Have you gotten to know your creative demon? (If not, see “Getting to Know Your Creative Demon, Part 1,” and also parts 2 and 3.) Have you begun to learn the specific personality of the deep psychological force that organically motivates you to be passionate about, fascinated with, and energized by this instead of that and some things instead of other things? Have you experimented with reading your life’s trajectory, both inner and outer, as a work of art or literature that embodies central, recurrent motifs and themes, and have you recognized these as clues to the natural direction your creativity would like to take you?

If so, then you’re way ahead of the game. Many people never do these things, and you, by contrast, may be experiencing a new or renewed sense of creative potency and possibility. This is a heady and alternately (or reciprocally) frightening and exhilarating development.

It’s also an ongoing one. You can never exhaust the depth of discovery in your muse or genius. This is built into the very structure of human consciousness, since the unconscious genius lies perpetually “behind” the conscious ego. The harmonizing and integrating of these two selves in a quasi-Jungian process of individuation — which is really what we’re about here: individuation as experienced in or applied to artistic creativity — represents not a discrete, one-time accomplishment, like a finish line to be reached, but an ongoing, ever-deepening relationship in which communication flows with increasing freedom between you and your daimon.

In this process, getting familiar with your creative demon’s general nature is only the beginning: a (very) necessary step, but not a sufficient one. This is because you’ll soon discover that in addition to a general direction, your demon muse has specific habits and desires. These can sometimes pertain to things so seemingly prosaic and trivial that you’ll be tempted to dismiss them as meaningless. But that would be a mistake.

The experience of creative diminishment or full-blown creative block often arises from your unwitting attempt to force your genius to deliver through channels or means that it simply doesn’t like and refuses to comply with. Conversely, you can stoke your creative fire by finding and using the right approach for your genius.

In short, through trial and error you can learn exactly how your creative demon likes to work, right down to the most humdrum daily details of method and material.

Kipling’s daemon and “the blackest ink”

The practical pickiness of the muse/daimon/genius is vividly illustrated by something Rudyard Kipling recorded about a tiny but crucial aspect of his authorial life, in his posthumously published autobiography.

Kipling overtly externalized his own creative genius and framed it exactly as we have been doing here at Demon Muse: in terms of the ancient concept of the personal daimon or daemon. In his autobiography’s final chapter, titled “Work-Habits,” he wrote,

Let us now consider the Personal Daemon of Aristotle and others, of whom it has been truthfully written, though not published:—

This is the doom of the Makers—their Daemon lives in their pen.
If he be absent or sleeping, they are even as other men.
But if he be utterly present, and they swerve not from his behest,
The word that he gives shall continue, whether in earnest or jest.

– Rudyard Kipling, Something of Myself (1937)

The “doom of the Makers,” says Kipling — that is, the unavoidable burden, mission, and destiny of an inspired writer (and presumably of other types of artists, too) — is that “their Daemon lives in their pen.” In other words, their creativity has a mind and a will of its own, and this is only realized (made real) in the act of committing words to paper. When the inspiration isn’t there, “they are even as other men,” with nothing guiding or empowering them but their own conscious efforts. But if the inspirational spirit is moving, the writer who follows it faithfully (“swerves not from its behest”) finds the work taking on a vibrant life of its own, so that effort falls away and the creative act becomes one of natural flow and seemingly external guidance.

Rudyard Kipling

Kipling also explains that his daemon made itself known early in his life, and provided his career’s enduring direction: “Most men, and some most unlikely, keep him under an alias which varies with their literary or scientific attainments. Mine came to me early when I sat bewildered among other notions, and said; ‘Take this and no other.’ I obeyed, and was rewarded.”

He says he first discovered his daemon in the writing of his story “The Phantom Rickshaw,” and quickly learned that he would have to make a lifelong point of following the creative influence entirely, because otherwise his work would inevitably suffer: “I learned to lean upon him and recognise the sign of his approach. If ever I held back, Ananias fashion, anything of myself (even though I had to throw it out afterwards) I paid for it by missing what I then knew  the tale lacked.”

