'Routine Kills the Muse'

Bring on the wrecking crew

I’ve been getting up at 2:00AM to write before my 4:00AM morning routine of light therapy, breathwork, fitness, cold shower and meditation.

I used to start with the routine, then cycle to work, and after about five or seven hours, come home, or drop by the pub, to write. But too much energy was used up on the job, which made writing afterwards a chore.

This reordering effort may provide a better balance in my time management.

Yeah, I know.

Are muses for losers, as Nick Cave writes to a fan in his Red Hand File #274?

Cave approaches writing like a daytime job; a chore, perhaps. He goes to the office, ploughs through, and has something to show for it at the end of the working day, or doesn’t.

I haven’t got a muse. Stephen King claims the muse lives in a basement, smokes cigars and makes the writer do all the grunt work. Or, maybe I do have a muse? I’m certainly the one pushing the wheelbarrow to bring the bricks and mortar. 

And after all my slogging, I have to face my writers’ group, who show-and-tell their way through a bunch of examples of my incompetence. ‘Live with it!’ I hear Mr King shout from behind his clackity-clack typewriter.

Chapters I submit to group sometimes get criticised because my fellow writers find the scenes aren’t driving the plot forwards. I’ve been wondering … Should I try to write something that drives the plot backwards?

After another bi-weekly group meeting, more edits must be made. And there I go, slicing and dicing like Dexter in his kill room, and scrawling words like ‘PLOT’ and ‘STRUCTURE’ on the walls with bloodstained fingers.

Now, I don’t want plot to ruin a perfectly good story—Right, Mr King?—but I do need a clear and simple enough structure to show the readers where they are in my wildly intuitive fiction.

And I do spend an awfully long time building the world it’s all set in.

So, yes, I’m a builder. And, oh my, it’s going to be big!

The hard labour continues as I tolerate the smoke rising from below, and the maniacal laughter that echoes sarcastically inside the walls of my mind palace, which looks suspiciously like the Stanley Hotel.

But there are times where the light of inspiration explodes, and great ideas reveal themselves to me like fresh-baked stone tablets, falling from the sun into the hands of this mountaineering prophet. These moments, when the story appears to be writing itself, are glorious. But they are part of the process, not the process itself.

Routine is not an inspiration killer. But changes must be made to make space for wild creativity.

Bring on the wrecking crew.

I’m building this palace.

And I’ll be redecorating the hotel.

And should the ideas pile up so high that they morph into an alphabet-limbed monster, I can always make the sign of the Hollywood Three-Act Structure to scare that word-chewing-and-spewing fiend back into the void.

Happy writing!