The Nature of Musing
Read this essay in its new home.
2005-04-27
Entry tags:
meta on muses
So, between them Permetaform and Melannen got me thinking.
Muses. Imaginary Friends. Characters.
As best I can tell, you know, the three have always been much the same thing to me. I vaguely recall having imaginary friends (one or two) who were not either my characters or someone else’s, but the characters, and the stories I could tell around them and me definitely predominated, as far back as I can remember. My terminology is the only thing that’s really changed over time, as I called them imaginary friends, and then characters, and then muses–that last happening when I got involved in fandom and fanfic, where it seemed to be the going vocabulary term.
I also remember passionate arguments with other people about whether or not they were real. I said they were, only to be told if they were real they should be able to move a bowl or some such. This frustrated me hugely, because I didn’t have the vocabulary to say what, in retrospect, I think I understood very early on. Their reality was not a physical thing. It’s true, the story taking place was often something I acted out as a child, overlaying the physical shapes of the story environment on my ‘real world’ environment so that, for instance, my dresser became a supercomputer. But it was an overlay. The reality of my IFs was a reality arising from the truth or genuine-ness of the personality pattern in question. Anything that rang true and led to a positive interaction between that other pattern and my own was real. That reality, I felt then and still feel now, was not less because the other participants couldn’t pick up the bowl.
This leads to something I’ve written about before, but now comes back to me refracted at a different angle. Muses, characters, IFs are not me. But I make them out of myself. This is precisely how some characters, and not others, gain enough depth to be muses/IFs for me. Those identities are not mine, any of them. But when I’m fascinated enough to conceptualize a character, and bits of them are missing, which is invariably the case, I take whatever bits of my identity pattern or experience match what is there (in my idea-sketch of this person, or in the source text) and use that to fill in the gaps.
This is why I can’t say that my muses are either internal or external to me, because it’s both and neither. 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. They exist in border territory: Storyspace.
And in Storyspace, I am also a character. My personality patterns occupy space in that border territory, and interact with the other patterns there. This is what I’ve done from the start, only now I act it out on the page, rather than in three-d, and call it muse-chat. When they enter the framework of a plot, and I am not present as a character, then I call it a story. When both happen at once I call it a role-playing log.
It’s probably redundant to mention that I write very character-driven stories.
Despite that parity of existence, within Storyspace, my own experience of where the basic inspiration or creativity or suggestions come from is that it comes from myself–the parts of myself that process experiences and extract patterns and apply them to actions, both internal and external. Those parts of myself are where I connect to the rest of the world; they are the active boundary; they are what produces Storyspace in border territory. When a story possesses me, as one occasionally does, and gains enough momentum that writing feels nearly involuntary, it isn’t the willfulness of the characters–it’s the shape of the story as a whole, beautiful and fascinating enough that I don’t want to leave it.
I am not, however, about to generalize from this to some Unified Theory of Creativity, and say that anyone who experiences inspiration as external must simply be alienating their own creative voice. Because if anyone were to tell me that all inspiration must be external and that my own experience is ’simply internalizing’ that external source? I’d eviscerate them with a plastic spork. Slowly. Sometimes highly individual muses are obviously just a figure of speech within a given discourse community. Sometimes it’s equally clearly a given writer’s literal experience. *shrugs* “Infinite diversity in infinite combination” yeah?
What I would like to know, myself, is why vivid descriptions or accounts of highly individual muses seem to squick so many people (and other writers, particularly) who don’t share the experience? I’ve seen the squick itself expressed, but not really explained.
Muses. Imaginary Friends. Characters.
As best I can tell, you know, the three have always been much the same thing to me. I vaguely recall having imaginary friends (one or two) who were not either my characters or someone else’s, but the characters, and the stories I could tell around them and me definitely predominated, as far back as I can remember. My terminology is the only thing that’s really changed over time, as I called them imaginary friends, and then characters, and then muses–that last happening when I got involved in fandom and fanfic, where it seemed to be the going vocabulary term.
I also remember passionate arguments with other people about whether or not they were real. I said they were, only to be told if they were real they should be able to move a bowl or some such. This frustrated me hugely, because I didn’t have the vocabulary to say what, in retrospect, I think I understood very early on. Their reality was not a physical thing. It’s true, the story taking place was often something I acted out as a child, overlaying the physical shapes of the story environment on my ‘real world’ environment so that, for instance, my dresser became a supercomputer. But it was an overlay. The reality of my IFs was a reality arising from the truth or genuine-ness of the personality pattern in question. Anything that rang true and led to a positive interaction between that other pattern and my own was real. That reality, I felt then and still feel now, was not less because the other participants couldn’t pick up the bowl.
This leads to something I’ve written about before, but now comes back to me refracted at a different angle. Muses, characters, IFs are not me. But I make them out of myself. This is precisely how some characters, and not others, gain enough depth to be muses/IFs for me. Those identities are not mine, any of them. But when I’m fascinated enough to conceptualize a character, and bits of them are missing, which is invariably the case, I take whatever bits of my identity pattern or experience match what is there (in my idea-sketch of this person, or in the source text) and use that to fill in the gaps.
This is why I can’t say that my muses are either internal or external to me, because it’s both and neither. 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. They exist in border territory: Storyspace.
And in Storyspace, I am also a character. My personality patterns occupy space in that border territory, and interact with the other patterns there. This is what I’ve done from the start, only now I act it out on the page, rather than in three-d, and call it muse-chat. When they enter the framework of a plot, and I am not present as a character, then I call it a story. When both happen at once I call it a role-playing log.
It’s probably redundant to mention that I write very character-driven stories.
Despite that parity of existence, within Storyspace, my own experience of where the basic inspiration or creativity or suggestions come from is that it comes from myself–the parts of myself that process experiences and extract patterns and apply them to actions, both internal and external. Those parts of myself are where I connect to the rest of the world; they are the active boundary; they are what produces Storyspace in border territory. When a story possesses me, as one occasionally does, and gains enough momentum that writing feels nearly involuntary, it isn’t the willfulness of the characters–it’s the shape of the story as a whole, beautiful and fascinating enough that I don’t want to leave it.
I am not, however, about to generalize from this to some Unified Theory of Creativity, and say that anyone who experiences inspiration as external must simply be alienating their own creative voice. Because if anyone were to tell me that all inspiration must be external and that my own experience is ’simply internalizing’ that external source? I’d eviscerate them with a plastic spork. Slowly. Sometimes highly individual muses are obviously just a figure of speech within a given discourse community. Sometimes it’s equally clearly a given writer’s literal experience. *shrugs* “Infinite diversity in infinite combination” yeah?
What I would like to know, myself, is why vivid descriptions or accounts of highly individual muses seem to squick so many people (and other writers, particularly) who don’t share the experience? I’ve seen the squick itself expressed, but not really explained.