His Daemon, he tells us, was palpably involved in the writing of, for instance, the Jungle Books and Kim, as evidenced by the fact that “when those books were finished they said so themselves with, almost, the water-hammer click of a tap turned off.”

But what of the specific, nitpicky end of daemonic matters mentioned above? What does Kipling have to say about the role of his daemon in establishing concrete work habits?

At one point he starts talking about pens. He devotes several sentences to the history of the pens he found it necessary to write with in his authorial life. Then he shares the odd fact that his daemon had a highly specific and undeniable preference for a certain shade of ink:

For my ink I demanded the blackest, and had I been in my Father’s house, as once I was, would have kept an ink-boy to grind me Indian-ink. All ‘blue-blacks’ were an abomination to my Daemon, and I never found a bottled vermilion fit to rubricate initials when one hung in the wind waiting.

This may sound odd to people who haven’t pursued authorial work themselves, but to those who have, and/or to those who have known creative artists, it probably rings an immediate bell of recognition. Writers and artists are notorious for their idiosyncratic work habits, which often involve curiosities like Kipling’s black ink, and they’re usually only too happy to tell you why: It’s because when they don’t adhere to these seemingly arbitrary rules, they don’t feel the creative flow as strongly as they’d like, or perhaps not at all. Something within them demands a particular circumstance, tool, or method, and in the absence of it they feel that appalling deadness which is the living hell of creative block, sterility, or miscarriage.

The “something within them” that makes these peculiar demands is, as we know, the daimon, the muse, the unconscious genius that asks (demands) to be honored, in return for which it gladly gives you its gift when the time is right.

Paper, computers, and blue Bic pens

In my own authorial life, I’ve discovered that there’s something talismanic about taking a break from typing, whether on a computer or an actual typewriter (I started as a child on a manual one, then switched to an electric), and returning to the handwritten word. Most of my best work has started as either handwritten notes or, quite often, full drafts written by hand, which I later typed.

This was true of all the stories in my Divinations of the Deep. It’s true of half the pieces in Dark Awakenings. The very blog you’re reading now started as a handwritten brainstorming process. I didn’t set out with conscious intent in the earliest stages to create a blog about the daemonic model of creativity. Rather, that direction emerged from some focused tooling around (brainstorming and concept mapping) with a pen.

Speaking of which, my best creative feeling, the state of mind and spirit where I can really feel the flow, seems to come through a blue ballpoint ink pen with a modulated flow of ink that’s not too thick or thin, and that provides a suitably scratchy feeling on the page. Rollerball pens and gel pens, by contrast, are things to be avoided. Interestingly, this dislike of their feel and performance reaches all the way back to my childhood, when I unself-consciously hated them.

My calligraphic needs aren’t nearly as refined as Kipling’s. Cheap, disposable, blue Bic ballpoints with a medium width are my best tool, as verified over a period of nearly two decades.

That said, sometimes I need a break from ink entirely. Sometimes a pencil — preferably a real wooden one, a yellow #2 “school pencil” — is needful. Not only the dry scratching of graphite on paper and the feeling of the wooden pencil shaft in my hand, but the appearance of the grayish letters on the crisp white background feels unaccountably satisfying to my eye and sensibility.

(Not incidentally, this sense of satisfaction is the very thing you should be looking for when gauging your own daemon’s preferences. Pay attention to the conspicuous absence or appearance of a sense of heightened intensity, a kind of delicious buzz that says you’re “in the zone,” as the sports metaphor has it. Sometimes it’s delicate, but it’s definitely there — or not.)

After I’ve written something by hand, the very act of transferring those words into typing — always on a computer instead of a typewriter, these days — seems to open them up and unfold possibilities that were only latent, not manifest, in their handwritten incarnation. It’s as if I record a highly concentrated version of the inspiration when working by hand, and then unpack, expand, and enflesh it into fully finished form in the act of typing and reifying it. A few years ago when I read Stephen King’s account of writing the first draft of Dreamcatcher entirely by hand, because he started it in a hotel where the electricity had gone out, and then decided just to keep running with it, I understood exactly what he meant about the vibrancy of the process. He said writing such a long book by hand put him back in touch with the language in a way he hadn’t experienced for years. I know exactly what he was talking about. Maybe you do, too.

