my next blog on the muse, I'll talk about voices in the writer's head, what they are, and when to listen to them. 

Other recent posts about writing topics: 

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry? 

Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka

Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone? Part 3, Allow Your Writing a Life of Its Own

“O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend

The brightest heaven of invention…”

I still get a few shivers when I read that cry for a muse at the very beginning of Shakespeare’s play Henry V. “A Muse of Fire”—I love it! That’s the opposite of cliché language, to take the muses, spirits of the water, and turn them into flame.

But I’m not suggesting that you begin your works with an address to the muse. That is the very last thing I would ever suggest.

What’s most interesting to me about the ancient concept of the muse is that it seems like a fairly accurate description of the creative process when it reaches a certain speed or intensity—in other words, when it works best. When we are writing at our most inspired, it does feel as if the work is flowing from a spring beyond our personal consciousness. Even if we are writing about our most intimate memories or hopes, a moment can occur where we feel as if we are taking dictation, or as if the work is pouring through us, rather than from us.

This reminds me of that famous moment in literary history when the poet Rainer Maria Rilke was walking by himself on the ramparts of Duino Castle by the Adriatic Sea, at the very edge of the European landmass and at the extreme moment of his personal despair. Rilke looked at the waves dynamiting against the rocks and the bunched-up storm and heard the first words of the Duino Elegies come to him as if out of a dark cloud: “Even if I cried out loud, who would hear me in the ranks of the angels?” It’s a strange and fascinating question: why does he need the angels to hear him? That kind of line in Rilke’s poetry is so intriguing and maddening. It’s what makes me come back to his work over and over.

What does this mean for us as writers, that we seem to reach our greatest personal triumphs when we are least personally in control of our writing? It’s a humbling truth, one that should keep us from getting too swell-headed about our work. But beyond that, can we use the idea of the muse, or of an external inspiration, in practice? Can this idea help us as writers and as critical editors of our own creations?

To try to persuade you why this is important, I’m going to approach this subject by means of a metaphor: the parent and the child. There is a sense in which we are the parents of our writing, not its owners, any more than a father or a mother owns a child. Parents always want certain things for their children—those wishes may be a father or mother’s deepest hopes, in fact. But parents who insist on their children being just like them or parents who demand that their kids fulfill their frustrated dreams are missing one of the great mysteries of parenting. The greater challenge, for the parent and for the writer, is to witness the child or the work forming itself on its own, so closely related to the parent, but independent and with its own hopes and desires and weaknesses. Similarly, when we see our own writing most clearly is when we are no longer thinking of what we want for the work. We begin to think of what is best for the work. We start to let our writing tell us what it wants us to do for it, not what we want for it.

In my next blog I’ll discuss how this need for the work to exist on its own played out in the writing of one of my favorite novels, Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Márquez.

Other recent posts about writing topics:Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Why Write Poetry? 

Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka

Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone? Part 2, How and Why to Avoid Clichés

As poetic as the muses may be, I’m afraid that there is no more cliché moment in literature than invoking the muse at the beginning of an epic poem: “Sing, oh, ye muse!” And writers should avoid cliché diction like athletes in training should shun cheese fries and chocolate chip cookie sundaes. Cliché language is the very opposite of what Muse Power brings to our writing, which is the spark of the unexpected but true.

When I’m editing my own writing, I try to do one reading of my work where I’m not thinking about anything except purging cliché diction. I’m not looking at the overall success of the structure, the characters of the story, the arc of the emotion or plot—I’m just marking every cliché expression. 

How do you spot cliché language in your work? Ask yourself if you’ve ever, even once, read this image, description, or phrase before. If you have, or even if you suspect you have, it’s probably cliché and already overly familiar to the reader.

Why is that a bad thing? Because it doesn’t really register the emotion or image you’re trying to get those words to carry. If you write to your beloved, “My heart burns with desire for you,” it conveys anything but passion, since it seems as though you’re just repeating someone else’s words.

So what do you do when you spot cliché language? View it as an opportunity to go back to the emotion or scene that moved you to put it into words. Re-experience it the way you did the first time. Gather the image or scene deep in your imagination and then live it and describe it again. Instead of “My heart burns with desire,” go back to the source—write “It scares me how beautiful you are,” or something that really gets to that edgy emotion that pushed you to write in the first place. Or take the language you used and bend, twist, stretch, compress, rip, mince, or sauté it. Bring the words back to life.

A thesaurus is often not useful in this regard. A thesaurus is only going to take you to a word on the same level as the one you chose. You want to take your language up to the next level when you are trying to edit out cliché expressions.

In my next blog, I’ll return to the subject of the muse to discuss how that idea can liberate writers to tap into the fountain of inspiration. 

Other recent posts about writing topics:Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Why Write Poetry? 

Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka

Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone? Part 1

In this series of blogs, I'll talk about the ancient Greek idea of the muse, and whether there is anything writers can learn from that concept today.

You probably know that the concept of the muse as an inspiration for writers dates back to ancient Greece. But the muses then were not simply women whose presence sparked a poet to compose, as in this sentence: “Matilde Urrutia was Neruda’s muse and companion for more than a quarter of a century.” No, the muses in ancient Greece were viewed as goddesses, worshipped at shrines. Followers made sacrifices to them. People venerated them and believed in their immortality.

The muses of ancient Greece were always closely associated with liquid. They were water nymphs. According to mythology they inhabited two freshwater springs on an actual mountain in Greece: Helicon. One of the those fonts was the Hippocrene Spring. A myth recounts how the Hippocrene Spring first spouted when the winged horse Pegasus struck a rock with his hoof. Interesting that from ancient times creativity was associated with fluidity. We still talk that way. Think of the expression: “get your creative juices flowing.”

The muses, of course, were female, and poetic inspiration was not limited in ancient Greece to men. There was Sappho, but there were also other well-known women poets, including Nossis and Anyte, poets who were major influences on the poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle).

In Greek mythology, there were nine different muses, all of them sisters. I find it intriguing that the Greeks would recognize that inspiration has a completely different personality for different genres. Isn’t that the case, though? Each muse inspired a different sort of writing. I’ll list them, partly because I just like the sound of their names: Calliope was the source of epic poetry. Her sister Clio inspired history. Erato was the muse of love poetry or erotic writing. Euterpe was behind lyric poetry. Melpomene inspired tragedy. Polyhymnia guided sacred song, Terpsichore choral song and dance. Thalia sparked comedy and nature poetry. And lastly Urania was the muse of astronomy, which in ancient Greece was also written in metered verse.

The ancient Greek writer Hesiod said the nine muses were the daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, goddess of memory. Interesting that inspiration should be the child of memory and a thunderbolt, but writers know that is often the case. We rely on our memories to create or recall stories and images, even when we’re depicting fictional characters or situations. The thunderbolt could be that unexpected jolt of creativity that moves a project from random thoughts in our minds to something that speaks to a hunger or a common story in us and others. Of course in Hesiod’s time, the seventh century B.C.E., most literature was also memorized rather than written down, another connection between the muses and memory, as Eric Havelock points out in his book The Muse Learns to Write.

Hesiod, who described the muses in his book the Theogony, speaks of them always as singing: “Unwearying flows the sweet sound from their lips, and the house of their father Zeus—the loud thunderer—delights in the lily voice of the goddesses as it spreads, as it echoes off the peaks of snowy Olympus…” Hesiod recounts how the muses are “telling of things that are and things that will be,” giving them prophetic sight as well. 

In my next blog, I'll talk about the muses and how to banish cliché language from your writing. 

Other recent posts about writing topics:Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Why Write Poetry? 

Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka

Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer