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Playing With The Muse
By Bob Yehling

In his masterful book On Becoming a Novelist, the late John Gardner eloquently described the Creative Dream as:

• That place where space and time are suspended;
• Our characters and their dialogue tell the story and we serve as instruments;
• We check our egos at the door, step aside and let the story flow.

As writers, we've all been there – whether it be a few minutes to compose a song or short poem, or hours and hours in the crafting of a novel. We've all experienced the Creative Dream; we've all become servants of the Muse. During this time, we feel little or no urge to eat, drink, look at the clock, or respond to any noises in our external environment. We are totally focused, "locked in," completely wrapped inside our poetry or prose. When we are finished, we emerge strangely invigorated, then we look down at what we've written and say to ourselves, "Wow! Did I just write some of that?"

This material is what is going to work in our books, short stories or poems. It has come directly from Source, from the Muse, and has been unimpeded by our ego's designs of how the story should or should not flow. As musician/songwriter and writer Marty Balin says, "This is the material that you keep."

The Creative Dream, or direct contact with the Muse, is such a beautiful experience, yet it scares us. Why? Why don't we eagerly sit down at the computer, type out a page or two to warm up, then immerse as easily as hopping into a swimming pool? Because it is a different reality. It is not a linear, task and time-oriented process like that we use to structure and manage our daily lives. It is not operating in the beta brainwaves to which we are accustomed as we maintain alertness and awareness of all around us in the course of our lives. It is not dependent on other people, food or our other normal staples to sustain itself; the Creative Dream gathers its sustenance from a much higher and deeper source. It is a near-complete suspension of what we know to be time and space; rather, a transcending of it. While our creative spirits know this and practically plead with us to be allowed to play, our minds resist with everything in their power. Anyone who has written fiction, poetry, songs or painted on a regular basis knows the power of this resistance. The conscious mind will do anything to avoid being put on hold while this other source, the Muse, emerges and delivers the dialogue, plot, character interaction, conflicts and resolutions over and over again.

Yet, in spite of our fears and litany of excuses for not going into the Creative Dream (I'm one of the worst offenders), we know that it's the one-way ticket to highest quality work, to ideas and narrative angles that are new, fresh, imbued with wisdom and magnetism to the reader. So, how do we regularly access this – and welcome it into our daily lives?

First of all, when we look at the face of the purveyor of the Creative Dream, the Muse, we're a lot more likely to do whatever we can to plunge into this spiral, universal reality and away from our linear world. Using the concepts of spiral time/acceleration of time and space, and the five-step process from Receiving Information to Automatic Response (Information-Knowledge-Wisdom-Intuition-Automatic Response), we can readily explain the "anatomy" of the Muse and show just how all-inclusive our inner writing voice truly is. We can also show why we need to brush our conscious minds aside once we've structured the basic direction of a story, article or song – and let the Muse spin her Creative Dream.

Four Directions of the Muse
Look at an Indian Medicine Wheel. It is a complete circle built upon the relationship of the four directions (west, south, east, north) to the person, the earth and Wakan Tanka, or Great Spirit. The medicine wheel is not complete without all four directions being included; if a person, an event or practice is dominated by one direction or another, it is incomplete.

So it goes with the Muse. The anatomy of the Muse is not linear; it is circular, spiral, constantly evolving upward. The Muse pulls from everything we have ever read, learned, experienced and observed, then mixes it with collective universal knowledge, cellular memory and the inspiration of Universal Source to create the flow of material that pours through our pens and computers. Trust is food to the Muse; the more we feed Her with our trust, the more She delivers to our pens (and readers). Besides trusting this process to the nth degree, we must bring two distinct elements to the table – our technical skills, and the "voice" we have developed.

When this comes together, apparently disparate subjects come flying into our minds as we write – and somehow, they string together seamlessly. If they don't, we can revise them into place in subsequent drafts. We go off on apparently brainless tangents – yet the tangents work. Facts, statements and vernacular we left on our cliqued-out high school campuses appear as dynamic dialogue between a high school student of today and his father, who's trying to "be cool" by reciting old lingo.

