Getting Started

MUSES AND JOURNALS

The scariest moment is always just before you start. After that, things can only get better. — STEPHEN KING

What I try to do is write. I may write for two weeks "the cat sat on the mat, that is that, not a rat," you know. And it might be just the most boring and awful stuff. But I try. When I'm writing, I write. And then it's as if the muse is convinced that I'm serious and says, "Okay. Okay. I'll come." — MAYA ANGELOU

I asked the muse if she needed a ride. When she hopped in, I couldn't believe my eyes. What a babe. I slid my arm around her and cruised down the avenue. Women waved; men nodded and smiled. How proud I was to finally be a real writer. — SY SAFRANSKY

MAKING A MUSE

Since it's highly unlikely that a kindly muse will announce from above that you should start writing immediately, and equally improbable that the people you love are encouraging you to write about the deepest, most personal aspects of your life, and since you might just possibly have this little voice in your head humming about your lack of talent or doing a riff on how real grown-ups don't sit in a room all alone still wearing their bedroom slippers and writing stories about themselves, and Who would be interested in your story anyway? — here's what you need to do: make up your own muse.

Make up a new voice that will inspire you, a voice that will say whatever you need to hear and will drown out all the other, negative voices, both real and imaginary. A voice that tells you that you have something unique to say. Something no one else has ever written before, and that if you don't write it, no one will — it'll be lost forever. Because this is true: you do have something unique to say, and no one on earth has written it the way you're going to write it.

The dictionary says a muse is a "goddess or power regarded as inspiring." We all need as much inspiration as we can possibly get, but until you've been writing for a while, or you take a writing course or join a workshop, it's not a good idea to have a real live person in your life attempt to fill the role of your muse. Real live people, especially those related to you by blood or long history, have the habit of saying the wrong thing and giving you a perfect excuse not to sit in a room all by yourself trying to write. In the beginning (to be truthful, always) you only want to hear one thing from your family or friends about your writing, and that is: My God, this is brilliant, don't change a word.

Your muse could be another writer, one you know or one you've never met — someone whose writing always inspires you and reminds you why you're so passionate about writing; a writer who makes you believe that writing as a craft is accessible, something that you too can do, and who gives you not only a kind of blueprint for your own writing but also the courage to start.

At the moment my muse and mentor is Mark Doty. On bad days, when I forget why I even want to write in the first place, or how to write, I open up one of his memoirs — Heaven's Coast or Dog Years — read a bit and think yes. This is what it's all about, being deep and serious yet inviting the reader in, being intimate and open but with emotion always crafted by language. Though I think of Doty as a muse and mentor and I love him, I've never met him. If he were to come to Los Angeles for a reading, I'm not sure that I'd go. I like our relationship just the way it is — his voice on the page and me reading his words and loving them.

However, I'm a promiscuous reader: I fall in love and change my muse often.

TO DO: (The best assignment you'll ever get.) Go to a library or a bookstore and browse. Dip into books. Find the latest books by your favorite authors. Find the kind of book, or collection of essays, that you want to write. Find your muse and mentor, your literary love. Check out or buy as many books as possible. Go home and read. When you're writing you can rationalize these book binges. You're acquiring essential tools for your job.

What if you can't find a literary love? You will if you read enough. Or what if you don't like to read? My friend, if you don't like to read, don't write. There's no reason to. You'll be able to stand the loneliness, the frustration, and the rejections of writing only if you are passionately, madly in love with books, with reading, with words. If your heart doesn't start thumping with anticipation when you walk into a library or a bookstore, if you don't rationalize all the reasons why you must absolutely order all those books online and damn the expense, if your idea of hell isn't being stuck on a plane without a book to read, then quite simply: don't write.

All of us who write belong to a community of like-minded people, and the glue that holds us together is our love of reading, of books.

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As well as being good company for writers, cats and dogs can make good muses. (If you love animals, you'll understand. If you don't, just skip this.) My cats, Stuart and Charlotte, have listened to more bad prose read aloud, to more moaning about how hard it is to write, as well as to bizarre moments of my over-the-top optimism — and they never lose their cool. They never say to me, Oh, stop whining, and find some real work, or Don't count your chickens, cookie, or Don't you think this might be a little too personal to write about?

My husband is allergic to cats, so Stuart and Charlotte live in my office, and they greet me at the beginning of every writing day with enormous enthusiasm. Tails up, meowing to me to get going: Showtime, let's write! My two muses. They love me unconditionally. Even my writing. It makes them purr.

TO DO: Who or what is your muse? Write what he or she is telling you.

FIERCE WITH REALITY

The complicated and sticky part of writing your life into story is that you have to connect to your inner life to do it, and it's so much easier to chug along on the surface of things. Just about any activity beats facing your own imperfect self on the page. You suddenly develop a compulsion to work out at the gym, clean the garage, put your CDs in alphabetical order, locate all your old classmates from junior high on the Internet, or — my personal favorite — cook enough hearty soup to get whole armies through arctic winters. Once, when I was really stuck in my writing, I dug up half the backyard to create the world's largest compost pile. Most any compulsive activity seems so much easier and more useful than writing.

It takes practice to write about personal things, and you need to find a way to write without any expectations attached. This is what journals are for — or notebooks, or diaries, or whatever you want to call yours. This is the one place you can forget about craft. There is no craft to keeping a...