The Muse

Last Thursday on my return flight from Vegas after the battery on my laptop gave up the ghost, Muse whispered in my ear and I found myself writing a short story in a journal I'd brought along for note-taking... As I was writing the strange feeling came over me that maybe I wasn't writing the story so much as it was writing me. A starting line popped in my head and my fingers and my pen just went with it.

While I didn't finish the story on the plane, I have been working at it over the weekend and over the course of this week. It's been awhile since writing came this easy to me. I'm taking full advantage of it while the Muse is still present to entertain me.

An interesting bit, I find myself writing in the 2nd person (the main character being referred to as "you" instead of "I" or "me"-- as you'd expect in first person, or even "he" or "she"-- in third person objective or third person omniscent). When I was in college I took a class in Intro to Creative Writing in which our professor recommended Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City as it was/is one of the few novels in the English language written in the 2nd person. After that I even started keeping my personal journal in the 2nd person (referring to myself as "you") to gain practice in writing from that PoV. Initially, my scribblings, wreaked of poor man's McInerney... But this bit I'm writing now, it's me, not me trying to be Jay McInerney. There's something liberating about it.

For those who write, you can perhaps relate... It was as if somewhere along the way I'd lost my "voice" only to have found it mid-air somewhere between Las Vegas and Chicago (I believe I was flying over Nebraska or possibly Iowa when I started writing-- if you want to nitpick).