Tag Archives: Muse

Hibernation & the muse…

22 Sunday Mar 2020

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A few of you who follow me may recall my somewhat occasional & fanciful notion that Virginia Woolf is my muse. My admiration for her writing has sometimes led me to place imaginary trays of tea & buns outside her metaphorical door, with the aim of persuading her to lend her genius to my lesser & more lowly pursuits.

Right…

In other, more realistic, muse-related ramblings, I call on my word birds. And let’s be honest, they’re far more likely to aid me than the ghost of Mrs Woolf.

In these odd times, I confess to having struggled over the past week. Largely due to political shenanigans. (Let’s not dwell – this is a blog about my work, not my ‘men in grey suits where are all the women and the joined-up thinking?‘ observations.) Trying to get my old head around the new regime & telling myself, there is always the new story to write!

The interwebs have been awash with writer-focused memes, not least the one about how Will Shakespeare penned both King Lear & Macbeth during the plague. Aimed, I’m sure, at reassuring us that all we need to do is ignore the firestorm, hibernate, knuckle down & crack on with the latest book. All well & good but the reality is, anxiety is a poor bedfellow for the muse.

I’m hearing many stories, online & from my writer friends, about how they’re struggling to concentrate. How the plan to use this enforced time of solitary existence to write is already falling by the wayside.

A few weeks ago I began writing my fourth book. I love it to bits & if it isn’t quite writing itself (that would be a trick worthy of a witchy woman!) it is coming along nicely. Having lost some of my hwyl for the act of writing per se, rather than the story, I know this is a crucial moment. It’s an opportunity to write a story that wants to be written. No excuse not to. There are weeks, possibly months of this hibernating lark ahead of me so a grip must be got!

A myriad muses (musii?) for all my writer friends! And whether the shade of Mrs W likes it or not, I’m calling up one of my favourites quotes.

Onward & sideways as my mum used to say. Apposite on Mother’s Day too! I kissed her picture this morning & like to imagine, she kissed me back.

Writing the wrongs

15 Sunday Dec 2019

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It is highly likely, dear reader, I could be tempted into wordy confabulation (see?) when it needs only my best & simplest words to adequately convey what I feel. The hell in a handcart shenanigans I predicted have occurred. It gives me no pleasure to be proved right. Being right about something so wrong is awful. Like almost everyone I know, this feels like a dark time. I’m not in the mood for hopeful memes or well-meaning platitudes – hope for too many people has been ravaged. Our hearts are hurting.

Saddened by what I see as a squandered political opportunity, I turn to that which gives me, on a very personal level, a measure of hope. When despair strikes, write. Reach for the words.

Mistress Crow has been ubiquitous. Landing in the skeletal birch tree, her feathered finery silhouetted against wintry skies, she’s been eyeing me for a few weeks now. Or so it seems. I try not to anthropomorphise wild creatures & resist the temptation to second guess a bird. But the version of me who toys with the idea of a muse can’t give up on the idea that some of the words I conjure arrive via some magical, possibly birdy, portal.

My next quest, should I choose to accept it, is to write the right book. Finish #Book4 – all 89,000 words of it? I still don’t know & the reason is simple: the singular voice of #Book5 will not be still. Like Mistress Crow, she perches, peripheral & illusory, whispering her intriguing, scary first person present words in my ear. And I can’t shake her off.

Come the next new moon – Boxing Day therefore perfectly placed – I have a decision to make. The write one… Right?

Onward & sideways, as my mother used to say… Not least about shenanigans.

In which the itch to write returns & I guiltily mourn the decline of the servant class

29 Tuesday Sep 2015

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It is a fact universally acknowledged that a man in possession of a completed novel has either a wife or a maid. I have neither. I am a woman who lives alone (by choice – I’m not sad or anything.) And in any case, even if I could afford one, my socialist inclinations make me feel slightly guilty at the idea of employing another woman to do my housework.

I am also a woman who has a love-hate relationship with procrastination.

Recent events have kept me from my writing. The timing was interesting. I’m waiting for my Editorial Notes (please forgive caps – still excited and can hardly believe I’m even due any.) With draft zero Book 2 tucked away for the duration I was at a bit of a loose end anyway. I had my notes for Book 3 to play with and an unexpected trip to Cornwall to visit my family fitted very nicely thank you.

I’ve been back for two weeks now and once again, the Muse nags. The other day I dipped into The Hours by Michael Cunningham and a scene near the beginning where Mrs Woolf (for it is she) takes herself downstairs in the early, seductive writing hour, helps herself to coffee and proceeds in the direction of her study via the printing room. Leonard (already at his proofs) waylays her.

“Have you had breakfast?” he asks.
“Yes.”
“Liar.”
“I’m having coffee with cream for breakfast. It’s enough.”
“It’s far from enough. I’m going to have Nelly bring you a bun and some fruit.”
“If you send Nelly in to interrupt me I won’t be responsible for my actions.”

And this, dear reader, is where Mrs Woolf and I part company. I long for a ‘Nelly’ to interrupt me with a bun and some fruit: blessed Nelly, who would then disappear and attend to the chores leaving me free to create deathless prose. Or, at the very least, get to grips with the latest notes for Book 3. My scribbles are accumulating and I need to get them organised while I wait for my EN’s.

I can feel a return to work coming on. In the absence of a Nelly, I must make an effort.

Meeting my muse in my bath

23 Sunday Aug 2015

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In my perfect, fanciful world, Virginia Woolf is my muse. In my real one, all she has ever done is lead me to abandon punctuation & paragraphs while I, in the mistaken belief that I understand ‘stream of consciousness’ well enough to make it a viable motif in my own writing, follow like a witless fool. I freely confess to having wasted a lot of valuable time in this pointless pursuit.

My actual muse is a creature who lives somewhere in my bathroom. (She is probably a Daddy Long Legs or a small spider. Or even a helpful cobweb.) I know this because, without fail, each time I run a bath with the specific aim of mulling over a particularly puzzling writing-related issue, once I lie down in the water, I invariable mull usefully.

It happened this morning. With Book Two finished (draft zero – see above) & tucked away in a drawer to marinade for a week or two, I need something to do. (I’m not one of those writers who can amuse themselves with a short story or a bit of poetry. If it isn’t the book I’ve finished, then it has it be the one I’m about to start.)

For the past two days I’ve been outlining Book Three. The idea has been hanging round for some time & all at once, I got it. Apart that is for a small but crucial plot strand.

Cue a delicious, lavender & rose scented Sunday morning bath…

Job done.

It’s embryonic of course, but I do think it has [Daddy Long] legs… And it’s another ghost story…