Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

The muse slept in this morning, after I’d planned some writing time for her. She did, however, flood me with ideas in the shower - she seems to like times and places where there are no pencils or keyboards around, probably because it means no immediate work for her. Lazy muse. I cornered her on the T, though, and made her add her new ideas to the opening scene of The Wrong Novel. She’s pulling in some stuff from The Wrong Prequel, both to set up later events and to justify the opening blood and gore. Maybe sleep is the secret to getting more out of her.

Lori, source of all blog content, blogged about curse words. I’m also a known fan of the English language, so I have to point out that curse and swear and cuss and execrate all mean pretty much the same thing, and do not refer, technically, to foul (a.k.a. vulgar) language or dirty words.

These two families of words split up cleanly: in the foul court, we have fine old words like the f word, which are undeserving of their current dishonor, as well as obviously dirty words like the sheeeee-it word, body parts like ass (which picks up subtones from its donkey sense), and other riff-raff like Micro$oft.

The world of true cursing, however, involves blasphemy, oaths, or wishes for damnation. Here we find damn, its brother darn and its cousins hell and heck, all invocations of deity from jeez to Kahless, and some mysterious old words like bloody (which is, to my knowledge, a particularly Christian oath abbreviated from God’s blood).

Darning them all to heck, in other words, is not vulgar but evil, yet it’s hard to curse when you don’t believe in cursing or the second commandment. So curse words degenerate into just so many more dirty words, but deep down you know bloody isn’t saying much to the listener - hence the preference for dirty dirty words rather than dusty swear words.

Following more Lori links, I found a good word in the pseudodictionary: truline, for that opening line that truly says it all. I wonder if I’ve coined any non-Romulan words I can submit.

Final scenes don’t multiply on me the way they seem to for Lori. My trouble is proliferation of opening scenes. I wrote another opener for The Wrong Novel yesterday, which brings me up to six or seven now.

The trouble with openings is that you usually can’t start at the chronological beginning - life and plot come on slowly, but a story has to dive right in there and catch the reader, plus state the full premise in the opening line. (Never read how-to-write books - that’s where you pick up crazy ideas like “the first line must summarize the entire story.”) So I wrote an opening where things really begin, that’s very interesting for me but much too boring for the reader, and I wrote an bloody beginning to grab the reader by the throat and shout “Read me!” In between there was a bit of negotiation, where I kept trying to move the opening closer to the chronological beginning - but I know I have to start in the middle with the blood and the guts (and, surprisingly, the tea service), then work backwards and forwards at the same time. Flashbacks are a pain in the neck, even when you have five spare openings’ worth of material to use for them.

Speaking of openings, I really have been working on the Seven Saga. The first chapter (barring two spare beginnings) is kind of done. I got everything I wanted in there, spackled every plothole of Seven’s misspent youth, and added some Obscure Characters to boot. The only problem with my story is that it isn’t quite a story. It’s missing that essential cohesion that binds Beginning to End, if you know what I mean. The muse has been sleeping on the job, again. I wish she got busy when I’m too busy to pay her any mind, but the truth is she’s a lazy muse who insists on bubble baths and chocolate and three-hour background checks to coin one Romulan word and hours at the keyboard to contemplate her previous drafts, before she’ll write a word.

On the other fanfic front, the Buffy finale was good, at least in its Spike aspect. I can’t say I saw too much Willow continuity in Evil Willow, or felt that the two hours cohered any better than chapter one of the Seven Saga, but I’m into the whole soulless Spike issue so I found this little reverse redemption compensated (in my fic-weaving mind) for the Random Spike Characterization of the second half of the season. I was handling it a little differently in my still incomplete chip fic, but now I see the potential of reconnecting it to canon at the end that I couldn’t see before.

Still, I’m not sure I want to rejoin canon. If I could think of a way to marry off Spuffy, I’d do that instead, but Buffy, if not Spike, is too twenty-first century for a secret wedding. This is not a century for great love stories - which is, I suppose, a good deal of the reason I take refuge in the future.

