Where Do You Get Your Ideas?

Muses, Daemons, Genii and other strange creatures

If you tell someone that you write seriously, the odds are they’ll either be impressed by how disciplined and determined you must be, or be impressed (or scornful), that you can afford to wander around with a pretty notebook until the Muse descends and writes in it for you.

Of course all Itchy readers know that in reality the work of having ideas and imaginings, and then clothing them in words, is some combination of the two: some unpredictable interaction between quantifiable hard graft, and the weird and unquantifiable magic that we flippantly call a muse.

By definition, art is a created thing: a story, picture or song is made of elements which are drawn from the real world and then combined until they make a new object: a single, integrated experience which is greater than the sum of its parts. The writer/painter/composer’s combining process is at least partly amenable to being teased apart, examined and put into conscious practice, if only by trial and error. We call that craft, which I see as the business of putting practical technique to the service of an overall idea, an artistic vision.

But what about the ideas and imaginings? How do you get hold of something as slippery as a muse, as incalculable as magic?