Find the Muse Within the Story

How to Recognize and Search Beyond Ordinary Inspirations

Dave King

Writing is hard. If you don’t have something driving you to keep going, some dream that will get you through your fifth revision or past the writer’s block that sets in after chapter eight, you won’t make it. You need a muse.

But there’s a danger in picking the wrong one. Some muses will lead you happily through your final draft, only to abandon you with a novel in a drawer that you never look at again. After being worked over by one of these false muses, you may get so discouraged that you take up another hobby. Which would be a shame because being a writer is a wonderfully fulfilling way to spend your life.

No, if your true calling is writing, you have to find your inspiration in the right place: your story.

RECOGNIZE THE FALSE MUSES

A number of muses will call to you with their siren song. Here’s how to recognize and avoid them.

Money

I know clients who got into writing for the money. Some of them dream of making it big, with royalty checks and movie deals pouring in. Less delusional clients simply want to know if their novel will make enough money to be worth the investment of having it edited. I tell them all the same thing: It’s possible to make a living as a writer, but there are a lot of easier and more reliable ways to do it.

The writing world once had plenty of room for hacks who cranked out formulaic novels with no real thought behind them just to turn a buck. But so many people are writing well now, and so much good writing is reaching the market, that even the most generic stories are well written, with heartfelt intent.

Even the medium where hacks used to thrive—novels based on movies or television—has transformed. For those of you unfamiliar with it, the ABC series Castle centers on Richard Castle, who writes police procedurals. In the show, Castle shadows NYPD detective Kate Beckett. He uses his experiences to write a series of novels whose main character, Nikki Heat, is based on Beckett. As an adjunct to the show, ABC produced an actual series of Nikki Heat novels, anonymously written under Richard Castle’s name.

I’ve read a couple of them, and they are not hackwork. The writing is more than competent, the plots have some nice twists, the settings are authentic, and the action is fast paced and clear. More important, even though the anonymous author is using characters someone else created, you can tell she (I’ve seen good arguments that the writer is a woman) loves these characters. She’s inspired by them and what happens to them. She’s doing it for the story rather than the money.

Preaching

Another muse that misleads a lot of writers is passion for an idea. I can understand the attraction. Ideas are important and often beautiful, and it’s natural to fall in love with them. Novels have sometimes changed people’s minds about important issues. But like the hackwork of yore, there is little room for sermonizing novels in today’s market. The last bestseller of this variety that I can think of is The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield, a ten-part New Age homily decked out in a wafer-thin story. I’m sure others have been written in the quarter-century since, but no one has heard of them.

So if you’re trying to sell your ideas to the world by wrapping a novel around them, you’ll likely wind up with something that is neither an effective sermon nor a good story. Novels can convey ideas, but only if you’re focusing on your story first, with the ideas in second place.

It’s not just that preaching interrupts your story in order to dump information on your readers—think of the endless lectures on fiscal policy that break up Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged—but it often forces your characters to act out of character for the sake of getting across your point. Real people’s lives aren’t perfect examples of abstract principles. So if your ideas are your main focus, you’ll end up stretching your characters thin enough to wrap around them.

As soon as you start using your characters as mouthpieces, you undermine the suspension of disbelief. Your readers may still learn something, but if they no longer believe in your characters as people, they aren’t going to care about what they learn. If they see through your attempt to sermonize, you’ll probably generate a backlash. People don’t like being preached to, and they like being preached down to even less. When you preach down to them without acknowledging what you’re doing, you may as well give up any hope of changing minds. The only people who will keep reading already agree with you.

It’s worth looking at what may be one of the most successful sermonizing novels ever written, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. By humanizing the plight of slaves, this book inspired and spread the abolition movement and may have helped push the country into the Civil War. It literally changed the world.

But while the book does contain a fair amount of preaching—it was written in an age when sermons were much more tolerated in fiction—the sermons didn’t change people’s minds. Rather, it was the emotional connection readers made with Harriet Beecher Stowe’s very human characters. It’s clear that, like the author of the Nikki Heat books, Stowe loved her characters enough to bring them to life. Her readers’ empathy for Eliza and George and the rest of the cast made it impossible for them to view slavery in the same way. Even Uncle Tom, who later became an archetype of a black person who passively submits to injustice, would have been seen as a noble character at the time. By sticking to his faith despite his suffering, he proved that he was a better Christian than his white owners, a notion that turned the world of Stowe’s readers upside down.

Style

Style matters. I’m often surprised and delighted when I read an original description or a unique stylistic technique that brings a fresh approach to the reading experience. But style can become a false muse when it serves as an end in itself rather than a means of conveying your story.

This problem shows up most clearly when a writer has a personal voice so idiosyncratic that it overrides her characters’ voices. It’s hard for characters to become individuals when everyone sounds alike. So if you’re deliberately adopting a distinctive voice, stop. Start listening to your characters instead.

You can test whether your personal style is vetoing your characters’ voices by gathering all the dialogue of a given character in a separate file and then reading through it. Do the same for your other characters. Each file should contain a distinctive vocabulary and a unique worldview. If it doesn’t, then you need to start listening to your characters more than yourself.

Unfortunately, a lot of readers—and reviewers and book awards—reward stylistic navel-gazing before genuine entertainment. They lionize originality and even hold some contempt for traditional storytelling with likable characters put in challenging situations. But the books that are written to please this market rarely reach a wider readership, and many of the stylistic techniques that are celebrated as original turn out to be fads. Jay McInerney was praised for his use of the second person when Bright Lights, Big City first came out. In retrospect, it seems like a gimmick.

