Demon Muse

For many of us, one of the hardest things to learn in the creative life is the necessity of falling into step with our creative demon’s innate rhythm. Your inner partner is invested with a certain schedule or pace, and a major part of your job is to discover this schedule through trial and error — and then to embrace it wholeheartedly.

Note the emphasis: You don’t choose when your demon will deliver the creative goods. Cooperating with your genius or muse isn’t like ordering fast food. In the creative life, delivery may be fast — or it may be slow. It may be regular — or it may be intermittent. Regardless, your task, the job of you-as-ego, is first to find your demon’s natural schedule and then to welcome it, to second it, to work with it wholeheartedly. Semi-paradoxically, this deliberate cooperation is also what enables you eventually to exercise, if not outright control, then some sort of benign mutual influence over the comings and goings of your creative cycles.

The overall principle is illustrated by something H.P. Lovecraft said about his authorial process in a 1928 letter to Frank Long. “I never try to write a story, but wait till it has to be written” (Lovecraft’s emphases). That’s what we’re talking about: waiting for the moment when creative work has to be done, as indicated and dictated by the internal pressure of daemonic necessity.

But, significantly, not all waiting is alike. It’s common to think of waiting as a passive activity, but the type of waiting we’re talking about is quite active, so much so that you may be just as well served by thinking of it as an aggressive (or maybe passive-aggressive?) courting of your demon muse, a kind of “come-on” that encourages it to provide an influx of inspiration. Whichever way you want to regard it, learning to do it effectively represents a milestone in your maturation as a creative artist.

The creative process: A review

At this late date, the classic stages of the creative process as first enumerated by Graham Wallas in The Art of Thought (1926)  probably don’t need restating from a strictly informational point of view, since the pattern they describe has pretty much become universal knowledge and been absorbed into our general discourse about creativity and art. To take my own introduction to it as an example, I learned this pattern in 1989 from one of the textbooks adopted by Dr. Betty Scott, master trumpet player and creativity teacher extraordinaire, for use in a class titled The Creative Process, which she developed and taught through the honors college at the University of Missouri-Columbia. As I recall, the book introduced this process and its stages without reference to Wallas’s name. That is, it simply presented them — and again, I stress the “if memory serves” qualifier — as a generically recognized truth about the way creativity is experienced in actual practice. And I, and probably you, have seen it mentioned countless times elsewhere over the past few decades.

But for purposes of illuminating the importance of the topic at hand (getting in stride with your deep inner rhythm and learning to wait on your demon muse), it can’t hurt to review the whole thing.

The well-established stages in this most widely known analysis of the creative process are:

1. Preparation, in which you clarify the problem or issue you’re dealing with, gather information about it, think diligently about it, make some trial runs, and/or otherwise take conscious and positive action to get started.
2. Incubation, during which the issue sinks into the unconscious, which works with it and on it while nothing appears to be happening consciously. You may even forget all about it, or think you’ve failed or had a creative misfire, since you feel becalmed.
3. Intimation and Illumination (sometimes listed separately, sometimes with the second word changed to “Insight”), in which you receive a mental-emotional inkling of imminent inspiration, followed by a bursting of the new image or idea into your conscious mind.
4. Verification, in which you act on the idea, test it, and refine it, as when you start to write after waiting for the idea to come clear.

Note that stages 1 and 4 involve conscious and deliberate work, while stages 2 and 3 occur on their own timetable and outside of your conscious ability to control. This intimately intertwined relationship between effort and relaxation, control and letting go, trying and waiting, is the heart of the whole thing.

Trusting the process and its timing: A personal example

To put some flesh on them bones, I offer the following real-life example from my own experience.

When I was writing my Angel and Demon essay for Icons of Horror and the Supernatural (2006), I began by reading a veritable mountain of material about the subject: history, anthropology, religion, folklore, literary criticism, and more. My assigned task was to write a long article/essay about the history of the iconic figures of the angel and the demon in horror entertainment, fleshing out their origins and detailing some of their prominent uses in the genre. It was a subject I found fascinating, and one that I already knew quite a bit about, so I expected the writing to be easy and enjoyable.

Partly before and partly after doing all of that reading, which of course served as the preparation stage for my work on that project, I created what I thought was a workable outline. I wrote the introduction and the first section or two. It all seemed to be going well. I was enjoying having a monetized excuse to devote so much time and attention to a subject of such intense personal interest, and I felt pretty sure of myself.

