Tuning in the Muse

Here are a couple of tips for tuning past the mental static that can drown out a writer’s soft-spoken Muse. First, write in a staging area that’s separate from your working draft. Second, before you revise older text, save it to an outtakes file. Let’s detail the staging tip first.

Staging 

Add these two headings to the document containing your working draft: Working Draft, and Notes or Staging. Working Draft obviously holds the prose an editor will eventually see.

Notes or Staging, completely separate from Working Draft, is the virtual garage where your not-ready-for-prime-time prose rehearses. I think of Notes as a place where anything goes: streams of consciousness, brainstorming, laundry lists, sketches, etc. All these untamed things are free from the domestication that a presentable draft requires.

With the Notes heading in place, start writing in the Working Draft heading. When you hear your inner critic begin to whine, stop writing in Working Draft and start writing in Notes. Pretend you’re talking to the best listener you know — God, your Labrador or some other entity who accepts you completely. When you speak to this entity, you can take on the voice of Don Corleone, Oprah, or any other effective communicator or chat guru. Do this aloud or just in your head.

Outtakes

Here’s tip two for getting the digital ink to flow: reassure your inner squirrel — you know, the part that’s afraid to delete something for fear you might need it later. Do this by making a separate outtakes file for your article or story. For example, HistoryOfFlight.doc holds the working draft and OutsHistoryOfFlight.doc holds its outtakes.

Before you change any text in your working draft, whether it’s a sentence or several paragraphs, copy that text to the outtakes file. This assures your squirreling impulse that you’re not actually deleting anything, but keeping it safe for later use. Now you’re free to hack the original text to pieces.

Copyright © 2008 Darrin Koltow

A proofreading technique

Here’s an approach to proofreading I’ve found to be effective: turn the document into a plain text email message, email it to yourself, then read each word aloud. You’ll catch errors big and small this way.

Some details and thoughts. First, the operating principle to this technique is this: when you see a familiar thing from a fresh perspective, the familiar thing seems new.

In this case, the fresh perspective is that of a reader. Your brain naturally shifts to a reader’s POV when reading email, even if it’s email from yourself. As a reader, you’re not going to be defensive about the document’s errors, and you won’t try to deny their existence. I bet a lot of that denial can happen on a subconscious level, which is why even experienced writers can miss their own mistakes.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could step outside of your body and see all the annoying character flaws that you’re normally blind to but that everyone else around you notices? Well, at least you can do it for writing.

I use my Yahoo Mail account for this technique, with the text coming in as plain old Courier. This helps me see all the errors standing stark naked before me, black on white. Specify a Courier font in the Yahoo Mail Options menu.

Another important factor here is line width. It’s better to have a relatively narrow window, one that can hold maybe 50 to 60 characters per line. I get impatient when I read those long horizontals. And when I get impatient, I miss errors.

Copyright © 2007 Darrin Koltow

I think we forget our successes way too easily. I have to remind myself of a major success involving fiction writing that happened to me last summer. It amounted to finally discovering an approach for consistently writing and finishing short stories. I finally found something that trumps “writer’s block,” and “I don’t feel like writing,” and all the other crap that repels the muse.

The approach goes something like this: I imagine sitting in a movie theater, seeing the coming attractions of movies, and hearing great music backing the images: the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth symphony; Elgar; Dvorak; Wagner. Oh, man: Wagner.

Before the epiphany, I had been trying to write stories using the aforementioned approach, but minus the music. I would see myself in the movie theater, just as the lights went down and the sneak previews began playing. And ideas would come. I would feel galvanized, enough to sketch out an outline of a complete story, or a single scene to a story. But I couldn’t seem to develop the story further. The juices dried up, no matter how vividly I imagined the setting of the cinema.

I kept trying, though. And then I think the epiphany happened like this: I played Vaughn Williams Fantasia on a theme by Tallis, or it might have been the Wagner piece that opens the movie Excalibur, and I imagined sitting in the cinema.

Anyway, something big clicked. Very big. I wept, I wrote, I had to get up and pace the room the feeling was so intense. I won’t pretend any of what I wrote that day was quality stuff. But it felt real and it felt good. I don’t think what I wrote in that moment was junk. There were gems in there. But the point is, I found an approach to writing that felt right to me. And I used the same approach — great music and thinking of movies — the next day, not believing it would work. But it did. It took me some time to finish the first story, but I did finish it, and another and another. That approach got me to write stories and finish them, and dig the process. I’m still powered by that personal Big Bang of several months ago.