I promised several entries ago to discuss the line between muse and man, and it’s high time to whip out Origins and get to it. So, with malice toward none; with charity for all; more on the muse:

Some moderns write without benefit of muse. For example, I’ve never felt that the muse was involved in writing non-fiction, not even when a column of mine all comes together in an unexpected way. Perhaps it is the lifetime of use that blinds me to the muse in such situations, but, there being no general talk of a muse for non-fiction, I’ll assume not. So writing without the muse is possible.

Once upon a time, some muses wrote without the man. To Plato, for example, complete possession by the muse was the sine qua non of artistic merit:

… all good poets, epic as well as lyric, composed their beautiful poems not by art, but because they are inspired and possessed … there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses and the mind is no longer in him.

(All quotes are taken from Jaynes’ book, including the ellipses.) Art in this context means artifice - that is, craft or talent as opposed to inspiration or the muse. Jaynes claims that the muse’s possessiveness in Plato’s day was her last hurrah, yet he goes on to give more recent examples of the muse in action. Milton took dictation from his Celestial Patroness, and even Shelley risked the wrath of fellow poets with blanket statements like the following:

A man cannot say, “I will compose poetry.” The greatest poet even cannot say it; for the mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness … and the conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure.

Ellipsis again thanks to Jaynes, but I’ve found the original on-line: A Defense of Poetry by Percy Bysshe Shelley. The quote above starts at section 284, but the whole thing looks so interesting that I’ll put off any more muse musing until I’ve read it through.

I was supposed to get something else done tonight, but the muse (whose taste is far from the best in certain areas) started thinking about this filk on the T and wouldn’t let go until I typed it up for her. I hope that since I indulged her tonight, she’ll write something useful for me tomorrow.

Filk:      It’s My Blog
Original:  It’s My Turn (Diana Ross)

I can’t cover up opinions
In the name of blog
Or keep my peace
In jetc that was easy

And if thinking for myself
Is what I’m guilty of
Go on and disagree
I’ll still be me

It’s my blog
To see what I can see
I hope you’ll understand
This blog’s just for me

Because it’s my blog
With no apologies
I won’t tone down the truth
I’ll never try to please

For here it’s my blog
Yes I do have all the answers
Before I blogged, I took my share of stances
Ain’t no use of mailing lists
Where everyone’s the same

No, it’s not disdain
For I don’t know you from Adam
And I’ll tell you so
Here in my Dear Sir or Madam

It’s my blog
With no room for replies
I’ve never seen my fic
Through someone else’s eyes

And here it’s my blog
To try and have my say
And if the muse is blocked
At least I’ve blogged today

It’s my blog
Yes, it’s my blog
Ain’t no use of mailing lists
Where everyone’s the same

No, it’s not disdain
For I don’t know you from Adam
And I’ll tell you so
Here in my Dear Sir or Madam

It’s my blog
To see what I can see
I hope you’ll understand
This blog’s just for me

Because it’s my blog
To rant and say “my eye!”
I sure do like to see
That Lori’s stopping by

Because it’s my blog
It’s my blog

It’s my blog
For fanfic and for “fun”
Trying to work out
The thoughts of number one

Yes here it’s my blog
To reach and touch the muse
No one’s gonna say
That I was not amused

It’s my blog
Yes, it’s my blog
It’s my blog
It’s my blog
It’s my blog

Ok, here you go, an actual scientific theory of the muse, taken from The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind:

According to Jaynes, there are two halves to the human mind, the conscious half, and what I’ll call the non-conscious half. (Subconscious and unconscious are used, and we don’t want any of their unfortunate connotations confusing us, anyway.) In general, you think of yourself as the conscious half, because it is logically impossible to be conscious of any of your non-conscious processes.