Please understand that this focus on pens, pencils, paper, and keyboards sounds ridiculously fussy even to me, to whom the importance of it is simply a given of my creative life. At the same time, it’s all undeniably real. Howcome? Beats me. Ask my daemon. He’ll probably only answer you through a blue Bic pen, though.

Trial and error

When you’ve got the daemonic, muse-based understanding firmly developed, and when you’re really starting to cultivate both the general idea of your creativity as an external force and the specific understanding of what your particular creative demon is like, that’s when you can begin to make good, productive use of all the self-accounts you’ll hear from writers and artists about their idiosyncratic work habits.

Some writers have to stand while they write. Others have to sit. Still others write in bed. Some need silence and solitude. Others need noise and company. Some play music in the background. Others find this a deadly distraction. Some find mornings more congenial to creative flow. Others find nights or another time of day to be just the thing. Some write by hand, with a specific type of instrument, while others need a typewriter or computer. And so on. For an excellent compendium of writer’s habits, see, for example, the appropriate chapter full of interview excerpts about this subject in editor George Plimpton’s The Writer’s Chapbook. Anchored by your understanding of the muse, you can conduct mental or practical trial runs of any number of tricks and techniques, and not have to worry that you’re just distracting yourself and tooling around on the surface with changes that are merely cosmetic, because you’ll know that what you’re doing is feeling out your muse’s eccentricities..

This is important. The only way to find out your daemon’s habits is by trial and error. It will definitely let you know. Just pay attention to that electric flow feeling, that heightened sense of creative aliveness — or to its conspicuous absence.

Don’t abuse your muse

Nick Cave

Still speaking of concrete matters, but going beyond the subject of work habits as such, your demon muse can also provide specific guidance on a career-level basis. Remember when Nick Cave turned down the MTV Award in 1996 and refused any such awards in the future, citing his innate sense that his music “exists beyond the realm inhabited by those who would reduce things to mere measuring,” and stating, “I am in competition with no one”? Do you remember the rest of what he said in that letter to MTV? It’s worth quoting, since it displays a profound understanding of everything we’re talking about:

My relationship with my muse is a delicate one at the best of times and I feel that it is my duty to protect her from influences that may offend her fragile nature.

She comes to me with the gift of song and in return I treat her with the respect I feel she deserves — in this case this means not subjecting her to the indignities of judgment and competition. My muse is not a horse and I am in no horse race and if indeed she was, still I would not harness her to this tumbrel — this bloody cart of severed heads and glittering prizes. My muse may spook! May bolt! May abandon me completely!

Now there’s somebody who takes the idea of the muse and her needs with the utmost seriousness.

Drift, wait, obey

Which all brings us back to Kipling. In a review of biographer Harry Rickets’ Rudyard Kipling: A Life (2000) for Arts and Letters, William B. Dillingham describes Kipling’s decision not to accept money for poems about important national subjects that he submitted to the London Times. This feeling, says Dillingham (quoting Rickets), was based on Kipling’s feelings about his daemon: “Kipling felt that if he took money in payment for such works, he might lose his creative inspiration — that is, his ‘daemon’ might consider him unworthy and desert him. Terrified of losing his ability to create, he therefore made a deal with his daemon and with fate to forego monetary reward for poems like ‘Recessional.’

Is it actually possible for your demon muse to desert you? Rudyard Kipling apparently believed it, and so does Nick Cave. Both of them made concrete, real-world decisions to forestall that possibility, decisions that affected their careers. And they made these in deference to, and in honor of, their respective creative demons.

Based on this, but of course not just this, I urge you to take Kipling seriously when he offers what still stands as one of the most valuable pieces of daemon-oriented instruction ever given to creative artists: “When your Daemon is in charge, do not try to think consciously. Drift, wait, and obey.”

Just remember while you’re drifting and waiting to experiment — casually, relaxedly, even playfully, with an open mind — in order to find out exactly how and with what tools and under what circumstances your demon muse wants to work.

BOOKS REFERENCED IN THIS ARTICLE:

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