How do _You_ Avoid The Muse? Let's Make a List...
Twenty-five years ago, it was easy. We weren't rock stars because we didn't have the recording equipment.
You couldn't say it was for lack of trying, either. Pretty much everybody out with whom I hung would have emphatically jumped through unthinkable flaming hoops to have access to a 24-track recording device and a microphone or two -- it would have been like...living in the Realm of the Gods. Easy to say that, and to think it, especially because of how low the odds were of it ever being proven.
Hell, my band and I torpedoed the summer of '78 living in the worst place imaginable (correct, the floor of a warehouse Irwindale, California) because there was a broken 8-track studio there. We did nothing but sleep, and try, try, try to get our spirits up enough to rehearse and write songs, just hoping the studio would be up and running at some point. The studio was never repaired, and to my heretofore secret relief, there is no evidence of the fact that we didn't write any good songs of which to speak.
Bullet Dodged.
Now we (everybody who reads this on O'Reilly anyway) have more than enough equipment to make the music, art, videos, etc. The golden gates to creativity are open. But to gaze beyond them is all the more terrifying for that openness. One of my friends, Charlie, remarked, "The suits can't stand to be in a room with a piano. It scares the shit out of them, because it represents Infinite Possibility." To do "Art," or even "Entertainment," one must be brave, ready to put her ego out there, make a thousand decisions a minute that might each be criticized, to put his dick on the anvil.
OUCH. It's a terrifying thought. Understandably, our subconscious mental processes for avoiding a Showdown with The Muse have become of necessity quite subtle and sophisticated.
Bill, a dealer in creativity software, thinks that the otherwise creative people to whom he sells these magnificent tools seem to turn their attention towards projects, research, funding drives, tool development, administration and such -- all of which appear to Bill to be subconscious efforts to shy away from The Golden Gates.
Ahem.
We're missing out on Heaven, people. Let's not let that happen ... let's be brutally honest with ourselves and, in order to recognize our own subconscious creativity avoidance patterns, let's learn to recognize...
Things That When We Hear Them We Should Wonder What a Certain Somebody Is Running From.
I'll begin, you add to it with your comments. Let's go ahead and mix up the Oldies with the New Breed ... we can sort them out later.
"I've started working on my song again."
"I've almost got my patch library together."
"Yeah, well, if I had ten thousand dollars worth of equipment, my music would sound good, too."
"Hey. HEY. Dude. I have a Les Paul."
"Are you going to _use_ that take?"
"If we want to do this project right, we're going to need funding."
"I've realized that I'm not my audience, so I'm going to rely heavily on focus groups."
"Game designers aren't good at storytelling, so we hire writers from the movies."
YOUR TURN! Please comment...
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"I'm LIVING - I need to do that before writing."
or
"I gotta get better tools, first." (my favorite actual example of this is, "I can't wait to get a new laptop." "Why?" "So I can start writing again.")
Not to get too existential, but "the muse" is a rhetorical fiction created to diffuse responsibilty for inconsistencies in our own productivity. Creativity is always a product of individual choices and psychological openness to the process.
That said, although I sometime procrastinate about finishing a recording of a song, I rarely put off writing a song and am still pretty good about being able to sit down and write something useful or worthwhile. Still, if I were looking for excuses, I think the main one would be that I have already created my share of stuff. I have said 99% of everything I could ever say through music. My repeated efforts to fill in that last 1% is mostly vanity and perfectionism, not that those don't have their place as well in a well-balanced life.
That reminds me. I have a report to finish and an arrest affidavit to create to send a couple credit card thief's to jail.
Dangit! back to writing deadlines again!
Officer/Composer Dave
The truth is that we now live in a time of great distraction. If you truly do find your muse, there are enough other things to do (Blogs, FB, Twitter, iPhone/iPods, 200 channels, pay-per-view, website to browse) that you really have to carve out time and shut the cacophony of modern life out.
I wrote a book over the last 2 years and it was writing writing writing in odd places, at a Panera bread over coffee for 15 minutes, late at night after helping the kids with homework for a half hour...a notebook on a beach on Cape Cod during a 2 day "vacation" last summer...sometimes jotting myself a few sentences through my hands free phone to Jott when I thought of a cool plot twist.
The work is posted on the kindle, so I guess I got it done. The cost of doing it was to play my guitar a little less and to almost completely cut TV out except for the news and the Patriots/RedSox/Celtics during end of season games or really important MNF or something.
Conversely, we started a discussion in our forum about how to stimulate creativity:
A Whack on the Side of the Head
Muse Repellants...
"spent my writing/recording time reading [insert political site here]."
Was it not Rob Petrie, when working on his "Great American Novel," who said, "You have to live to write. Eating is writing. Walking is writing. Sleeping is writing."
"I'm working on it, you just haven't seen me working on it."
"I just don't have time to practice." I currently have my boot in the corner trying to squish this one.
lol! priceless! I just want a whole roll of those high-quality music biz one liners!
"before i start recording, let's check twitter ..."
"Sorry, I couldn't prepare for our songwriting session--I had to write this blog."