How do you find your muse?

I don’t believe in muses in the mythological, daughters of Zeus sense, nor do I believe in afflatus. They fall into the category of man-made, make-believe concepts along with the Easter Bunny, Santy Claus and God. If we’re merely talking about the definition of muse meaning inspiration, creative influence or stimulus, I don’t really believe in that either. I’m more from the Bukowski school of writing in the sense that writing is something that comes from within, not from without. If you are a writer, or at least consider yourself one, you can (and should) force yourself to write every day, with or without external stimuli. It’s not that everything you write will be great or even good, but if you write every day, the odds of striking on brilliance dramatically increase in the same way that you will never win the lottery if you don’t buy a ticket.

Even if you see, hear or read something that gives you an idea, and then you go write it down, the words themselves, the fleshing out of that idea, comes from within you. The words and how you put them together are yours even though the idea may have been external; so, this concept of external influence is pretty well bunk in my opinion. All of our lives are different. We all glean different knowledge from the same experience. Even if the end result is the same, we arrive at the same conclusion from different places. No two people experience the same thing in exactly the same way.

However, to be fair and honest, for nearly a year, I have used Plinky and now, The Daily Post as creative guides. I wouldn’t have written nearly as much on this blog last year if not for the daily writing prompts. When I was unemployed, every day, I forced myself to answer the, more often than not, silly writing prompts, even if nothing came to mind. I wrote a lot of nonsense, but I also wrote some things that I consider to be fairly good. While a lot of my answers were pat and formulaic, I did write some fiction and some answers that came straight from my soul, which exposed my vulnerability. Those posts most likely would not have been written if not for the daily prompts.

When you ask how I find my muse, I answer that I don’t. I don’t go looking for it; instead, it comes to me. When I look at a writing prompt like this one, sometimes, the sentences come to me right away. They flood my brain and overpower me until I write them down. Other times, it’s like planting a seed; you bury it in the ground and hope for the best. Eventually, something might grow from it, but sometimes, nothing happens at all. Occasionally, nothing will come to mind when I read a prompt. I let it sit underground in my brain for a day or two and still nothing comes. When that’s the case, I just leave it alone. I no longer have the time to force the words out of me. Nowadays, with a full-time job on my hands, I write when the words visit me. I don’t have the time nor energy to seek them out. Fortunately, they still come, although, not as regularly as they once did. As long as I am writing, even if it’s only once or twice a week, things will work out just fine.