The Nature of Musing

[branchandroot]

Read this essay in its new home.

Comments

[anruik]

I've had it explained to me once as fright over whether these "voices in my head" would induce me to murder someone. *shrugs*

Really, the way I see it, I get to have an entire group of people who like to protest a lot while muses throw images and cake at me. It's like having a congressional floor in my mind over plotlines. If I don't have someone else to bounce ideas off of, I can just bounce it off them and think how they'd look at it. Instant feedback.

[branchandroot]

You know, that sounds disturbingly like one of the common explanations for homophobia: I don't want it done to me.

[melannen.livejournal.com]

>>They are not me, they have their own integrity as personalities, and in that way they are external individuals. Yet, they are made from me and my sense of their integrity is no doubt strengthened by the fact that I have loaned them my own, and in that way they are internal parts of me.

Yes! You've explained that wonderfully well! A lot of good thought here, I'm going to have to come back to it. And the idea that in Storyspace you are somehow on an equal plane with them; I like that.

I should come back to this and think some more. But the question about the squick. I think it's at least partially fear-- writers are always, I think, more aware than others of the limits of imagination and mind, and they know they're on tricky ground, but we don't *talk* about it, at least not in such a concrete way, because we're not *that* weird, I mean maybe I dreamed about Draco Malfoy every night for a month and hear his voice in my head all the time, but I still know the difference between fantasy and reality!--- right? Er...

[branchandroot]

because we're not *that* weird, I mean maybe I dreamed about Draco Malfoy every night for a month and hear his voice in my head all the time, but I still know the difference between fantasy and reality!--- right? Er...

*chuckling* That makes a lot of sense. It reminds me a bit of some things LeGuin wrote in her intro to The Left Hand of Darkness about getting to Truth via a pack of lies, and no respectable society ever trusting its artists. "I am an artist, and therefore a liar. Distrust everything I say. I am telling the truth."

muddling attempt at explanation

[bluedelirium.livejournal.com]

Re the squick:

Hm.... I think some people tend to read highly individual muses as either sort of pretentious or sort of insane. Like- these people don't really talk in your head, you're just using them as a device to clarify your own thoughts! Don't take this pretense too far, or else you're either a) confused about where your mind ends and the 'real world' begins, or b) pretending you are (a) because you think it makes you an obsessed-but-cool-because-of-it writer.

Driven by the muse, right? But sometimes people who don't have muses, who just kind of write from wherever, tend to think it's either fake- that people are pretending to have muses but really muddle along like everyone else- or crazy/stupid/silly, because, honestly, you are you are you, totally separate people do not exist in your head.

I don't have muses, although I'm not, uh, squicked by people who do. It seems like a good deal to me, actually- free dialogue- but characters have never internalized enough for me to feel comfortable with them outside a narrative context. It's why I can't write fic well, natch.

Re: muddling attempt at explanation

[branchandroot]

*thoughtful nod* I suppose there is a pretty strong cultural prescription that we should distrust the accounts of people who say their reality includes things that other people can't see/hear/touch. So that an initial response of "I don't do that" slides that much more easily into "that can't be possible/right".

Though, by that scale, we should think all theoretical physicists are quite insane. Food for thought.

Re: muddling attempt at explanation

[bluedelirium.livejournal.com]

Rethinking this, there might be another aspect to people disliking individualized (versus character-type) muses- they're so damn personal. Looking at it that way... it is a kind of squick to read strangers going into a lot of detail about what personally inspires them; it seems too intimate to me. On some level, a muse will be a reflection/distortion of some essential aspect of yourself.

As ever, though, if you're squicked by it, why read it? Which sometimes seems like the fundamental question of the internet.

[violeteyeddevil.livejournal.com]

I've always wondered if people who don't 'believe' in such exsistences of very real type muses or just the notions of muses in itself are operating on the same kind of fear people show to schitzophrenics. The idea that hearing voices is some form of mental illness and not at all healthy...especially those writers that have that Storyspace where they can also exsist as self (writer, artist, person etc).

To take it a step further, what about two writers who work together whose muses actually interact with one another? It is definitely something I have heard called not only impossible but highly disturbing which intrigues me because I know quite a few people where this is a reality. I often pondered the notion that the more real a fictional persona is portrayed under the label of muse and the more concrete they seem to the author the more they are likely to be viewed as disturbed...more so if the author believes it is not only themselves but also people they are in contact with on a personal or creative level can see, hear, talk to such muses.

...I am rambling but you have brought up a topic I am highly interested in so yes. I ramble.

[branchandroot]

*wry* Yeah, by the end of this piece I had to stop myself from proselytizing for the DSM-IV, and the concept that nothing is pathological until it interferes in living one's life. Now, if it was something missing, if it was an inability to see or hear something, I could see that being a serious problem. But something extra? Never quite saw the big deal, though I admit it can be a little unnerving to deal with when you can't hear the other conversational partners. Hm. Now there's a thought to come back to.

I also stopped short of going into the issue of Sharespace and collaborative writing, here. It's a curious thing, isn't it? When Storyspace overlaps. And, yet, since the whole thing takes place on the borders, it makes perfect sense in a the geography of psychology that it can be shared.

*also babbling; should have more coffee*

imaginary friends/muses

[tallihensia.livejournal.com]

Science News just had an article on that... It seems to be deconditioning that people aren't "supposed" to have them, but in reality, we pretty much all do as kids, and most imaginative people still do. Er, well, I'm expanding and simplifying from the article, but still...

http://sciencenews.org/articles/20050326/bob8.asp

A quote towards the end: Her team interviewed 50 fiction writers, ranging from an award-winning novelist to scribblers who had never been published. Of those authors, 46 provided vivid examples of made-up characters who had taken over the job of composing their life stories and who sometimes resisted their creators' attempts to control the narrative. Some fictional folk wandered around in the writers' houses or otherwise inhabited their everyday world.

Taylor suspects that similar hauntings occur in other jobs in which people predict others' opinions and behaviors.

Re: imaginary friends/muses

[branchandroot]

I'm rather tempted to send a reply to that article. Something along the lines of 'well, duh'. Honestly, I really think more clinical psychologists should stop studying people and start talking to them a little. Everything in that article seems perfectly straightforward and self-evident to me, nothing that should have taken years of research to figure out. *sighs*

Re: imaginary friends/muses

[tallihensia.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I know. But sometimes in reasearch, they have to study the self-evident just in order to counterdict the "accepted" way of thinking. I think that was the point of this one -- her branch was going against the 'normal' psych thoughts, so they had to do research to show why.

For several decades, psychologists have generally assumed that imagination peaks in the preschool years and then dwindles as children grasp the difference between pretense and reality.

Taylor belongs to a contingent of researchers who regard imagination as a thinking tool.