The Curse of the Muse

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Or a blessing. Essay. 800 words, 4-minute read.

Image: Olivia Newton John as a muse, in the movie Xanadu (1980), imdb.com

The Curse of the Muse

By Ray Tabler

Have you ever had a snatch of music lodged in your head all day? An earworm, it’s called. Achy Breaky Heart. Who let the Dogs Out? The Macarena. Dare we mention, Baby Shark? Something about that sequence of notes, possibly accompanied by clever lyrics, burrows in and echoes throughout the skull.

There is a literary equivalent for writers. Occasionally, an idea for a story pops into your head, and won’t leave until the darn thing is forced down through your arms and fingertips, onto the page, a keystroke at a time. The experience can be euphoric, or tortuous, or anywhere in between. Sometimes all in the same typing session.

The muses are mythical daughters of Zeus and are delegated the task of planting ideas in the heads of poets, artists, philosophers and musicians. Sounds like a pleasant pastime, for the muses. These 9 ladies of creativity flit from one subconscious mind to another, inspiring and moving on like ethereal butterflies.

The best movie about muses, in my humble opinion, is the 1980 fantasy Xanadu. Olivia Newton John is a muse just minding her own business, doing her job, when she happens to fall in love with an artist. Good story, great songs by The Electric Light Orchestra, and [spoiler alert] a happy ending. Check it out.

Theodore Geisel (Dr. Seuss) started writing children’s books because the ones he saw around him were boring (to him anyway). More or less the same for James Fennimore Cooper, who figured American readers craved action tales instead of turgid English novels. The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings started off as bedtime stories Tolkien told to his kids. A dream of a couple in a sunlit meadow was the seed for Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight saga. Supposedly, Jane Austen based Pride and Prejudice on her first love. Robert Heinlein’s Starman Jones was inspired by a passing reference to the possibly true tale of a cabin boy who sailed away on a clipper ship and ended the voyage as captain of the vessel. Sounds like a sea story to me. Isaac Asimov used the fact that some species of insects and worms actually have three, instead of two, sexes to build an entire alien race with this more complicated procreational set up in his novel The Gods Themselves.

The word “inspire” derives from the Latin phrase for “to breathe into.” The breath of the muse is a wonderful thing, a great blessing. But sometimes, it can feel like something of a curse. Because you want to do the inspiration justice. Which isn’t always an easy job. It can take a while to figure out how to build the home (setting, story, characters) for the idea to live in.

It took J.D. Salinger 10 years to finish Catcher in the Rye. Although, he was drafted into World War II and fought in Europe for a lot of that time. Margaret Mitchel started Gone with the Wind to pass the time while recovering from a leg injury. Ten years, and 9 drafts, later she submitted it to a publisher on a dare. Writing in his limited spare time, Tolkien finished Lord of the Rings after 17 years. Ezra Pound spent 57 years writing and re-writing his epic poem The Cantos and died before he finished the work.

I can provide a couple of examples from personal experience. In the 1970s I read a novel serialized in Analog Magazine, Dying of the Light by George RR Martin (back when he wrote science fiction). The concept of people locked in a desperate struggle in an empty city on an abandoned planet haunted me for decades. Until it served as a setting for my novel Fool’s Paradise, about an agent tasked with protecting a time-skipping teenaged girl from evil characters. A childhood tour of a radio astronomy observatory lurked in the back of my head until it teamed up with a random late-night movie to precipitate my novel The Diesel-Powered Starship, about a faster-than-light star drive that won’t tolerate an electrical circuit.

Maybe the muses get bored after thousands of years planting seeds in millions of brains. That could get old, and creatives aren’t as grateful as they ought to be. Who could blame them for having a little fun now and then? Certainly not me. I’ll always welcome a visit from one of these lovely ladies, regardless of the torment they may cause down the road. The curse of the muse is usually a blessing in disguise. Wouldn’t have it any other way.

END.

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