You may be aware that something mysterious is going on over there on the right side (usually) of your brain, from other clues, and the truth is, consciousness really doesn’t take up that much of your mental time. Most thinking and processing goes on non-consciously. Jaynes gives some nice examples:

I’ve had this experience myself in mathematics, which is, perhaps, why I recognize it so readily when writing fiction. (My muse is fondest of the Bed and the Bath, though she’s been known to act up on public transportation as well.) Jaynes explains how a certain amount of preparation goes into the process - setting up or contemplating the problem, then putting it aside, after which (one hopes) comes the flash of insight, and finally, the logical justification.

So, without getting into the more debated areas of Jaynes’ theory, we can establish certain facts about the muse. Because the muse is a non-conscious process, it cannot be controlled by the conscious mind, that is, by the writer herself. The muse’s process of creation can be neither “fun” nor painful, because the conscious writer, the only party involved who can feel amusement or pain, is involved in the act of creation purely as a spectator.

Of course, the muse can cause the writer no end of frustration when absent, and when present, can give the writer a feeling of transcendence. The point here is that any conscious writing, whether fun or sweat-and-blood painful, is not from the muse. The muse is, by definion, a non-conscious process. Just as you cannot have fun or feel pain while you are sound asleep, you cannot have fun or feel pain while the muse is producing. As Lori has noted, she may leave you quite a mess to clean up, but editing is not a muse process - it’s the logical justification at the end.

Another point to note about the muse so far is that what she writes is not necessarily better than what some other, conscious writer writes. She is, of course, generally accepted to be smarter than her own writer - she has the best bits of your brain in her non-conscious hands, so of course she’s going to show you up big-time.

Matters are a bit more complicated than this; it can be hard to separate the muse from the man. To do so, we’ll need more theory from Julian Jaynes. Join us next time on Mutual of Jemima’s Wild Fandom…

I suppose I shouldn’t let it get to me when strangers several blogs and blogbacks away say they think I’m full of myself. It didn’t occur to me that Victoria would take down that particular blog entry - I’m still not sure she did, since I don’t know much about livejournals. Anyway, feel free to put it back up if you did take it down. The damage was already done, anyway. Next time I just won’t click on the comments link, since I know it won’t be pretty.

I probably shouldn’t have been so blunt in my previous post, either. Again, it was the people at a fourth remove who got insulted, and Victoria, despite, or perhaps because of, her misinterpretation, had some interesting things to say.

For instance, she suggested that people use the muse metaphor out of longstanding habit. I’m sure some people talk about the muse without any real internal referent, just because they hear it bandied about so much. Yet that cannot explain the persistence of the muse in general - no one talks about Apollo, though we still have war. Fanfic writers don’t talk about spleen or bile, though these metaphors lived from ancient Greece well into modern times.

I’m getting too apologetic in my old age. My original purpose for this post was just to link the new muses category. (Categories are just another cool feature brought to you by Moveable Type, like comments that don’t slow the page download to a crawl.) Some older musey musings have been included, which make a start towards the musobiography Lori requested.

[This entry has been edited from the original rant.]

Yes, I’m uninterested in engaging in a discussion with people who seem incapable of separating personal opinion from personal insult, or who have related difficulties distinguishing between what I’ve actually said and what they think I’ve said, or who think I’m capable of hobbling the English language singlehandedly because I prefer strong words to weak ones. I’m willing to do it in zendom (much as it annoys Christine) but not here. See later entries for why. To the end of not discussing, I’ve edited this entry down to a more average episode of Jemima’s Blog.

I blamed Lori, rebel-in-training, for saying that museful writing was better than museless writing. I never said it. (Watch a future muse entry for my opinion on that issue.) She says she never said it that way either, which means the people who read it that way were hallucinating.

More on colloquialisms:

I find them unclear. As a writer, I have to choose between strong words and weak words. Fun and happy are weak words, ones I’d be very cautious of putting into the mouth of a character (only partly because most of my writing is set in the future where current colloquialisms stand out as bad writing) and equally cautious of using in a discussion, where they lead to confusion.

