Muses Afloat

I always thought I could never write fiction. Words are easy, grammar is easy, format is easy, spelling is easy, describing what I see and feel is easy….making shit up and detailing an entirely new world full of entirely new people, however, is fucking hard.

That’s what I always thought.

Then, one night, I was laying in bed and talking with my partner. I was describing how cool it would be to read this one book and I was getting really excited about it. The catch? The book doesn’t exist. As I lamented this sorry state of affairs, my husband proffered a simple solution: “Why don’t you write it?”

Before doubt even had a chance to set in, I was struck with the fully formed concept of not only the book I wanted to read, but an entire trilogy. Blam. Effortless. Unexpected.

Realizing that inspiration was striking, I quickly scrambled to make notes in my journal, kept by the bedside. One note per trilogy flowed out of me and onto that page. I would throw it up here for you so that you could see how nearly illegible my hasty scrabble was, but I have this new theory about writing fiction, about inspiration and, if I were to share the ideas with you, I fear they might leave me.

Once, I was walking with a fuzzy mongrel beast along a nice forest pathway and listening to a podcast, I don’t remember which one. I do remember that a lady named Nora Ephron was talking about writing.  I had never heard of her and she sounded like a complete nutjob. She was quacking on about how she felt that concepts for books were actually floating around the noosphere, waiting to be embraced by people. Sometimes, she said, they came down to material reality in order to choose someone to endow with their presence. She said that these people had a duty to help bring that idea into reality, help to flesh it out with form, or else they would not only suffer the loss of that idea, they would be destined to watch another take their place. The idea would continue floating until it was born, satisfied.

I felt either that she had lost some critical perspective along the way or that she had a gift and didn’t fully understand it, believing instead that her abilities came down from on high.

At other times, I had heard authors talk about their characters as though they were people who actually existed. Some believed, apparently, that the author merely channeled the character’s actual, pre-existing thoughts, actions, words, and interactions into written form. This, again, sounds like a form of schizophrenia.

But, now I know they were right.

Not only was I blessed to receive a fully formed muse, offering me a trilogy of material, I have also met a handful of truly intriguing, amazingly detailed, and incredibly rich people cast as my characters. They exist somewhere, I swear they do.

At the time I wrote this, they would come to me each day and show more of themselves to me. I would literally watch them in my mind as they went through their days, their lives, and I simply wrote down what I saw.

I swear it, I had no idea what would happen next in the story. No joke.

This is completely insane and I know it. I went from hearing of other people being crazy in this way to experiencing the crazy firsthand. I know how it sounds and it sounds ridiculous.

You wanna know what’s even more bizarre? So, this trippy thing happened to one of my characters. She was walking along and sort of passed out, went into a trance, started dreaming, or something. In this dream vision experience, she is confronted by this being. What is this being? The dreamlike quality makes it hard to pin down, but it seemed like a combination of a man, an elk, and perhaps a wolf. Seriously, I couldn’t have been more surprised myself.

As the story progressed, I learned that this being represented endurance, masculinity, renewal, ancient knowledge, prescience, cyclical time and change.

But, however weird things had gotten for me up to this point, nothing prepared me for what happened next.

I was searching for symbols and their meanings online when I saw something that looked strangely like the being who popped up in the character’s vision. Eerily like it. Creepily like it.

I nearly lost my mind. This Celtic god’s name is Cernunnos. He is part horned beast. He is not of a physical reality. Stumbling upon this is still tripping me the crap out.  Maybe you think that’s not that weird? Well, get a load of this list of Cernunnos’ meanings and associations:

• Virility
• Power
• Strength un
• Survival
• Masculinity
• Weaponry
• Sexual Superiority
• Transition/Cycles
• Agricultural Blessings

While not a direct translation, that list is pretty similar to the set of characteristics I had gleaned from my muse – no? I’m not sure if I can convince anyone that this actually happened. I’m still nearly unbelieving myself and definitely in a bit of shock.

Call it what you will: flights of fancy, the human mind’s penchant for finding patterns where none exist, Jungian archetypes coming out of my subconscious, or the actual existence of muse-like ideas floating around our collective unconscious, waiting to grace someone lucky enough to catch them with their unfolding.

I didn’t take any chances. I dedicated as much time as I could to the story until it was out, birthed into the world. I hope my muse has been satisfied by my work.