Writing

Once, I had a muse. She bounced around in my head and put the amalgam of strange ideas and thoughts into words. She had a black polka dot dress and little pink shoes. I made that last part up.

I don't know if she was silenced by the medication, confused by the drama, or fed up with the bullshit known as Emerson College Creative Writing classes, but somewhere in there, my little muse jumped ship, and, for a very long time, I have found it extremely difficult to sit down and write. I still have all of the same ideas and thoughts, but, when I try to put them to paper (or, keyboard, as the case may be), I rarely make it past the first few lines before I hit a wall and put the pen down.

The writer in my head is the dangerous girl I have never been. She brainstorms sex, alcohol, darkness, and mistakes. My muse, perhaps, has grown up. She watches me live day-to-day, and she is bored. She tells me all the things that I will never do, and wants me to flesh them out. But she does not tell me how. Not anymore.

I take what I know - what I have experienced - and I build. The hurt that has shaped me becomes the basis for the character who is me, but funnier. Prettier. Sexier. Smarter. She feels what I felt. She says what I would have said. She does what I would have done. What I would have done, had I written the script. She is a re-imagining of my past. This girl, this woman, I live vicariously through her.

When I write, she walks around in my head. She mutters sentences, paragraphs, and stories. She talks fast, and I can't keep up. When I am frustrated enough, I stop. I give up. The stories float around in my head for days, weeks, even months, before I will sit back down and try to get them out. Phrases, paragraphs, whole pages, lay around, for stories that will never be written.