So in the fanfiction world, “muses” are apparently frowned upon. Authors who have convos with the characters in their authornotes are scorned, people who imagine the characters talking to them or whatever are considered stupid and delusional, and I remember someone once saying “authors with REAL TALENT just make themselves write, only second-rate writers use ‘muses’” (something along those lines).

I admittedly use the term muse a lot in describing my creative process. I even coined the phrase (that I sometimes see on icons that I didn’t design) that “Muses are imaginary friends for grown-ups” after learning that, yes, people look at you sideways when you start talking about your imaginary friends. When you talk about your muses, though, that tends to clarify imaginary activity as having a creative and not social intent. Some people even look vaguely impressed!

Once again, I find the sliver of fandom that I occupy, albeit peripherally, these days, to be at odds with “fandom at large.” But then, I don’t think that the part of Tolkien fandom where I play even uses the term muse in the sense that sarajayechan and commenters discuss in her post. Certainly, I’ve never heard of “soul-bonding” or communing with muses on astral planes. I’ve never even seen an author carry on a conversation with a character in her or his author’s notes.

Instead, I find that I and people with whom I associate tend to use the term muse in different ways.

• It becomes a shorthand for discussing the creative process during which one connects deeply enough to a character to write that character convincingly. I find the idea that “authors with REAL TALENT just make themselves write” to be hogwash. I was nattering under friend-lock on my journal last week about character writers versus plot writers. This sounds like it comes from the plot writers to me. Just as it is easier or harder to connect with certain people, it is easier or harder to connect to certain characters, in my experience. For example, I relate to Fëanor, with his creative compulsions and sense of injustice in the world, more easily than I do to Fingolfin, who is accepting of the Valar and life in Valinor in a way that I can’t imagine myself being. I can write out the explanation that I just did when discussing how Fingolfin’s PoV chapters in AMC are weaker than Fëanor’s. Or I can just say that I have a Fëanor muse but haven’t found a Fingolfin muse yet. Viola. I think most people in the communities I frequent would understand that this refers to a difficulty connecting to Fingolfin’s character, not that I haven’t started setting an extra place for him at supper.
• The term muse can be used playfully, sometimes to deflect criticism. “My Maglor muse wasn’t happy that you made him flee from battle!” sounds less confrontational than, “I think it’s OOC to have Maglor flee from battle,” which opens up the whole can of worms about canon and interpretation and all that that we’ve been over a thousand times before. I’ve certainly seen the term used in this way.
• It can be used just plain ol’ playfully. I might say, for example, that one day, Pengolodh just let himself in the front door, plopped down next to me, and started dictating “Illuminations.” I don’t actually mean that I imagined the front door opening or even that I imagine an Elven loremaster in the chair next to me (which is perpetually piled too high with books to occupy anyway). It’s just a lighter way to express the sudden out-of-the-blue whallop of inspiration that can feel like getting hit by one of those Shire freight trains: One day, you’re not in the least bit interested in writing a particular character, and the next, you suddenly think s/he is the most interesting character in the world.

Some people have brought up in the comments on sarajayechan’s post that muses are a way for writers to deflect responsibility for their own creativity … or lack thereof. Inspiration and creativity can feel magical, like they come unprovoked out of the ether and recede again just as quickly. My own experiences suggest that my creativity, at least, has a strong neurochemical basis … but it still feels magical, and attributing inspiration or lack thereof to something outside oneself becomes a handy way to explain the inexplicable or (in my case) avoid hard truths like, “I’m not writing because I’m dysthymic or stressed out.” Instead, I’m not writing because Maedhros isn’t back from his Caribbean cruise yet.

So what are your experiences with muses? Do you use the term? What does it mean to you? Have you encountered fans or writers who believe that they actually connect with muses? Have you seen disparagement, in fandom or otherwise, of the term muse? Do you think it’s a cop-out, a shorthand, or something else entirely?

“Like the rest of America and its genius writers,” writes one commenter,

you’re just another ‘trend-spotter’. Like chick-lit hasn’t been suffering since the START of the recession in 2007. You’re 2 years late! But congrats on being another academic whose ’study’ concludes with “we need more work here” or “______ field needs to re-invent itself”. But then again, your party scene tells that perfectly – getting a glimmer of an idea does not count as executing that idea in itself.

