Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Liz tells me I should stop if it isn’t fun anymore. There are so many little assumptions hidden in her brief advice that I’m not sure where to begin.

For one thing, I was never in it for the fun, except on the reading side. I don’t read as much now partly because I don’t have time, and partly because I don’t enjoy the sorts of stories I used to, not the way I used to. But Liz was blogbacking my muse psychoanalysis, and the muse was never in it for the fun. The muse does not have such motives; it’s not clear the muse has motives at all.

She came to me and started writing, and while I was Insufficiently Reluctant, I was not having fun per se revising MII or Colony or The Museum until I knew every line by heart, no. I don’t even know what fun means in that context. I did it because the story was inside of me and wanted to come out, and the joy of making a story is not the same as the fun of chatting in #jetc.

If anyone out there is sacrificing the pain of hours writing fic for the fun of feedback or the glory of BNF, I feel sorry for them. They know not the muse. I never understand when someone undermines a story to push it to a particular audience, nor when someone rehashes old fic as part of the hamster wheel potlatch, because I fear and respect the muse more than that.

I’m not picking on Liz. I’m sure I’m confusing everyone with my muse psychoanalysis, because nobody believes in the muse herself. I do. For one thing, I’m willing to take the word of the many, many fanfic writers who’ve talked about their muses. Were they making analogies? Why would everyone make the same analogy?

If you want to know what the muse really is, read The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes. I’d summarize it myself, but it’s late and I still haven’t gotten around to today’s observations on the muse. Check out this summary; I skimmed it and it looks pretty good.

So, today on the muse: this morning on the T, I was wondering why the muse finds fanfic so much easier to write than original fic. I think it is the characters, after all. The characters are so familiar that all you have to do is toss them into, say, the Mirror-Mirror Universe, and you know, in that mysterious way the muse knows things, what they’re going to do. Presto! Story.

With original fic, a whole lot of which my muse has started and left lying around in various states of unpolish, there are too many vectors. What happens? Who does it happen to? What’s this person like? What will she do? There are too many angles for the muse to collate at once, I think. It must be much easier for LMB to write another Miles novel than to start a fresh fantasy. She starts with the character and fills in fresh ideas every time. Asimov, on the other hand, started with the Foundation idea and filled in fresh (let’s assume so for the sake of argument) characters every time. I think it’s easier, and works out better, to start with the characters. Maybe that’s why when fanfic is good, it is very very good.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 7th, 2002 at 12:32 am and is filed under Muses. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.