Muse

Notes for Monday

There were days when I had slept well and dreamed, that, after rising and taking care of chores, I had to write. It was not writing to an outline but a mad rush of ideas.

Jerry Jenkins, my spiritual and writing mentor, called this the pant-ser approach: there were writers who wrote to an outline and those who just wrote and worried about organization afterward, writing by the seat of their pants.

Perhaps intuitive was a more accurate descriptor.

It is not as if anyone does an outline before having a dream, and yet dreams have a wonderful sense of chaos until they are subject to logical analysis and compared with the concerns and activities of the day immediately preceding.

In writing, the best coherence is often subliminal, unintentional and driven by deep motivation.

The initial result is, for the most part, verbiage that sounds like thought, although without a logic that is universal, it remains just a jumble of words crossing a page.

It is not until a motive and direct reference to people that the thing seems to take on life, like an inanimate body into whose nostrils the breath of life is blown.

Motivation: it is only with a specific female face in mind that I begin to emerge from incoherence.

The older faces serve as muses, inspire logic and description, perhaps the rationale for writing.

The younger faces, the less familiar whom I would like to know better, inspire the need to entertain, to write something different and amusing, and personal.

It is with the close faces that the best writing comes out, the immediacy and passion of unmet needs and curiosity left hanging.

Invariably, these latter muses draw something out that has remained unspoken and private, a conversation in intimate tones when more than logic drives the interaction.

There are always words, as frequently as there are impressions, thoughts and inspirations. Some lines of suggestion take a deep plunge, and suddenly open up things that are frequently thought, but never spoken.

This gives writing that surprising character of unexpected familiarity, that sudden realization that the reader knows exactly what the writer is getting at.