Examples in today's body of literature abound. Gary Snyder takes us deep into the bowels of primordial earth and sings his verse in Buddhist chant mixed with deep reverence for life and harsh criticism for those who'd mess with the environment. The combination won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1975 for Turtle Island and status as the greatest communicator of nature in America since Walt Whitman. In her fine literary memoir, Hawk Flies Above, Lisa Dale Norton loses her ego in the tall grasses of Nebraska's Sandhills – then emerges with a gut-wrenching tale of the twin violations of her own self and Mother Earth, and how they recover together. Lisa stopped at nothing to get that story told – not anguish, not tears, not complete suspension of her daily reality. She trusted the process completely. Joyce Carol Oates becomes practically possessed – completely suspended from her own ego Ð and turns out an experience in Blonde, a novel, that makes us swear to the high heavens that Marilyn Monroe, the protagonist, dictated the book from the other side. Maybe she did; the Muse will stop at nothing when gathering forces and impressions for the story.

The difference between a Gary Snyder or Joyce Carol Oates and a frustrated, unpublished writer comes down to trust (in the Muse), knowledge (study and experience in a very wide body of subjects) and technical skill (hard work) brought to the process. As Marty Balin says, "If you put in the work, if you bleed and sweat to make yourself a better writer or artist, when that moment comes, you will be ready."

Marty should know. His moment has come quite a few times. While with Jefferson Starship in 1975, he wrote the mega-hit song "Miracles" in 30 minutes after a meeting with Indian miracle worker Sathya Sai Baba:

If only you believe/
if only you believe like I believe/
we'll get by/
If only you believe in Miracles/
so will I.

He trusted his Muse; we received "Miracles." Prior to that, he wrote 500-600 songs in the first 15 years of his music career and performed live another 1,000 times. He was ready for the moment. When the idea came to him, he knew what to do: Be quiet, and allow his Muse to put it all together. He was nothing more than an instrument in the creation of the music and lyrics; he readily admits it. Afterwards, he used his technical skill to polish up the song into its finished piece – one of the 25 most-played FM songs of all time, according to BMI.

Let's break down the four "directions" or faces of the Muse a little further:
1) Knowledge, Experience and Observation: Whenever we see, hear, touch, taste or feel something, the experience is registered and stored in our minds. Whenever we read a statement, quote or fact, or listen to a piece of music, it is registered and stored in our minds. The brain is an amazing repository; according to one study by Stanford University, it can store 30 terabytes of information – the equivalent of two supercomputers. All of the accumulated knowledge, experience and observation of our lives is stored in our brain, ready to be accessed and cross-referenced whenever triggered.

2) Collective Universal Knowledge: Each of our minds can store 30 terabytes of information. There are, at last count, about 6.2 billion of us on the planet. Furthermore, the Internet has realized Marshall McLuhan's vision of the Global Village. Those who operate in the spiritual realm have even greater access to the collective knowledge of the planet and beyond. We are deeply interconnected, and we all have access to a delicious buffet of knowledge, experience and observation as it is lived by others. It is achieved in the way we observe others. This is part of what happens when we delve deeply into characterization when writing fiction.

3) Cellular Memory: Our body is the center of our entire earthly existence; therefore, the cells within it become immense repositories of accumulated information. They are microscopic brains. When you come upon a raging creek that you must cross, what happens? Your mind might say, "I don't think I can do it." Your body will tense in either fear or preparation – conditional on the last time you crossed a river. That's how cellular memory works. It comes into deep play when writing anything that involves characters, memoir, journaling, action or suspense.

In addition, cellular memory brings DNA into the mix. DNA is the blueprint of who and what we are when we come into the world. It contains not only our own blueprint, but also passes down pieces of the blueprints of our parents, grandparents and ancestors Ð and sets up the blueprint for our children, grandchildren and descendants. When the Iroquois and Cherokee nations talked about the need to look ahead seven generations in our stewardship of the Earth and ourselves, they spoke to this blueprint. In our writing, it means we can readily access feelings that our ancestors experienced, because their residue is in us. Wonder now what the real secret is of great historic fiction that grabs you even though that era passed 200 or 2,000 years ago? The authors tapped into cellular memory to record the feeling of being there.

4) Inspiration/Universal Source: This is touchy for some, but let's face it: There's a Source behind all creation. The physical, natural proof manifests every spring, when naked, dormant deciduous trees transform into lush forests in 4-5 weeks. This Source (Aum-Shekinah-Kuan Yin-Holy Spirit, among other names) carries a feminine charge, which means it operates with absolute creative expression and upon a task of growth and nurturing. By meditation, quiet contemplation or deep natural observation, we can access this Universal Source. It will provide us with whatever sustenance and direction we require, that is in our highest good. Taken into writing, this is the river that flows through disparate thoughts or "tangents," bringing them back together or back to circle.