The aside:

I’m not here to encourage good writing. I don’t know where anyone got that idea. This is my blog, and I’m here to express my opinions, and, when the muse strikes, to write fanfic. The rest of you can save fandom from itself - I’ve done my time.

On the sweating and the bleeding:

Note that I have never and will never claim that sweating and bleeding for your writing is worthwhile, sane, productive, or any other such thing. Since I dislike most mainstream literature, my exposure to the hurt me school of writing has been through fanfic, where I’ve seen a fraction of writers boast of having to cut each word out of their flesh, or at least sweat or bleed for their writing. It still surprises me when people say that, and that attitude is as alien to the muse as is writing for fun.

As for what is native to the muse, see the later muse entries.

Have you heard of remote sensing? I seem to be an expert in remote annoying.
My own personal thoughts on the muse have filtered
down through Lori’s and Victoria’s blogs into the hands of the museless, which means,
at the very least, that I’m going to have to switch the category on the first muse entry to
fanfic [moved again to muses], so the unintended muse war is all in one
place, for fuming reference.

Here I am, not apologizing again. This is my blog and I’m not going to be
diplomatic. If you want diplomacy, Lori’s blog is right there in the link list. I’m not
full of myself; I just happen to have my own opinions. If you don’t like them,
then, as we say in the industry, click off.

Well, that being said, I’ve had an interesting muse-related experience lately.
I used to say I loved all my fic equally, flaws and all. I used to write them, edit
them, then put them down and never look back. It’s not that I wouldn’t edit them
to death, at the time, but I never let them sit for editing reasons. I only put them
aside when the muse flagged (or turned C/7 and refused to finish J/C fic), until
the muse returned.

Recently, however, I reread most of my fic. I still loved them all, and wouldn’t
retouch a word except for misspellings (which I do fix) and repeated uses of the
same word close together (which I don’t bother to fix). There was one exception,
though, Colony, my old novel.
Christine was right about it back when I wrote it,
and if I had the time now, I might do a Lori-scale revision of the thing. It’s so…uneven.
It’s depressing, really - I’m not sure I’d know where to start if I were fixing it.
All I know is that it started dragging in the middle and I gave up reading. If its own
mother can’t read it, it’s got to be pretty bad.

In response to Liz’s latest comment…

Enjoying something and doing it for the fun are two different things. Psychology of the muse aside, it’s like the difference between taking fanfic writing seriously and treating it as just a hobby where you can blow off grammar and good taste.

When people start throwing around words like fun or happy that don’t really seem to refer to much, compared to fine old designations like joy or sorrow, I mourn the loss of the true meanings of words. Especially in the realm of emotions, good words are slipping away into a morass of vague synonyms. I fight back with the dictionary; there’s nothing like a controlling legal authority in these cases, and mine is Webster:

The relevant idiom is to make fun of, which is to ridicule, and in fun, which is, not seriously. I can only repeat that fun and games are not what I’m after here. If you told me you were after joy, or honor, or love, I would know what you were talking about, but fun? It’s an empty bit of slang, or as the dictionary puts it, it’s colloquial.

I usually get into this discussion over another word, happy. Happy means fortunate, which is obvious from the word itself. (See, for example, perhaps and happenstance, words that refer to chance.) When you extend it to an emotion that presumably results from the circumstance of good fortune, you get a weak word and a lot of people wishing they felt happy when they ought to be wishing to be happy. But people shy away from words that really say something, like joy.

So no, I’m not in it for the fun. You can keep the fun, and I’ll take the joy and the sorrow both. I still come out ahead.

Better summaries of The Origin of etc. are not forthcoming, but I found a nice thread in sci.anthropology: “Jaynes points out that a modern child if magically teleported back 3,000 to 4,000 years ago would grow up bicameral while a child from that era if teleported to today and raised would grow up conscious.” –Tom Bevington

Consciousness, to put it briefly, is a meme.