Demon Muse

Embrace your inner genius

Posts Tagged muse

Advice for Writers: Dig Deep into Your Passion

Jun 30

Posted by Matt Cardin in Dealing with Creative Block, Techniques for Enhancing Creativity | No Comments

I’ve just been interviewed by a publisher of dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction for a feature at their blog. Along with questions about my writing career — how I got hooked up with Ash-Tree Press for Divinations of the Deep and Mythos Books for Dark Awakenings, how I came to my overriding focus on the combination of horror with religion and spirituality, what my writing process is like, etc. — the interviewer asked me if I had any advice for aspiring writers.

It was only after I had answered the question that I realized I had ramped up into a state of heady intensity as I tried to distill my best advice to writers into the span of a few sentences. Since I know this type of thing is of interest to Demon Muse’s audience, I figured I’d reprint it here, with a few slight expansions.

Here’s what I said: Read the rest of this entry »

Share

Tags: advice, daimon, dark awakenings, divinations of the deep, muse, publishing, ray bradbury, unconscious mind, writing

The Muse in the News

Jun 21

Posted by Matt Cardin in Creativity and Society | No Comments

inspirationAs recounted in part two of “Embrace Your Creative Demon’s Rhythm,” the poet Amy Lowell once compared poets to radio antennas. The poet, she said, is someone who “is capable of receiving messages on waves of some sort; but he is more than an aërial, for he is capable of transmuting these messages into those patterns of words we call poems.”

Lately, if you consciously fashion yourself into a different kind of antenna — specifically, one that’s set to detect references to the daimon/daemon, the genius, and the creative muse in current cultural discourse — you’ll find that you receive a lot of signals indeed. There’s a diffuse conversation afoot about this ancient view of creativity and selfhood, and paying attention to it can reap some serious rewards in terms of clarifying your crucial relationship to your own inner partner.

Here are some choice items from the past few weeks, months, and years. Read the rest of this entry »

Share

Tags: amy lowell, creativity, daimon, demon, edward hirsch, Elizabeth Gilbert, lawrence staples, meredith wickham, mike nichols, muse, nick laird, Steven Pressfield, sunni brown, thomas moore, tony white, unconscious mind

An Unleashed Imagination: T.M. Wright on Creativity, the Muse, and Finding Your Writer’s Voice

May 24

Posted by Matt Cardin in Interviews, Techniques for Enhancing Creativity | No Comments

Today we kick off what will become an ongoing series of occasional interviews with writers and artists. The series launches with a just-finished conversation between me and contemporary novelist, poet, and painter T.M. Wright.

* * *

T.M. Wright

T.M. Wright

I first became acquainted with T.M. Wright via his sterling reputation. Amid the flood of books, most of them quite awful, that made up the 1970s and 80s horror publishing boom, Wright was one of the few authors who rose above the murky waters to produce work of authentic and lasting quality. Some readers and critics called him a new master of ghost fiction, even placing him in the company of M.R. James.

His 1978 debut novel, Strange Seed — about a newlywed couple who escape the urban din of New York City by moving to a farm house in upstate New York, where they’re confronted by a shattering supernatural presence in the woods — is a bona fide modern classic that prompted Stephen King to dub it “the best supernatural novel since Interview with the Vampire,” and to describe the author as “a rare and blazing talent.” King ended up including the book on his list of essential modern horror novels in Danse Macabre. Read the rest of this entry »

Share

Tags: brian keene, creative writing, creativity, ghosts, horror, inspiration, Interviews, joe lansdale, matt cardin, muse, t.m. wright

Stoking Your Creative Fire: Embrace Your Creative Demon’s Rhythm (2)

May 17

Posted by Matt Cardin in Dealing with Creative Block, Techniques for Enhancing Creativity | No Comments

NOTE: This is a continuation and conclusion of a previous post. See “Embrace Your Creative Demon’s Rhythm (1)” for the contextual lead-in to what follows.

HandsThe myth of constant creative output

It’s common for those of us who are driven to pursue work in the creative arts to have in mind an ideal goal that we’re aiming for. Along with hopes of having our efforts recognized by an appreciative audience, probably one of the most common desires is to achieve a state of regular, and even constant, creative flow.

The reasons for this are obvious. As a matter of phenomenological fact, writing or other creative work can make you high. Even those writers (and there are plenty of them/us) for whom the actual act of writing is sometimes or always a matter of sheer drudgery have experienced those moments of deep satisfaction when everything comes together, the stars align, the chi flows, and it’s as if the universe is doing the work through you. It’s only natural to wish that it could always be this flowing, this fulfilling, this easy.