Concept of Spiral Time
Does it seem like your life and your world is accelerating– and something continues to push down the gas pedal? It's not a figment of your imagination; linear time itself is accelerating, pushing inexorably toward a shift into what is called spiral time. We spend nearly all of our daily existences in linear time, where we have concepts of time and space, make schedules according to a 24-hour clock, move from point A to point B, and build and maintain our careers and our one-way tickets to middle age and retirement.

Spiral time is entirely different. It is where the Muse operates. In spiral time, we lose track of hours and minutes. Space becomes a realm in which we consciously operate, both inwardly and outwardly, rather than an out-of-the-way place with stars and galaxies. All of our bodies (spiritual-emotional-mental-physical-thinking-feeling) work together in a way that lifts us to greater potential. We feel "in the world, but not of it," to use a yogic saying. Another adage that speaks for spiral time is "Center everywhere, circumference nowhere." We experience life as a circle, rather than a series of straight or curved lines.

If you have ever entered the "creative dream," where your characters, verse, lyrics or story took over and "wrote itself," then you have lived in spiral time. That's the secret to communing with the Muse. To meet the Muse, we must learn to let go and operate in spiral time.

Putting It All Together
How does it all come together? Picture a tornado, spiraling from the ground to an opening in the sky. The tornado is spiral time; you are within it, in the center, where it is as calm as the eye of a hurricane. The tornado is being fed by environmental factors from all four directions. On one side, all of your mentally and intellectually accumulated knowledge, experience and observation feeds the tornado. On another side, all accumulated worldly and universal knowledge feeds the tornado. Below, your accumulated cellular memory feeds the tornado, giving palpable feeling to these facts, figures, statements, symbols and myths. Above, Universal Source/Inspiration feeds the tornado.

These elements swirl together on the outer winds of the tornado, and then spiral within, to where you are, writing. These elements are not an agglomeration of random ideas that spill into your system and overwhelm you as you write. Rather, they form into the dialogue of two characters in your novel, or the bridge stanza of a poem or song, or that memory from adolescence that was so traumatic that you locked it away and forgot about it – or so you thought, until it became the missing piece of your memoir. Hemingway once said, "I write every day and hope to receive one perfect sentence."

In these moments, everything comes together. Your writing becomes deep, inspired, charged with emotion and electricity, fluid, filled with both universality and personal voice – the material that draws readers like magnets draw iron filings. You finish and think, "Did I write that?" "Is that from me?"

It sure is: From you and Your Muse. By simply opening up and trusting the process of creation, creation responds by culling from the vast reservoir and gift-wrapping words, expressions, feelings and movement that move your work forward. By knowing all four directions of this circle – mental knowledge, universal knowledge, cellular memory and Universal Source/Inspiration – you know the "physical" makeup of the Muse. By allowing your Muse to speak, play and create, you become connected with this tremendous inner world that raises the level and clarity of your writing to that point where it stood when the "can't miss" concept first flashed in your mind. Along the way, everything you've ever known comes to play. As Natalie Goldberg notes in her exquisite book, Writing Down The Bones, "To do writing practice means ultimately to deal with your entire life."

Handel wrote "The Messiah" in three days. Anne Rice wrote The Vampire Lestat in six weeks of midnight-to-6 a.m. sessions; she's dipped into that well almost 30 times since. Ray Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451 in nine days. Annie Dillard wrote her ecological masterpiece, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, about a body of water that is 30 feet wide at its fattest point Ð hardly Huck Finn's Mississippi. These writers trusted their Muses, and dealt ultimately with their entire lives Ð spiritual, mental, emotional, physical, thinking and feeling. It all came together; their works speak for themselves.

Like a creek that builds into a raging river, there is a process that transforms information we come across into the automatic response that we covet when we're looking for that one word, piece of dialogue or phrase that supercharges our work. Information, when held and nurtured, grows into knowledge. Knowledge grows into mental wisdom. Mental wisdom dives within and becomes intuition. Intuition becomes automatic response. Automatic response is cellular and never errant – unless the mind tricks it. It is the runner who is dead tired on the last mile of a long race, yet suddenly finds another gear and sprints to the finish line. Why? Because for five years, or 25, she has intentionally picked up the pace on the final mile of her training runs. In the race, her body automatically responds when her mind said "I'm tired."

So will your Muse. It's a beautiful process. What emerges is equally profound.