{DISCUSSION} Muse or Force

Should writers wait for muse or force it?

As many of you writers and non-writers may have noticed, this month is Camp NaNoWriMo. As such, writers all across the world are joining cabins and sharing their word counts and expressing their plights and discussing their need for motivation. Well, most of them at least. After all, many writers are introverted creatures and like to stick to themselves. But for the socialites out there in the writing world, they have jumped on the bandwagon and started throwing words at paper…

Or they tried to.

Writing is not nearly as easy as it sounds. A writer needs the ability to tap into their imagination in order to put words to paper and sometimes that imagination is hiding behind a brick wall of stress, locked inside an airtight prison of obligations, and bound and gagged by this thing called life. Some days it’s nearly impossible to find the Magical Muse that we writers often refer to. The Muse is supposed to be our Holy Grail, our Fountain of Youth, Hermione’s never-ending bag of goodies. And when we can’t get access to The Muse, our writing suffers.

Or we just don’t write at all.

But we must keep writing. Many people have deadlines. Others have dreams they’re trying to achieve. No amount of roadblocks or detours or crashes can or should stop us, but they do. Oh hell they do. But those deadlines. Those dreams. So now we must ask the ever important question that every writer has faced in their life:

Do I force the words out
OR
do I wait for The Muse?

This is probably the hardest, yet most important, question any writer will ever come across. And it is definitely more difficult for some writers than others (binge writers, I believe, are most affected by this as we only write in large quantities [aka when muse hits us.]) But we have to keep writing just like the daily writers. And some of the most common advice you hear (as a writer) from published authors is:

Write every day. Make time to write every day. Treat it like exercise and don’t let anything divert you from this.

Now, that’s all fine and dandy for people who have normal, scheduled lives. But NEWSFLASH: most people don’t. Most people have chitlins or aminals or on-call work or, I don’t know, friends?? (That magical thing called friends. Someone wanna tell me about that sometime? Hahaha!) Even the people who are good schedulers don’t always manage to write every day (gym goers don’t always go to the gym every day.) A lot of these schedules is about compromise, but can we compromise with ourselves about our writing? It’s work, after all. We don’t usually compromise about work tasks that have deadlines… do we?

Honestly, I don’t have the answer to this question (because I am literally struggling with it right now as we speak.) I’ve only written 2,000 words this month out of the 50,000 I needed to write. -.- I know, I’m such a failure. And I keep making up excuses for why I haven’t written anything – they’re all legit reasons – but if we really want to, we can come up with infinite reasons and then we never write. And if we are so busy, The Muse will remain aloof and anonymous forevermore. (It’s a total bitch like that), but we still need to and want to write.

So what on Earth are we supposed to do?!

What do you think?
Force the words or wait for The Muse?
Leave your thoughts below!

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And check out my discussion from last week:
“YA Romance“