Courting the Muse

One of my favourite quotes when it comes to writing rituals is by German author Peter Prange. Translated it reads,

"Instead of discussing with myself every morning whether I feel inspired or not, I step into my office every day at nine sharp, open the window and politely ask the muse to enter and kiss me. Sometimes she comes in, more often she does not. But she can never claim that she hasn’t found me waiting in the right place.”

I think what Prange was trying to articulate was that, as a writer who needs to practice their craft regularly, he needed to manufacture inspiration rather than wait for the mood to fall upon him. This completely resonated with me. As you might be able to tell from this blog, I will often wait until I am in the right mood before I will sit down and put pen to paper... er, fingers to keys. And that mood doesn't come upon me nearly as often as I need it to if I ever want to get published. So I decided to try my hand at manufacturing inspiration.

I started thinking about the times when I have been able to churn out awesome pieces of writing while not in an inspired mindset. Two instances came to mind. The first is pressure. Whenever I have a deadline, I am somehow able to pull a solid piece of writing out of nowhere by working up to the minute before it's due. I have never turned in a piece late. But somehow, creating a stressful, pressured situation in order to invite inspiration was not the most appealing. So I went with my other idea: having a nice, clean, fresh workspace (my desk is almost always cluttered with paperwork and textbooks), a fresh page in a notebook that is devoted completely to writing, and a freshly sharpened pencil (I never write in pencil outside of writing creative pieces). I tried this every day for the past week, even waking up earlier than I normally would in order to write. And guess what? Inspiration began to flow - very slowly, but it was definitely there. I was creating! And not just To Do lists and doodles. This is very exciting for me, and hopefully I will be getting a lot more muse kisses in the near future.

- H