Melanie Ifield's Blog: Writing with Illness - Posts Tagged "muse"

Recently my dad was looking up an old Western series he enjoyed as a children through Google. He found the author had written over 700 books.
I was looking through the history of people like Enid Blyton, who was also prolific, and starting to feel the weight of it all!
Some people write literally hundreds of books in their lifetimes and others, like Harper Lee, are known only for one or two. Though those one or two are legendary and are the kinds of novels most only wish we could write.
As I slowly head towards forty, sadly I feel that hundreds of titles under my name will not be the reality of my situation. Not only does it seem impossible to come up with that many ideas – I’d have to write upwards of say, 25 titles a year, then work on them, edit them and publish them… - but I feel I’d become a writing machine, instead of a writer.
I don’t know if writing should be organic, not forced, or be a part of a discipline. I’ve read of two different points of view on this.
1. That writing is a creative pursuit, thus we as writers, should always wait for the muse to turn up and write when we are inspired. Our writing would then flow and feel natural and have a freeness and spontaneous feel to it. Which sounds all kinds of good and would be ideal in an ideal world.
2. Writing is a discipline, a job, like any other. We should learn to sit ourselves down at the same time every day, turn off all distractions, and just write. Make ourselves concentrate and over time, the words would just start to flow. But it takes time and discipline and work. You work at writing. We don’t have time to wait upon the muse for it may or may not come calling.

I don’t know where I stand on this. At one time I was writing every day, quite a lot, and pumped out half a dozen books in a short period of time (well I thought it was short, but looking at the numbers from the example authors above, it was nothing!). I thought I was doing really well, but it didn’t feel like work. It was disciplined, yes, but it was also inspired and the muse was definitely in town!
So which is it? Keep to the schedule and plug away even when every word, every sentence, feels wooden and laboured? Or wait until it flows? Until the words come flooding out of your fingertips, magic in every paragraph?
I’m still unsure, but I can tell you one thing – nothing is getting written while I procrastinate about it, so I’d better wrap this up and get back to the ‘real thing’. In this case, editing.