To Thine Own Muse Be True

Chapter 5 of 'Writing at the Wellspring' (my new and currently unpublished book)

Dear Living Dark reader,

“Your muse, daimon, genius possesses its own will and its own ways, and it visits and energizes you as and when it desires. Inspiration comes and goes. Your task is not to generate inspiration, and certainly not to control it, but to channel it, and to do so by whatever means necessary, so that when it shows up, you are there to listen, receive, and bring into being what it is intent on giving the world through you.”

Those words are from the fifth chapter of Writing at the Wellspring, which I share with you in full below. Like some other portions of the book, this chapter represents a revision of a post that I previously published here several months ago (and that I have now retired/removed to make way for this one). The subject is the subtle art of getting in touch and in tune with your inner creative genius by recognizing its unique needs and preferences, especially but not exclusively when it comes to the matter of rhythm, speed, and pace of production or expression.

I hope it speaks into your personal field of creativity—that is, to your own daemon muse—with a helpful voice. As noted in the chapter’s first footnote, you can find more guidance on the same theme in Chapter 6 of my A Course in Demonic Creativity.

Warm regards,

To Thine Own Muse Be True

Chapter Five of Writing at the Wellspring: Creativity, Life Purpose, Nonduality, and the Daemon Muse

When the Daemon Speaks

I grew up in an Independent Christian Church, one of those evangelical Protestant congregations that represent the rightward-leaning doctrinal divergence of some conservative Restoration Movement churches from their liberal brethren during the early and middle parts of the twentieth century. One of the mottos of my childhood church, which I learned directly from my father’s lips, is this: “Where the scriptures speak, we speak; where the scriptures are silent, we are silent.”

Anybody who scents in this saying a close analog to the muse/daemon/genius-based approach to artistic creativity is surely onto something. You simply cannot know your innate creative rhythm—whether occasional, erratic, or prolific—until you actually do the work of finding out who you are by making friends with your daemonic genius, and then by approaching your work openly and experimentally in order to discover the pace and volume at which your creativity wants to emerge. There is a wide variation among different writers and artists in how their creative daemon consents to being accessed and how their muse consents to being courted. The crucial thing is to get in touch, and then stay in touch, with your own daemon muse, so that when it speaks, you speak, and when it is silent, you remain silent.¹

An important implication of this truth is that you do not have to be actively writing all the time. Silence and inactivity are perfectly fine. On the other hand, making space for your muse to speak when it wants by committing to a regular practice can be valuable. This is not a contradiction but a simple fact of the situation, which is subtle and therefore calls for subtlety and sensitivity in one’s approach.

I have always found it greatly reassuring to read about the lives and creative habits of other writers, and especially the actual words of those who have generously talked about their idiosyncratic personal working relationship to their creative spirit. Here are six examples—from writers including Flannery O’Connor, Stephen King, and Katherine Anne Porter—illustrating the absolute viability of all positions on the matter of disciplined regular work versus the free acceptance of erratic silences. The first three line up on one side of the fence, the latter on the other. Every one of them is right, since “right” is a sliding scale calibrated to the precise nexus of karmic forces that has converged upon and manifested within (and as) the specific human being who is speaking, writing, and reflecting sensitively on the deep and singular nature of his or her experience of doing those things and being that person.

Magnetizing the Muse through Disciplined Labor

Flannery O’Connor: Three hours every morning

Flannery O’Connor was a firm believer in the value of discipline in a writer’s life. She famously suffered from lupus, which was both a help and a hindrance in her attempt to maintain the discipline of a strict writer’s routine. On the one hand, the severe pain of the condition took away her ability to perform many daily activities, thus leaving her free to sit and write. On the other hand, this was a sword with a distinct double edge, since, as anyone suffering from a rheumatic illness can tell you, sitting for long periods with such a condition can produce as much discomfort as moving.

This makes O’Connor’s now-famous recommendation that writers ought to sit for several hours and do nothing else but write all the more striking. When her friend Cecil Dawkins complained about a dry spell that she was experiencing, and said she sometimes used reading to distract herself from the tedium, O'Connor responded with this:

It is my considered opinion that one reason you are not writing is that you are allowing yourself to read in the time set aside to write. You ought to set aside three hours every morning in which you write or do nothing else; no reading, no talking, no cooking, no nothing, but you sit there. If you write all right and if you don’t all right, but you do not read; whether you start something different every day and finish nothing makes no difference; you sit there. It’s the only way, I’m telling you. If inspiration comes you are there to receive it, you are not reading.²

As seen in editor Rosemary Magee’s 1987 anthology Conversations with Flannery O’Connor, O’Connor returned repeatedly to this point, stating it in various contexts and ways that, taken together, leave no doubt about her position:

“People seem to surround being-a-writer with a kind of false mystique, as if what is required to be a writer is a writer’s temperament,” she says. “Most of the people I know with writer’s temperaments aren’t doing any writing.” Miss O’Connor is writing steadily three hours a day, regardless of her mood. “If I waited on inspiration, I’d still be waiting,” she says. . . . “I can’t seem to turn out more than two stories a year. I have to have a ‘story’ in mind—some incident or observation that excites me and in which I see fictional possibilities—before I can start a formal piece. But I do try to write at least three hours every morning, since discipline is so important. . . . I sit there before the typewriter three hours every day and if anything comes I am there waiting to receive it.”³

Dani Shapiro: Attract the muse with hard work

Novelist and memoirist Dani Shapiro has described her experiences with inspiration and their relationship to conscious discipline in a way that resonates warmly with O’Connor’s account. Shapiro says that if she had assented to the notion that she ought to wait for inspiration before she started writing, she probably would not have written any books. “Don’t get me wrong,” she clarifies. “Inspiration has come. It has tiptoed into my writing room when I’ve least expected it. It has shown up mid-sentence, mid-thought, mid-idea. But it generally doesn’t precede me to the desk.” She draws out the point in a direct statement of the principle: