However, there is a third way, embrace the beast! Yes, seek the creature were it hides in the dark recesses of your imagination and when you find it, walk willingly into its arms (give in to the dark side Luke!). Consort with it, let it inseminate you with its wicked seed, and then gestate and deliver into this world its twisted offspring!
(Insert maniacal laughter here)
OK, what the heck am I talking about?
If you want to understand please first read this very short story that I posted on Scribd: She's Back! (if you already read it keep on reading).
The premise of the story is simple. To what extremes would a writer go to get rid of a bad case of writer's block? Especially a writer who has figured out the inner workings of his muse and the terrible thing he has to do to keep her coming back to him.
You see my point? Take your weakness, that anxiety, that depression, that barrenness that you are experiencing, and turn them into your strength. Writer's block can inspire stories, they may not be pretty, but they will get you out of your creative funk.
Now, if you allow me, I can't resist going over what the writer in the story discovered about muses. I will call it:
Museology 101
1) A muse is not an abstraction, a muse is a shape-shifting trans-dimensional being that feeds on our desire to create. It provides us with ideas, we take the ideas and break them down and reorganize them into stories and the muse feeds on the energy generated by the whole process.
2) Much in the same way that you won't eat eggs and bacon every day, a muse will not stay forever with one writer, it needs a balanced diet.
3) When you muse deserts you, it doesn't disappear, it goes off with another writer and gives that writer the ideas it would have provided to you. Therefore that writer will write or will finish writing the stories you would have written if the muse had stayed with you. Your muse will eventually return to you, just like you decide to eat eggs and bacon after not eating them for a while, but when this will happen is anyone's guess.
4) Now here is the crucial fact. If something were to happen to that "other" writer, say for example an "accident" like being hit on the head with a blunt object and buried in a basement, the muse will automatically return to the previous writer.
So you see dear reader, this is the type of inspiration and ideas you get when you embrace your "inner beast". Thank you for your attention, I hope both that you find the inspiration to write some great stories, and that you have gained some understanding of the plight of your fellow writers out there suffering writer's block. Remember also to be kind enough to accept an invitation to their house for dinner.
; ^ )
Phantomimic