Feed the Muse: Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner

Imagine that your mind is a large and spacious room. Some of its walls are lined with shelves, others are covered with picture frames and movie screens, and the whole place is wired for sound.

Go ahead. Have a look around. After all, its your room.

Somewhere near the center of your room, you should see a workspace, a place where you create. What do you see there? You might see a wooden desk with lots of drawers, a guitar resting in a stand, or a baby grand piano gleaming beneath the lights. Do you see a kitchenette, a painter’s easel, a drawing board?

Someone’s Coming to Visit

Whatever it is you see, there’s something you may have missed. It’s a chair, a cozy but distinguished looking chair, the kind you might reserve for a special guest, and that’s precisely who it’s for.

You see, if you’ve been doing all the things we’ve discussed so far (getting curious, collecting your thoughts, doing something daily), you’ve sent out an invitation, an invitation to the muse. And she should be arriving any day now, if she hasn’t already.

Now, I know that a muse is an imaginary being, a myth. But myths are merely metaphors with staying power, and the reason they have such power is because they’re so useful. Metaphors are enormously useful thinking tools, so for the remainder of this chapter please bear with me, suspend your disbelief, and entertain a few ideas.

With that in mind, return your thoughts to the guest you’ve invited to your room.

Hungry, Hungry, Helper

Her sole purpose for existing is to inspire you, so she can be a delightful guest to entertain, but a difficult one to keep around and even harder to predict. She often arrives unannounced, and you never know how long she’ll stay, but you can always count on this: she’ll be hungry.

To the muse, your room (your mind) is like a vast kitchen, because she feeds on the things you stock on the shelves , place inside the picture frames, project onto the movie screens, and pump through your state-of-the-art sound system. She gobbles these things up and converts them into creative energy.

Someone’s in the Kitchen with Ideas

And she seems to be fond of showing up after you begin working on something like a poem or a sculpture or a tapestry, because to her your workspace is the place where the meals get made. She smells something cooking and pops in for a visit, but she seldom shows up beforehand. She likes to arrive once you’ve already started, and offer her advice.

She likes to move around the room, plucking things from the shelves, gazing at the pictures and movies, humming along to the music coming through the speakers. This is how she tastes things, samples them, nibbles on them. Then she brings to them to you, sits in her chair, and says, “Here, try this and this and this. And hurry. I’m hungry.”

Starving Muses Don’t Visit Often

But if your walls and shelves are barren, she has little to offer you, and if you never fire up the stove, she sees little reason to stop in.

If the kitchen isn’t stocked, there’s nothing to cook, and if the stoves are never lit, all the ingredients are useless and thus go to waste, and in either case, the muse will not appear. Besides, who wants to starve?

Go Grab Some Ingredients

This is why you must go shopping. You must go out into the marketplace of creation and find good and tasty things for your shelves and frames and screens and speakers.

Every time you read a good book, you add its contents to your shelves.

When you sit and observe children at play or visit an art museum, you’re gathering images to place in the picture frames and project onto the screens on your walls.

When you listen to a symphony, a conversation, or a lecture, you’re recording things to play back through the speakers in your mind, your room.

Fire Up the Stove

And every time you begin to create something, whatever it may be, you’re working with all the ingredients you’ve gathered thus far.

Doing this makes the muse’s mouth water and leads her to your door. She finds it hard to resist when there’s a feast at hand.

So, feed the muse. Keep your room well stocked and fire up the stove as often as possible. A well fed muse is a good thing to have around.

Author’s Note: When the book is in its final stages, I intend to add a list of resources for keeping your muse fat and happy. This will also be an area that lends itself to frequent updates as I find new sources of inspiration. But since my goal right now is to finish the rough draft and thus nail down the main ideas, I’ll be moving onto the next chapter in the book, Live Your Life.

By the way, I’ve heard that muses love to snack on my blog posts. Why not get them delivered fresh and tasty every day? You can subscribe to them by RSS feed or by Email.