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. Read the rest of this entry »
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