| Inspiration:
Every
Writer Has A Muse
by Patricia Nell Warren reprinted by permission
from
Wildcat International "Secrets of Writing and Publishing" | |
 Thanks for writing
to me about One
Is the
Sun , and sharing your story of the powerful
persistence of
your dream to be a
writer. Only a writer -- and you ARE a writer -- could ask the
questions that
you ask! As you will discover when you start publishing, part of the
magic
of storytelling with the printed word is that our words can go out
there
and tell our stories to people that we've never met, even after we've
died
and gone on to the Great Round (as my native relatives call it). Earth Thunder's story captured me too, when I first heard about her and the People of the Deer Lodge from my Cheyenne cousins around 1981. I spent the next 9 years in terrifying creative struggle. I'd never written anything like One Is the Sun. Suddenly it seemed like everything I'd ever learned about novel-writing in The Front Runner and other books wasn't helping me now. Every new book is like climbing a new mountain to do a new vision quest. For a while, One Is the Sun made me feel like an ant toiling up the foothills of Mount Everest. There was so much to learn about how Earth Thunder's apprentices had lived in those bygone times, and how they must have seen Life. Little of this information could be found in academic books about native Americans (most of which were written by white men who never talked to women healers among the tribes!). So I had to LIVE a lot of this stuff myself -- staying tight with my relatives, journeying here and there, doing the ceremonies, taking care of children, working with healers, making tools, cooking, working with animals. I even helped dig the tribal privvies described in the book! Most of all, I was wrestling with the story emotionally, mentally, spiritually and physically, looking for insights into how native women learning about Self Power could take these activities and turn them into Medicine (the native word for sacred power). Between 1983 and 1987 I wrote two drafts of the book. Both were overlong and overburdened with "information" -- all the stuff I thought I had learned. They read like the kind of academic writing I was trying to avoid! Finally my Muse leaned over my shoulder and said, very quietly, that I had to get beyond the academic stuff and just tell the story. That was the first time in my life that I became consciously aware of a power operating in my life -- an energy and a beingness that seemed to come from the Universe, yet was mysteriously part of me and personal to me. I'd been responding to this power ever since I wrote my first short story at age 10, but it took living through One Is the Sun research battles to give it a name: my Muse. She asked if I had the courage to throw away what I'd written so far. "Go back to Zero and start over," she said. "Everything in Life starts with Zero." So I built a fire and burned the old manuscripts, and started over. This time, I focused on STORY. No "information" was included unless it drove the story and brought it to life. After a few months I knew I was on the right track. Thank Goddess that the publisher hung in there with me, and kept OITS on their upcoming-books list. By then I had used up the advance that Ballantine paid me for the book, and was broke. So I supported myself by freelancing magazine |
articles
and selling my paintings. At the time I was living in northern
California, and used to drive my pickup to L.A. and San Francisco with
my paintings in the back, and pound the pavements with my portfolio,
looking for art galleries and private buyers. The book was finished by
1990, and I spent the next year working with Ballantine on
pre-production stuff like copy editing and illustrations, which I did
myself. Now look...I'm not suggesting that you go burn everything you've written! But I'm telling a little of my own story because I think that every creative person has a Muse. The old Greeks were right -- Muses do exist. But instead of the old-time "official Muses who have charge of each art," my own thinking is that each Muse is personal to a person. Looking back over my 64 years, I can see that my Muse stuck with me through some hard times, including years of denial about sexual orientation and a horrible heterosexual marriage. Indeed, my Muse was there for me when I felt isolated from every other human. I wrote some tortured poetry during the last years of my marriage, but in it was the tiny seed of freedom from others' homophobia and my own fear. My Muse made it possible for the creative part of me to survive underground during that devastating time, otherwise I might have destroyed myself as an artist. You have a powerful Muse, and you've been hearing Her voice and feeling Her taps on your shoulder ever since you were very young. And you've been hearing Her through the hard times too. Your questions are about the "how" of doing what your Muse is urging. Yes, it's always about the "how." You certainly have a right to hope you can make a living as a writer. "How" is the question. Making a living as a writer is hard, because most of us don't hit it rich like the author of the Harry Potter books, who was on welfare in Britain just a few years ago. But it's possible, and there's always a way. I worked in the media for 22 years before I finally felt established enough as a writer to quit my office job in 1981 and write full time. The biggest economic challenges of my life came after that. But I learned that everything I know how to do, all the skills I have, can help me make a living, and I'm still doing that today. In 1994 I decided to take creative control of my work away from trade publishers whose attitudes had become a problem. With a business partner, publicist Tyler St. Mark, we started an independent publishing imprint for my work -- something like an independent record label! Since 1994 Wildcat Press publishes my books. We're even going to get One Is the Sun back in print shortly. It has been tough, very tough, but Wildcat is surviving and learning how to do it better. Your drive and will to move forward is impressive. Wild horses can't stop writers from writing, once they put their minds to it. And you have a lot of skills. Look at all of them -- music, martial arts, academic work -- as legitimate ways of supporting yourself, till such time as your writing starts bringing in money. After all, the skills are all part of YOU...and in a mysterious and wonderful kind of way, they may all be ways that your Muse is working in you. Different parts of the Circle that is You. Good Medicine to you! Let me know how you do. Yours, Patricia Nell Warren |
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