by PocketPen

Created on: February 08, 2010

Legend has it that a muse is inspiration in bodily form. Most typically, it’s a woman who inspires passion in a man—the passion to create.

Since we’ve evolved a bit,  a creative woman can also get a muse—young, attractive, and devoted—by (as usual) going after one herself.

A muse, after all, is just a metaphor for inspiration. Sometimes there are real scenes in our mind that consistently set us in the mood for writing. It may be an image of a beloved place that provides an imagined road or pathway. It can be a sensation as well, adrenaline if that’s your fix, desire, ambition, striving or even anger. Imagining success can also be a kind of muse (it certainly works better than imagining failure). Certainly conjuring up an audience for your work is helpful (my favorite right now is that moment when you enter the stadium and the crowds leaps to its feet and roars…).

Your muse is the lure you give yourself, the benefit that awaits you if you sit down and write those stories in your head. The reason the muse was a person was because writing is lonely; it sets you apart. Having an imagined guide and helper provided some of the social support that writing by yourself in a dimly lit room doesn’t provide. Because the old gods interacted constantly with mortals, it was natural to assume that poetry and the arts were gifts that the gods gave us, and it also indicated how much the arts were respected. A great poem stirred the population to great deeds or at least great thoughts, proof of divine origin.

If you can’t find a goddess or god to stand beside you, you can, of course, have muses who are real people. You may have a friend, relative or lover who stands behind you, admires you, thinks you’re unique and gifted. That’s your muse, giving you the friendship of affinity. It can be a writing group that you trust, because they already see you as a writer and know what your capabilities are. It can be an online community that gives you the kind of feedback you can count on. All of these, real and virtual, are muses.

Can a horse or a dog or a cat be a muse? If they strike you as things of beauty, why not? If the force, curiosity, steadfastness of their characters draws you into imagining a world fueled by it, then why not have them as a muse? No one said you can only have one muse for life; choose them as you need them.

And you are free to find muses in inanimate objects as well. A perfect pen, a faithful laptop, a fresh notebook opened to a new page—these can all provide the inspiration to create.

“Inspiration” itself means to breathe in, because, although it is by nature invisible, creativity like air sustains us.

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