Another chimes in, with respect to Ms. Bilston describing a particular revision that she felt compelled to undertake: “Don’t waste your time cutting up the party scene in your book, it won’t sell any better b/c it sounds like a waste of time to read.” As I read these remarks, I was flummoxed by the fact that commenters feel the need to proclaim the utter lack of worth of a novel that they haven’t even read and to dismiss the writer’s efforts as useless. And I’m having a hard time imagining a similar type of meta article written by a male horror or sci-fi author meeting with the same scathing dismissal of his very craft.

Another commenter broadens the ad hominem attack to point out,

This sort of whiny article is precisely why the writers of chick lit are so embarassed. They should be. They write frivolous books that are basically identical to each other in content and then want to be taken seriously.

I’m not a particular fan of so-called “chicklit” or women’s fiction, and my reasons for that are a lot of the same reasons that some of the commenters give: characters whose lives and conflicts seem so unreal and, yes, frivolous that my interest just isn’t sustained. Yet, reading these comments, no matter my own personal agreeance with them as far as choosing novels to read, I find my hackles raised nonetheless and have to come to the defense of my sister-wordsmiths. Because–as escapist as their novels may be–they aren’t getting a fair shake.

Commenter LaniDianeRich–who identifies herself as an author in the chicklit genre–put it best when she wrote,

Why is it okay for Stephen King to write about grisly evil, for Tom Clancy to write about spies, for Augusten Burroughs to write about his tragic childhood, but it’s not okay for Sarah (or me, or hundreds of other writers) to write about women?

Because the arguments against writing that doesn’t fall into the “literary” genre are familiar; I heard the same spiel about a lack of realism and cookie-cutter characters during a rather uncomfortable writers’ workshop in university where a short story of mine was shredded not on its own merits but by the professor’s assessment that, because it was set in a dystopian future, then it was sci-fi and therefore of inherently less worth than my classmates’ work set in present-day reality. In Tolkien’s “On Fairy Stories,” he addresses many of these arguments, suggesting that they have had a long and vigorous shelf-life despite the sheer bone-headedness of such assertions. So it’s not the arguments, per se, against “chicklit” that I find so disturbing as the vitriol that this particular genre seems always to earn. Why?

I’m just as guilty. I’m quicker to distance myself, as a writer, from chicklit than I am from the gaudily covered hardcore “science fiction” novels that sound like a thinner, dumbed-down Star Trek, even though I am a writer of neither and, in fact, as a reader, would probably prefer Confessions of a Shopaholic to a book from the Warhammer series. And, certainly, the Warhammer books aren’t regarded as fine writing or profound, yet they also aren’t subject to the same vitriol as chicklit. Rather, they’re waved off as harmless–if at times inadvertantly humorous (at least to those of us who don’t “get” the genre)–escapism. I remember once having to sit through a movie based on a Tom Clancy novel that my husband wanted to see and being driven to distraction by the sheer improbability and inanity of the whole thing, coupled with a constant hyper-masculine need to show the size of one’s dick and the heft of one’s balls by packing as many explosions, bombs, guns, guys in camo, dark-sunglassed operatives shouting in code into walkie-talkies, careening helicopter flights, and urban car chases into an hour-and-a-half sustained roar. Replace the bombs and guns with diamonds and yachts and the guys in camo with slim thirty-somethings in designer Italian couture and the car chases with posh parties and–from the description that Ms. Bilston provides of her own novel–you have chicklit. It’s no more improbable than Tom Clancy, certainly. (Perhaps significantly less so since people, presumably, do live such padded lives somewhere yet, as of passing it on I-95 this morning, Baltimore had not yet been nuked by terrorists.)

Yet I don’t see Tom Clancy or Stephen King or Dean Koontz being berated by literati who wish these authors would just get their darned heads out of the clouds and focus on reality and people (as they are in reality, of course) and “things bigger than your everyday troubles,” to quote on of the commenters on Ms. Bilston’s article.

And now this begins to remind me of a discussion that generated on my last post where I mentioned that one of the more interesting comments that I received on Another Man’s Cage accused me of writing the novel for my own pleasure (as a woman) and that of my largely female audience because I dwelled on the emotional and psychological lives of the characters. That comment–”written for a woman’s pleasure!”–was meant to be withering to the entire premise of my novel, I’m sure. It was instant damnation. It marked me, immediately, as a most unserious writer for choosing to aim my content at people with two X chromosomes. I have trouble imagining the opposite accusation–of a story being written for the pleasure and entertainment of males–as carrying the same sort of clout. Even fandom’s obsession with “Mary Sue,” that icon of female escapism, I think, marks how little we value typical feminine fantasy as compared to typical masculine fantasy. Fantasy in general is always regarded with distaste by some. But male-oriented fantasy–Warhammer and Tom Clancy and epic CGI-enhanced battle scenes–are laughed off at worst but generally consumed as the guilty pleasure that most people feel when indulging in obvious escapism. But chicklit? We need to be puttin a stop to that! But why?