Then, without warning, it all stalled after a few thousand words, for reasons beyond my understanding. Suddenly I couldn’t see my way through. What I had thought was a viable direction revealed itself upon further inspection, and in light of what I had already written, to be off-target in ways I couldn’t quite articulate. Was the problem structural? Did I simply not know enough about the subject to finish writing the essay? Was I simply a hopeless loser who had been fooling himself with the thought that he could tackle such an assignment? Should I never have accepted it in the first place? (Ask any writer, and he or she will tell you that these crises of confidence are all too common. If you are a writer, then you already know what I’m talking about.)

Luckily the project’s editor was S.T. Joshi, who proved marvelously patient and supportive when I contacted him to detail my difficulties and express my doubts about going forward. (That was only my second time working for him. I’ve since found, as a house reviewer for his horror review journal Dead Reckonings, that this is typical of his style.) On the practical side, he suggested that I might consider breaking the essay down into smaller sections and tackling each individually. On the attitudinal side, he suggested that I might take a brief break to relax and regroup. I mainly took the latter option, and let the project lapse into a coma.

Your inner partner is invested with a certain schedule or pace, and a major part of your job is to discover this schedule through trial and error — and then to embrace it wholeheartedly.

Or at least that’s what I thought I was doing. But instead, my decades-long engagement with creativity in various contexts asserted the inherent validity of the classic creative process yet again, and after a few days of deliberately abandoning the essay, I found my mind turning spontaneously toward it once more, at which point I recognized, pretty much without effort, where my structural and tactical errors lay. I sorted through my thoughts, went back to work, and found that the whole thing came together quite nicely in a way that only a few of my fiction and nonfiction projects have managed to do, so that I saw the entire shape of the finished piece flowing out ahead of me like an unfurling carpet even when I was still thousands of words away from writing the final lines.

What had happened? What had made the difference between my feeling of being lost, blocked, and defeated, and then, roughly a week later, entering a state of creative confidence and empowerment? Quite simply, on the front end I had run into trouble by trying to foreshorten or sidestep the incubation stage. I had tried to do all of the work myself, without the help of my genius. When I recognized my mistake with the aid of S.T.’s gentle prodding, I dumped the problem into or onto my unconscious mind, which is where it belonged in the first place, and let my genius/daimon/muse take over and run with it. How did I accomplish that dumping? Simply by letting go, by refusing for a time to devote any conscious thought or effort to the project.

And that, friends, is the trick. You really and truly have to give up, not holding in reserve some idea of control, and trust the process to work on its own, and your genius to knock on your inner door when it’s ready to proceed. Otherwise, you’re not just “working without a net,” you’re working without a soul.

This ‘enormous and powerful part of your nature’

Your ability to achieve this trust is helped when you recognize that one of the innate functions of the unconscious, both yours and mine, is to analyze experience and knowledge for their possible patterns of meaning, and from these to synthesize new insights. Knowing this, you can cooperate with your inner partner by giving up your sense of control and letting your daemon do what it likes to do best, and then by remaining attentive so that you’ll know when it’s ready to deliver the goods, as signaled by the onset of Wallas’s “intimation” substage, which arrives as the nagging and definite feeling of an impending idea or revelation.

To quote the wonderful words of Dorothea Brande:

The unconscious should not be thought of as a limbo where vague, cloudy, and amorphous notions swim hazily about. There is every reason to believe, on the contrary, that it is the great home of form; that it is quicker to see types, patterns, purposes, than our intellect can ever be. Always, it is true, you must be on the watch lest a too heady exuberance sweep you away from a straight course; always you must direct and control the excess of material which the unconscious will offer. But if you are to write well you must come to terms with the enormous and powerful part of your nature which lies behind the threshold of immediate knowledge.

– Dorothea Brande, Becoming a Writer (1934)

Concluded in Part 2

BOOKS REFERENCED IN THIS ARTICLE:

Image credit:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/deano/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Related posts:

1. Stoking Your Creative Fire: Embrace Your Creative Demon’s Rhythm (2)
2. Stoking Your Creative Fire: Embrace Your Creative Demon’s Rhythm (2)
3. Stoking Your Creative Fire: Identify Your Daemon’s Work Habits