Natural — but dangerous and unrealistic. A number of unexamined assumptions lie behind the myth of perpetual creative production, and it’s hard to judge which is the more pernicious and damaging to deep and authentic creativity. The basic problem is that a person in this state is judging himself or herself according to an artificial, external, and impracticable standard. Read the rest of this entry »

Share

Tags: alice flaherty, amy lowell, charles dickens, Dealing with Creative Block, dreams, h.p. lovecraft, harper lee, hypergraphia, inspiration, joe hill, maurice levy, muse, philip larkin, stephen king, unconscious mind, victoria nelson, writer's block

Stoking Your Creative Fire: Embrace Your Creative Demon’s Rhythm (1)

May 10

Posted by Matt Cardin in Tapping the Creative Unconscious, Techniques for Enhancing Creativity | 4 Comments

FirestarterFor 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 »

Share

Tags: angel, betty scott, creative demon, creative process, daimon, dorothea brande, genius, graham wallas, h.p. lovecraft, muse, s.t. joshi, unconscious mind

Ignorance, Faith, and the Discipline of the Demon Muse, Part 3

May 3

Posted by Matt Cardin in Tapping the Creative Unconscious, Techniques for Enhancing Creativity | No Comments

I ended Part 2 of this series with a description of the “realm of infinite inner richness and raw, self-evident meaningfulness” that offers to inform your writing when your unconscious mind acts as muse or genius by speaking to you in mental images, persistent thoughts, and intensified emotions. You tap into the nightside of consciousness when you deliberately seek and allow this guidance from beyond your ego shell.

To circle back around to where we started in Part 1, in order to accomplish that necessary nightside tapping you have to give up the idea that you know what you’re doing and where you’re going with it. The reasons for this should be obvious, but in case not: If you think you know what you’re creating, where it’s headed, how it’s going to turn out, what you’re trying to accomplish, what its overall structure is supposed to be, and so on, then this sense of knowledge will almost inevitably result in an attitude of control and ownership over the results. And this is, bar none, the most surefire way to block out the light, whether of the bright or the dark variety, that your genius is trying to shine through you.

The way to overcome this problem is to sidestep it entirely by embracing conscious ignorance and relying on your daemon to carry you through and inform your work with a deep, organically coherent direction. Read the rest of this entry »

Share

Tags: daemon, daimon, daimonic, demon, Federico Fellini, genius, Huston Smith, Mad Men, Marion Milner, Matthew Weiner, muse, ray bradbury, William Stafford

Ignorance, Faith, and the Discipline of the Demon Muse, Part 2

Apr 26

Posted by Matt Cardin in Tapping the Creative Unconscious, Techniques for Enhancing Creativity | No Comments

As explored in Part 1 of this series, communications from your unconscious mind are recognizable as such by the fact that they occur spontaneously. From your point of view — that is, the viewpoint of you-as-conscious-ego — the voice of the unconscious arrives in the form of involuntary promptings from a separate, independent, autonomous source within your subjectivity. This source — to restate the fundamental insight that animates this blog — is, or is equivalent to, the muse, daimon/daemon, and personal genius of classical antiquity.

(It’s also equivalent to a few additional and equally potent metaphors that we haven’t talked about yet, such as the Spanish duende as described by Federico Garcia Lorca. See “A Writer’s Guide to the Psyche, Part 1” and Part 2 for more detail about the daimon and such.)

Learning the specific “language” of your unconscious mind is therefore crucial to the cultivation of an empowered creative life. It doesn’t do you much good if your genius is trying to speak to you but you can’t understand it, or if you don’t even recognize the sound of its voice.

What you have to do is figure out, via careful attentiveness to your inner states of mind and emotion, the form(s) and the channel(s) by which and in which your inner partner wants to communicate and collaborate. We’ve already explored the general idea and some specific techniques by which you can get to know your daemon’s character (see “Getting to Know Your Creative Demon, Part 1,” Part 2, and Part 3). Now it’s time to take a look at what’s effectively the converse side of things by considering the specific ways in which your daemon tries to make itself and its wishes known to you. Read the rest of this entry »

Share

Tags: brewster ghiselin, buddhism, carl jung, creative unconscious, creativity, daemon, daimon, dorothea brande, dorothy canfield, duende, eckhart tolle, federico garcia lorca, fourth way, genius, gurdjieff, h.p. lovecraft, james bonnet, john gardner, mindfulness, morning pages, muse, religion, sandra lee dennis, Tapping the Creative Unconscious, unconscious mind, zen

Ignorance, Faith, and the Discipline of the Demon Muse, Part 1

Apr 19

Posted by Matt Cardin in Creativity and Society, Tapping the Creative Unconscious, Techniques for Enhancing Creativity | 5 Comments

When you get into a serious study of creativity like the one we’re pursuing here at Demon Muse, it’s all too easy to lose sight of the forest among the trees. That is, it’s easy to get caught up in the attractions of ideas and theories, to the point where you forget what the whole thing is really about. This can dampen your enthusiasm for actually performing creative work, whereas recalibrating your attitude can have the opposite effect of inflaming your muse.

