My Muse is a Bitch, and She Beats Me

I have finally accepted something about my creative process. My muse is a bitch.

Not metaphorically. Not in the “she’s difficult” sense. I mean she is an unstable, violent, emotionally manipulative gremlin who shows up drunk at three in the morning, pounds on the front door until I let her in, screaming, “I HAVE THE GREATEST IDEA ANY HUMAN HAS EVER HAD!” and then, twelve minutes later, smashes me over the head with a beer bottle, steals my wallet, and disappears into the night.

Before anyone sends me a strongly-worded email: yes, I realize the comparison sounds like domestic abuse. That’s intentional, and I don’t make it lightly. Anyone who’s lived through real abuse has my sympathy. But this thing, whatever malignant little goblin lives in the creative part of my brain, shares enough of the same emotional whiplash that it’s impossible for me not to describe it that way.

The cycle always begins with love bombing. She’ll burst into my head with this incandescent vision. A story so brilliant I can’t believe no one has written it before. Characters! Themes! Dialogue! I can practically see the movie adaptation. I can hear the soundtrack.

“Write.” she whispers.

“Oh hell yes.” I say.

I crack my knuckles, open a fresh document, and start typing. Halfway through the second page she has vanished. Not quietly, either. She’s gone to Nordstrom with my credit card. Now I’m sitting there staring at a blinking cursor while my brain insists that what I’m typing bears only a vague family resemblance to the magnificent thing I saw ten minutes ago.

Every sentence feels counterfeit. Every paragraph is somehow ruining the story. It’s like trying to describe a sunset after somebody has replaced your eyeballs with two damp tennis balls.

The more I chase the original idea, the faster it runs away. By page four I’m bargaining. “Come back. Just tell me where chapter three was going.”

Nothing. By page six I’m convinced the entire premise was idiotic. By page eight I’m looking at the document the way you’d look at roadkill that resembles somebody you once dated.

Then she has the audacity to return two weeks later. Not with an apology, but with another brilliant idea. The sheer nerve of this woman. My hard drive contains an archaeological record of these crimes. Folders full of half-finished masterpieces that became half-finished embarrassments. Thirty percent of a novel. The opening act of a screenplay. Four killer paragraphs followed by a digital wasteland where inspiration died face-down in a ditch.

I’ve read all the advice. “Keep writing.” So I do. And, strangely enough, the advice isn’t wrong. I’ve discovered that my muse has the attention span of a caffeinated squirrel. She can only remain in the same room long enough to produce about eight hundred words before she remembers she has somewhere else to be. (Presumably ruining somebody else’s afternoon.)

So I’ve adapted. I write short things. Essays. Rants. Little explosions that can be completed before she has time to assault me with a pool cue and pawn my laptop.

Like this one.

In fact, she’s sitting here right now, feet on the coffee table, smoking cigarettes she didn’t buy, telling me this is the funniest thing I’ve ever written. I’d better finish before she changes her mind, because if history is any guide, she’s already eyeing my purse.