The Muse Comes at Three

Yesterday morning at 3 am I was awakened by a smell. My dog Otis had dropped a pile of poop of such malodorious magnitude on my bathroom floor that it actually woke me out of a dead sleep. I tried to ignore it but finally got up and started cleaning, scolding, dragging towels and bathmats to the washing machine, scrubbing my hands and arms with antibacterial soap, throwing my nightgown in the laundry too....in short I was throughly awakened. Awakened in the worst way. Four hours of sleep wouldn't be enough to see me through the day but it was just enough to make me pretty sure I either couldn't go back to sleep at all or, if I did, I would fall asleep about 5 and then doze away half the morning.

Otis, needless to say, was happily snoring on the pillow beside me.

Damn Otis.

But the muse comes in many forms. As I was lying there in the dark, wondering if I should make coffee, walk out for the paper, cut on the computer and officially begin the day I suddenly began to have a rush of insights about the second novel. A literal shitload of ideas. Four or five plot points - a couple of them quite elegant - came to me at once.

I cut on the light and began to scribble notes.

What exactly is this strange aspect of the creative process? Why do we sometimes work and work on some aspect of our stories without really getting anywhere and then suddenly have these moments of clarity when we can see exactly what needs to happen?

And can these moments of seemingly random inspiration - my grandmother's best friend, an elderly and over-the-top poet, used to call them "wooing the muse" - be more predictable, and thus more productable, than we think?

For the last three days I have been working on a chapter summary for my second novel. Hard work. I went to bed the night before my 3 am fit inspiration having just wrapped ip a 3500-word plot synopsis, wondering if it all held together. I had shown it to Laura, an editor friend with a good sense of the linear, and she had pointed out that I had a character in the story that might not need to be there. I knew what she meant - the character shows up, says some stuff, does a few things, but doesn't really tie into the resolution of the book. But I wanted Tory in the story. On an instinctive level I thought she had an important role to play. There were a few more dangling plot threads....things that, like the character of Tory, were in at the beginning but didn't seem to have any crucial function by the end. But once again I was loathe to cut them out.

In the creative process, I strongly believe that our subconscious minds run ahead of our conscious minds. They rush forward, preparing the way, clearing the forest and leaving trail markers for our slower-moving more cautious conscious minds to follow. Novels really point out this out to you because they're so long and have the potential for so many dead ends. Several times while writing I have put something into the story without knowing exactly why it's there. And early readers (who constitute only my most trusted friends) have done just what Laura did, gently pointed out that this material doesn't fit. Most of the time, I nod and cut it. At other times I have left it in....not knowing exactly why. I am not in general a stubborn writer. Not a prima donna. Over my long years as a nonfiction writer I have been both edited badly and edited well and I know that work exists to be changed. When people give me feedback, I do not throw up my hands and shriek "But I am an artist!!!"

So these periods of stubbornness are selective. I think they mean something. I think they mean that my subconscious mind has put this seemingly random material in for a reason and it knows that my conscious mind will figure it all out at some point down the road.

Because I went to bed that night thinking I didn't want to cut Tory out of the story and that I should leave in a couple of the other seemingly non-essential scenes as well. Went to sleep mulling it over, exhausted and sick of working on the scene sequence. I slept. Otis pooped. I woke up. I cleaned. Otis slept. I got back into bed and suddenly saw how the Tory story fit into the whole and how one of the questionable scenes was indeed her logical route back into the book.

It's exciting when this happens. It's why we write. I'm trying to figure out how to get it to happen more. And I suspect that taking the time to write out plot treatments and chapter summarys, tedious as these activities may be, are actually the ways in which we build bridges between the conscious and subconscious minds. The way in which we allow them to - at least for a few hyper-productive minutes - walk the same path. Because I think that's what preciesely these moments of "effortless inspiration" are, a link up between the conscious and subconscious minds. We not only know what we should do next, we see clearly how to do it.

If I had not done the chapter summarys in sequence I would not have known where the holes in my story were. A major event happens to my heroine at about 2/3 of the way through the book. I knew I needed to show how this event changed her, to put a little rest beat into the rhythm of the book, a sort of pause-and-reflect chapter. So I wrote in my plot outline that chapter 17 needed just that and moved on to chapter 18, picking the story back up.

But if I hadn't known exactly where that hole in the plot was, would I have so easily come up with a way to fill it? It's one thing to know what something is missing....it's quite another thing to put the conscious mind to work outlining your plot and seeing exactly where the gap is. At that point I believe my subconscious mind sprang to work sorting through the options, shuffling a sort of metaphorical deck of cards, until it found the right material. Material which came directly from those "loose thread scenes" I had been reluctant to cut.

Speaking of metaphors, have I mixed up enough of them for you? Walking in the forest, leaving clues, building bridges, shuffling cards... It's hard to write about this. We don't write or talk or even think about these things very often and it's hard to find the words. But I do know this. The subconscious mind wants to help the conscious mind. When the conscious mind is stuck it tries to send it hints. We need to listen to these hints, sure, but I suspect we can also be more proactive and actually invite the subconscious mind to dialogue with the conscious mind. I think I did just that with my chapter summary outline. In essence I said to my subconscious not merely "I'm stuck" but instead "I'm stuck right here. Can you come help me?"

I'm pleased to have my new scene. Pleased that Tory is back in the book. Pleased that waking up at 3 am resulted in scrawled pages of very good notes. But there's one more thing I have to wonder. I don't want to wonder this because it seems like a direct contadiction of what I wrote above, i.e., that creativity is the result of cross-pollenation between the conscious and subconscious mind and therefore not only within us but something we can learn to cultivate. But what if there's another component, something beyond our own heads? If Otis had not taken a poop when he did, and if that poop had not been quite so pungeant, would I have missed my moment of inspiration? Would the same thoughts have been patiently waiting for me when I woke at 7 am... or were they just there, floating by, momentarily up for grabs in that silent stream of early morning? It's strange to think the role Otis might have played in all this (should I mention him in the acknowledgements?) and even more strange to comtemplate that my writing process might be helped along by unseen forces. When my grandmother's friend the poet used to talk about "wooing the muse" I always that she was affected and silly. But then I sit down and write for 30 minutes about how dog poop gave me the missing chapter of my novel.

Otis is usually very regular.