What it’s all about, this daimonic or daemonic approach to creativity, this muse-based theory of inspiration, this discipline of embracing your inner genius, is the alignment of your creative act with your deep creative intent. It’s about divining your daemonic passion and then letting this be your guide when you write (or compose, paint, perform, etc.).

The thing is, you can only get it right when you’re not self-conscious about it. During the act of creation itself, you can only ride the daemonic wave by focusing your attention exclusively and intensively on your sense of rightness — or, as a corrective, your sense of wrongness — as you seek to follow the thread of your passion.

So this is all to say that when you come to the actual moment of putting down words on paper, the way to unleash your demon is to forget all about it. The moment of creation isn’t the time to be reflecting on — or, God help you, deliberately trying to follow or implement — psychological theories or concepts about creativity or anything else. Rather, it’s the moment when you should abandon all reflectiveness about what you’re doing, willingly embrace a sense of ignorance (and therefore openness) about where you’re headed and how you’ll get there, and simply heed the impulse of what wants to be said.

And how, exactly, are you supposed to do that? Simple: You find and follow what feels right, for this is the irrefutable and infallible voice of your creative demon speaking. Read the rest of this entry »

Share

Tags: carl jung, creative process, creative psychology, creativity, daemon, daimon, daimonic, james hillman, muse, stephen diamond, unconscious mind

Patience, the Muse, and Real Life

Apr 5

Posted by Matt Cardin in Creativity and Society | 5 Comments

Remember Elizabeth Gilbert‘s anecdote about the time Tom Waits was struck with a brilliant musical idea while driving? He spontaneously entered a new stage of his artistic life when he addressed the creative impulse as a separate, living spirit and asked it to visit him again later, since he wasn’t in a position to heed it at the moment.

Currently I’m exercising the same option, after a fashion. Relocation to a new house, combined with a couple of other pressing circumstances, have briefly put Demon Muse on pause. Posting will resume on Monday, April 12.

In the meantime, here’s a brilliant passage from Jung’s “Psychology and Literature” to pass the time. I recently reread the essay and was bowled over even more than when I first encountered it some years ago. I consider it a crucial corrective for anybody who takes the artistic vocation lightly:

Every creative person is a duality or a synthesis of contradictory aptitudes. On the one side he is a human being with a personal life, while on the other side he is an impersonal, creative process. . . . The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purposes through him. As a human being he may have moods and a will and personal aims, but as an artist he is “man” in a higher sense — he is “collective man” — one who carries and shapes the unconscious, psychic life of mankind. To perform this difficult office it is sometimes necessary for him to sacrifice happiness and everything that makes life worth living for the ordinary human being.

. . . . There are hardly any exceptions to the rule that a person must pay dearly for the divine gift of the creative fire. It is as though each of us were endowed at birth with a certain capital of energy. The strongest force in our make-up will seize and all but monopolize this energy, leaving so little over that nothing of value can come of it. In this way the creative force can drain the human impulses to such a degree that the personal ego must develop all sorts of bad qualities. . . in order to maintain the spark of life and to keep itself from being wholly bereft.

. . . . How can we doubt that it is his art that explains the artist, and not the insufficiencies and conflicts of his personal life? These are nothing but the regrettable results of the fact that he is an artist — that is to say, a man who from his very birth has been called to a greater task than the ordinary mortal. A special ability means a heavy expenditure of energy in a particular direction, with a consequent drain from some other side of life.

. . . . Whenever the creative force predominates, human life is ruled and molded by the unconscious as against the active will, and the conscious ego is swept along on a subterranean current, being nothing more than a helpless observer of events. The work in process becomes the poet’s fate and determines his psychic development. It is not Goethe who creates Faust, but Faust which creates Goethe.

– Carl Jung, “Psychology and Literature,” in Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933)

Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dreama/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Share

Tags: art, carl jung, creativity, muse

Getting to Know Your Creative Demon, Part 3

Mar 15

Posted by Matt Cardin in Tapping the Creative Unconscious, Techniques for Enhancing Creativity | 3 Comments

As explained in detail in Part 2 of this series, a focused examination of your life’s trajectory in which you “read” your life in the same way that you would read and interpret a work of art or literature, can reveal enduring themes and motifs that serve as clues to your innate creative leanings. Your unconscious mind — your muse or daimon — is the inner genius that presides over your life and houses the deep patterns of creative energy that want to express themselves in and through you. Discovering these patterns in the unfolding outline of your life over time is a potent means of discovering the type of work and typical themes that you’re innately suited to pursue.

To say the same thing differently: Your purpose it to step out of the way and second the direction that your daimon is wanting to take you.

The question at hand is not only how to do this, but what such an approach to creativity truly, deeply means, on a whole-life level. Read the rest of this entry »

Share

Tags: artistic creativity, creative psychology, creative unconscious, creativity, daimon, genius, james hillman, muse, unconscious mind, victoria nelson

SEO Powered by Platinum SEO from Techblissonline