A great features writer, Rick Bragg, “Laments His Muse” in this article. During a summer internship at the Birmingham Post-Herald, the writing advisor there gave me a handful of Bragg articles to study. I’m still studying them – and reading his books too. One excerpt from this:
I think the muse is not a fairy at all but a sharp, prodding thing, like worry, or need.
It is always among us.
You write because you have to and you do not whine about it, because as hard as writing is it is not real work, like roofing, or toting cement blocks, or wiping tables at a Waffle House. But you treat it like real work. You cannot do it, this work, on an antique; you would beat an antique to scrap. You need electricity to write this way, the same way a guitar man in a busted-up juke joint needs juice running to his strings, to be heard.
So, wired, you write; write until you create some space between your peace of mind and some sharp thing in your head, write until you fulfill the contract you have signed or the deadline you are given or until you have mined just one more ton of coal, till you believe you won’t be too far behind the next day, when you go back down into that hole.
I’m at a different stage of life than I was when I wrote Hero’s Tribute. Then it was for the promise of a contract. Now I have a contract, and am finishing a manuscript. That prodding muse, now I have to chase him/her daily to keep up with deadlines, to keep the story moving. It’s always been there – now I just have to pay attention to it.
http://www.oxfordamerican.org/articles/2009/aug/26/rick-bragg-laments-his-absent-muse/
