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Never Give In
Today was a day when the muse was not in my head, or my heart. It was like the 14 pages from yesterday had emptied me out. I was vaguely angry, and disgruntled. I didn’t wanna work today. I was damn near pouting.
But I sat my butt in my chair, at my desk, with my keyboard and I took my own advice. I wrote all the reasons I could not possibly write today. I was tired. I was uninspired. My muse and I were grumpy. I didn’t feel well. The whining went on for a paragraph, then something I typed made me remember the dream I’d had at the end of the night. No I won’t share, but I wrote it on the screen, and something about the comfort of the dream, and the fact that I could still feel the tactile memory of it, helped get the juices going. And suddenly I was able to toggle the whining and the dream farther down the screen and I knew how to begin the day’s writing.
Sometimes it’s just the whining and then my muse looks over my shoulder and even she gets embarrassed and we start working. I believe it was, Bradbury again, who said, that if you write anything at all eventually the muse peeks at it and goes, "We can do better than that." But if you don’t start that sweet clack of keys to intrique the muse then there’s nothing to get her notice, there’s nothing for her to go, well, we can do better. You have to write bad before she wants to help you write better.
But sometimes, like today, it wasn’t the complaining that got the muse and I going, it was the dream. Sometimes it’s a bit of remembered dream, or a thought, or another idea, or just some spark of an idea, and it’s enough of a spark to catch the tinder that you’ve carefully piled up around the book, waiting for something to help you light that fire one more time.
If I had just listened to my grumpy half, I’d have just blown today off. I was tired, and not inspired, and whine, whine, whine. But I sat down, I tried, and now some nine hours later, with an hour off for lunch, I have 21 pages of the new Meredith Gentry book, DIVINE MISDEMEANORS. 21 pages I wouldn’t have had if I’d given up before I even sat down to try and work.
I’ll leave you with two quotes, the first one I was looking for, and remembered. The second quote, was new to me, but I liked it so much I had to share.
“Never give in, never give in, never; never; never; never – in nothing, great or small, large or petty – never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense”
Winston Churchill
Winston Churchill