How to Stop Stalking the Muse

The Subtle Art of Not Writing

After finishing a PhD in Creative Writing, and after more than a decade of tapping on keys and getting published and garnering a few awards, I finally hacked my creative process. I was surprised to learn it does not require candles or rituals or a room of one’s own. Nope.

It involves writing most days; it involves writing more often than not. While I’m definitely not a tyrant with myself, I am a devoté of the “butt in the chair” school of composition, prescribed by the prolific Mr. Hemingway. What I discovered, after I stopped chasing the muse, was that momentum is the midwife of creativity.

This involves simply sitting down and showing up and seeing what happens. Most days I am astounded. Somehow, during the hours I am not writing, my subconscious is weaving little bits of my story together with astonishing cleverness. I no longer come to the blank page striving to create plotlines or character arcs; the work just comes, easily and lightly, word upon word and line upon line.

The art of not writing may be the secret to writing well. I think our stories might be marinating in possibility while we sleep, and work, and run around the gym. Who knows what kind of brilliant narratives our brains are formulating as we walk through the aisles of Target pushing a big red cart filled with paper towel and bottled water.

Admittedly, I was not always so methodical in my approach, having spent a good many years dancing with a fickle muse called inspiration. To be fair, I did get a few poems and the beginning of a novel out of the cauldron of creative urgency, but then, in the cool afternoon, with just the charred ashes of desire underfoot, I was often silent, inexplicably bereft of the right words in the right order.

There is a true distinction between wanting to write and not being able to write, versus the generative state of passive imagining and unfettered daydreaming that can profoundly inform the work before us. These day I trust that much is happening that I can’t see; that silence is not the absence of ideas, but the necessary period of percolation that brings them to the surface. I hold to the maker’s stubborn faith that there will always be worlds that ask to be brought into being, if only we would sit still and take the time to write them down.