It’s really a matter of priorities. A fresh style is a gift, but only when your original ways of expressing yourself and looking at the world belong to your characters rather than to you, the author. Then you can bring those characters to life, and your readers will love them. When you make stylistic beauty your main goal, you shortchange both your characters and your readers.

In Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel made some original choices with her speaker attributions, using ambiguous antecedents or leaving out attributions entirely. She may have intended to create a sense that her characters’ daily speech was detached from their inner lives, which would have been appropriate for her setting in the court of an absolute monarch. But what she actually created was confusion over who was saying what. She must have realized that her stylistic originality was getting in the way of her story because her speaker attributions were much more conventional in the sequel.

On the other hand, Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone books often appeal to readers with descriptions that are both strikingly new and perfectly apt. In “D” Is for Deadbeat, for instance, Kinsey describes a character she’s just met as having “a dimple in his chin that looked like a puncture wound.” Since the books are written in the first person, these delightful original touches belong to Kinsey and show her self-confidence. She trusts herself enough that she can look at the world in a way no one else has and describe it the way she sees it. The style enhances the story without getting in its way.

Lauren Groff, author of The New York Times bestseller Arcadia, also uses language distinctively by creating rich metaphors and dwelling lovingly on details. Here’s a description of the main house in the eponymous commune at the center of Arcadia, as seen by Bit, a young boy being raised there:

Again, the descriptive gifts that capture the house’s menace are rooted in Bit’s history. He is a child of an iconoclastic community, raised by people who deliberately reject the conventional. Of course he’d see the world in original ways.

FIND YOUR MUSE

So once you’ve turned your back on false muses and prepared the way for the real one, how do you find her? How do you find inspiration in your story?

Craft

Even if you aren’t misled by false muses in the course of telling your story, your progress might be slowed because you haven’t yet mastered your craft. The best writers make writing look easy. It’s only when you try it yourself that you realize just how tough it is. And it’s hard to stay inspired by your story if your descriptions are too inept to bring your locations to life, or your dialogue mechanics are so cumbersome that they interfere with your characters’ voices. To follow your muse, you need to write at a certain level of competence.

To learn your craft, you can join writers’ groups—in person, online, or both. You can read books (like this one) on the writer’s craft. You can hire a professional editor. Or you can also simply keep writing. As you do, you will learn to critique your own work and eventually develop the skills you need to get your vision on the page.

Of course, it’s also possible to obsess about craft, to get lost in those writing books that reduce the art of creating a story to a series of rules. I’ve had clients quote some famous writer who said that a line of dialogue should never be more than ten words long or that you should never use a prologue. I’ve told them that they should use whatever techniques best let them tell the story they want to tell.

If you’re thinking about whether you should use third-person objective or third-person limited point of view as you’re writing a scene, your focus is not where it belongs. It should be trained on your characters and what happens to them. The trick is to know the details of your craft well enough to apply them unconsciously, freeing your mind to follow your story. Don’t worry, when you go back and revise, you can refine the details.

Your True Muse

Inspiration is, at heart, a matter of love, and what you fall in love with about your book is as individual as you are. Ask yourself what excites you most about your story. Is it your carefully constructed plot, which springs unexpected twists on your reader? Is it a particular character you can’t get out of your head, whose story you have to follow?

In his prologue to A Maggot, John Fowles wrote of how a single image inspired him to write the novel. “For some years before its writing, a small group of travelers, faceless, without apparent motive, went in my mind towards an event. Evidently in some past, since they rode horses, and in a deserted landscape; but beyond this very primitive image, nothing.”

J.R.R. Tolkien was inspired by his setting—he spent more than a quarter-century refining the history, mythology, geography, and languages of Middle-earth as a sheer labor of love before his friends persuaded him to start publishing stories about it.

A writer I know dreamed about a particular character traveling through a landscape. When she wrote down the dream, she found that the story continued, even though she was awake. So she kept writing. Fully rounded characters showed up, and a plot developed before her eyes. She was writing a novel.

Are you guaranteed to find inspiration on this level? No. But if you’re looking for your muse in the right place, she is not hard to find. After all, she’s been hanging out with us for tens of thousands of years. The earliest cave drawings are stories made visible. Once we developed written language, it didn’t take us long to go from making scratches on clay tablets to keep track of how many sheep we owned to creating The Epic of Gilgamesh—which is still a good read after more than four thousand years.

Storytelling is in our bones. When you create people on paper and follow their lives as they unfold, projecting yourself into someone else’s head, you connect to humanity’s deepest roots. Writing stories takes you out of yourself by forcing you to think about the motivations—and consequences—of human behavior. Putting a character you love into conflict or danger and watching him fight his way out reveals the courage and convictions that have shaped our species into what it is. This is why false muses are so unsatisfying—they do not make us more human.

Writing stories makes you more aware. As you learn to craft distinctive settings and plausible dialogue, you also start to pay more attention to the settings of your actual life. You listen to how people express themselves, spotting those moments when they turn complex thoughts or emotions into simple, heartfelt words that are unique to their personalities. As you craft plot twists, you notice how real-life stories play out in unexpected ways.

Writing stories makes you wiser. As you craft villains who remain plausible human beings, you learn that no one thinks of herself as evil but that flaws are part of the human condition. And when you start creating heroes who remain sympathetic despite their flaws, you come to see that the flaws we all carry don’t have to be fatal ones. We may turn out okay after all.

So look to your story, and ask yourself what attracts you to it. What about it speaks to the deepest part of you? You’re likely to find your muse sitting right in front of you, where she’s been all along.