Muse Says What?

This week we're going to be blogging about muse and inspiration. We've got guest blogger Cheryl K. Tardif joining us on Wednesday and vampire-reviewer extraordinaire, Bertena Varney, on Friday. Come join us this week for a fun-filled line up and news about our next contest.

Anyone who's been reading this blog for any length of time has certainly seen me talk about my newness to this whole writing shtick.  When I first started conversing online with other writers, I met some that referred to their muse like it was another person:

"My muse took over and I had a back seat to whatever flowed on the page."

"No matter what I tried, my muse was kicking and screaming, determined the scene would go this way."

"My muse has been silent for a while."

I scratched my head for a bit trying to piece this stuff together. Were they making it sound like their muse was a separate personality inside their head, or was I crazy? I seriously didn't get it.

Being a no-nonsense type of science geeky-chick, I thought perhaps they were being slightly eccentric. Hey, and my family is from The South. I know eccentric. I'm not sure whom it was that finally explained to me that it meant a person's imagination.

And even then I didn't quite get it. I watched a movie ages ago where a painter called an actress in the film, Sharon Stone, his muse. If she was his muse then what was in his head? In that instance they meant she was his inspiration.

Recently, I had an interview where I was asked who or what inspires me to write. I thought of that movie and I figured, well, no one. I have lots of people who encourage me, but no one person I can point to and say they inspire me to write.

Sure, I get ideas everywhere. How can one look around their immediate world and not find ideas for characters, setting, and possible story ideas?

This writing gig is pretty solitary. No one makes me write but me. I think some of us have conversations in our head when we may be working on dialogue for too long and we then name that our muse. I'm not sure.

I don't refer to my inner thoughts and plotting as my muse. It's just me. I don't have an idea of how I want the story to go and then claim the characters made me write it another way. Um, hello? It's in my head. You can damn well bet that is one place things are going to go exactly like I want.

If I haven't built the scene up to make the characters actions plausible to go as I envisioned, then I need to re-work the scene until it flows the way I planned it. Maybe it's my art background. Maybe because my imagination is so fully a part of my everyday life— from what I cook, how I decorate, to how I plan out a party— that perhaps I don't sense the separation as distinctly as some writers do.

Or perhaps I don't feel the need to make a part of myself a third person and talk about them like they're real. I have so many ideas I often find it hard to sleep at night. But that's been most of my life, not just when I started writing.

What about you? Do any of you feel the same why I do about this Muse business or do you have some alter ego talking to you inside your head? Please share, I'd love to know.