Margaret Atwood: The Sequel

So, I met Margaret Atwood at an event once, and I liked her enough to tell my sister to buy my mom her memoir for Christmas (mom is also a fan). I flicked through that memoir, and in it, she said that each writer was actually two people—the one doing the writing and the one doing the living.

What she didn’t say was how rarely the designated muse actually deigns to show up at the computer. Often, it’s the person who’s doing the living staring at the screen, thinking how this isn’t really their job and trying to remember whatever it was they learned about syntax in grad school. Then they struggle through the next twenty minutes or hour or however much time they slotted for this crap and come away feeling that it was, you know, crap.

The muse does show up, whining, when the person is doing other things such as showering / driving / running away from the crap they just wrote. This necessitates that the person instead run right on home to put that idea down before it disappears. In writing, as in video games, you need to get the little pixels before they go poof.

The two people—or halves of a person—haven’t worked out who steers the brain when. The muse thinks they’re doing a huge favor if they turn up late and possibly stoned, and the person living thinks that their muse should show up on time and as appropriate, thank you very much.

And no, I haven’t actually gotten stoned. I’m about the most straightlaced, rule-following person you’ll find. (I actually use the word “straightlaced.”) That was just the best metaphor I could come up with because the muse ditched me halfway through this blog.