9/17/23
Writer’s Block
This is number twenty-eight in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community so I can afford to keep writing.
“WHERE IS MY MUSE? I know she was here not long ago. She whispered to me in my dreams last night. But now, when I’m ready for her, I can’t find her anywhere. Where is she? Where is my muse?”
Starting back in 1987, I wrote a Christmas story for my wife every year. It was a gift she expected and that I delivered. Until one year I didn’t. It had been a difficult year and I was pretty stressed. My wife was heartbroken that I failed to give her the one thing I’d given her every year since we started dating.
The following year, I began my Christmas story with the words above, then wrote about frantically running about searching high and low for my muse, only to look into my wife’s eyes and see that she was there all along.
Aww. Romantic.
But I listen to writers frequently bemoaning that their muse has taken a vacation, abandoned them, or was giving them the silent treatment, and I think back on that time when life seemed too much for me to possibly put pen to paper. But it turned out my muse was right there where I left her.
Which brings me to the question of inspiration.
Simply because the muse is always present, doesn’t mean I’m always listening. We get in the habit of ignoring her. I think that’s what most people experience when they complain of writer’s block. They have not put themselves into a position where they can hear their muse.
Let me mention something else I think we’ve convinced ourselves fails with age. Yep, I’m talking about libido and the ancient quest for a solid erection. There are pills for it, chews, psychological counseling, and god-knows what else. Older folks mourn the passing of their hard-ons. But it does not need to be so.
It is far more likely that the dear old tallywhacker—or whatever cute equivalent name you ladies have for the pleasure garden below—will atrophy than that it will wear out. Yes, we get caught up in the issues of life—making a living, raising the family, paying the bills, pursuing the ten-point buck, or drinking all the whiskey under the bar. And the more we do that, the less we use the greatest source of pleasure known to humanity.
And it atrophies. Suddenly, we realize those feelings we once had when a beautiful woman (or any woman for that matter) walked into a room are no longer there. The stirring in the groin is oddly absent.
In the same way, writers get in the habit of ignoring the muse. Then when they want her, they find her sluggish and unresponsive.
My own means of tapping into the muse is to drive. As I write this, I’ve just completed my annual migration from Seattle to Las Vegas. It took four weeks! It’s merely 1250 miles, so why did it take so long? Because I was listening to my characters talking. I would drive for two to four hours in a day, then camp for two or three days while I wrote down all the characters said. When I drive, my characters take over my mind and all I need to do is listen.
It doesn’t always work the way I expect it to. In the summer of 2021, I was busy writing Team Manager SPRINT and took a drive to let the characters talk. Oh, they talked, but it wasn’t anyone I recognized!
“Hi. My name is Bob. I’ll be your demon this evening.”
What???
Suddenly, I had a character I had never heard of before occupying mindshare that I thought was reserved for Dennis and his crew. And he was insanely funny. I couldn’t just start writing down the story when I got home because I had to get SPRINT written. But I started taking down notes as Bob kept talking.
I talked to my story consultant, Doug—the last story we were able to work on together before our camp in Idaho closed and he moved to Texas. We came up with all the different situations that Bob would find himself in over the course of 4,000 years. Doug came up with the tag line: “Bob’s just a happy-go lucky—mostly lucky—demon.” I wrote down all the notes while I was still writing the Team Manager series and in November, for 2021 NaNoWriMo, I sat down to write Bob’s Memoir: 4,000 Years as a Free Demon. The story became so compelling to me that I ended up having to write three volumes of Bob’s Memoirs. My 50,000-word goal for November ended up at 150,157 words. And that was just the first volume. All three volumes are now available as a collection by Devon Layne on Bookapy.com.
The difference between a writer and a non-writer is that a writer sits his butt in a chair and writes. That’s it. It isn’t the degree of inspiration. As sports writer and columnist Red Smith is credited with saying, “You simply sit down at the typewriter, open your veins, and bleed.” (Quoted by Walter Winchell in 1949.)
But the brilliance of National Novel Writing Month is that it gives over 400,000 people a year permission to make contact with their muse. And remarkably, nearly ten percent succeed in squeezing out the 50,000 words it takes to ‘win.’
Even if they don’t make the goal, they still have written more than they would have otherwise.
As I like to say, it gives them permission to stick a hand in their pants and play with themselves.
Do I ever get writer’s block? Yeah, I guess I do. Sometimes it’s because I’m looking for the perfect way to word something or I’m spending hours researching the mythology of an ancient Mesopotamian god and the building of his temple so I can place my demon in the right context. Most commonly, however, it is because I have a logjam of ideas and need to clear them so just one comes through at a time. Should I write story A or story B?
I often have a huge amount of storyline ready to write, but I need to set it up first and that could take days while I’m just bursting to write the exciting part.
Or, like with Bob, I have a whole story waiting to be told, but I have to discipline myself to finish what I’m working on before I start the next project.
Oh, I’m not finished with this subject. I think next week I’ll look at the question, “When is it done?”
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