Wemyss first seized on it in his rather cumbersome retort On the responsibilities of writers. Here’s a paragraph that sums it up pretty well:

The idea that it is a writer’s responsibility, if not to write to pattern, then at the least to go back and ensure that the work is politically Bowdlerised, is not only utter balls; it is the high road to writerly ruin. The writer’s responsibility is to write the story that clamours to be written, take him where it may, and to write it in the best possible English. The writer’s responsibility is to her story and its characters. Failure to remain true to that responsibility is always fatal.

But …

Stellaluna didn’t say that.

I think it’s fairly clear from the examples that she uses that Stellaluna certainly prefers stories that positively portray characters of color, women, and GLBT characters. But I find it difficult to see–even with Wemyss’s use of bold italics underline to show where Stellaluna transgresses into advocating for self-censorship–where she actually says that a writer must consider what a story says “between the lines” and that a writer must edit and censor a story to portray typically ignored or maligned groups positively.

Instead, it seems to me that she is saying that writers should be aware that their stories and their characters might be seen by some readers to carry a message about these subjects and that writers should keep this in mind when writing. She also makes the argument that readers have a right to analyze a story for such messages, even (presumably) when the author doesn’t wish them to do so. Not knowing Stellaluna personally or being familiar with her fandom(s), I can’t say for sure, but I suspect that she is directly addressing authors who find their stories undergoing critique for seeming, to some readers, to express support for racist/misogynist/heteronormative ideas and stereotypes and defend themselves by arguing that “it’s just a story,” hence trying to have their cake (keep offensive depictions in their stories) and eat it too (still be regarded as progressive and hip to prevailing fannish ideology). With that argument comes the assumption, then, that offensive, insensitive, or stereotypical depictions of characters belonging to a particular group don’t matter. Stellaluna argues that stories aren’t just stories, and these depictions do matter. I would agree with her.

However, I would not argue that authors should sanitize their stories in the name of so-called “political correctness.” Nor does Stellaluna–Wemyss’s post notwithstanding–make this argument. But authors need to take responsibility for what their stories say. If they write in a way that depicts all gay men as effeminate theater majors interested in sex with anything with a dick, then they need to take responsibility for the reaction that may cause in some readers. Does that mean that they need to change the story? Of course not. But neither does it mean that they get to act all pie-eyed and innocent and claim that, no matter how offensive the ideas their stories seem to support, that these ideas are meaningless because they are, of course, fiction and are, therefore, beneath discussion.

In the comments to his first post, Wemyss likes to draw the comparison to religious fundamentalists. Their ideas of morality are at odds in many ways with the ideas advocated by most people in fandom. Why don’t they have the right to make similar demands as those who are politically correct, demanding that all stories have to be revised “with a list of boxes to be ticked off” to assure that they meet a particular fundamentalist creed?

They do have the right to author stories that meet these standards, and they have the right to comment on stories with these ideas in mind. Who is saying that they do not? Actually, this sentence nicely summing up Stellaluna’s thesis could apply just as easily to a fundamentalist creed as it does to a “PC” ideology, once removed from her examples:

I need to think about what my story is saying the subtextual and metaphoric level as well as what’s happening in the surface action of the story; and I need to think about whether I’m making any unconscious assumptions regarding gender or race or sexual identity that I did not intend.

I have just written a story intended to uphold a fundamentalist ideology. In the story, I have two gay characters. Clearly, I want to portray their homosexuality negatively. However, in the course of also demonstrating that I “love the sinner, hate the sin,” they come off as too empathetic for my audience, who accuses me of a GLBT-friendly agenda. Just as Stellaluna cautions, I should have thought about “any unconscious assumptions regarding … sexual identity that I did not intend.”

If I was to make one critique against Stellaluna’s post, it would be that I don’t think there is enough emphasis on the fact that readers can be wrong. Not all readers will agree. And where one reader is applauding the depth with which the female characters are treated, another is complaining that the story is misogynist in places; one of my stories earned just this reaction. Who was right? Well, neither and both: each was correct in that no interpretation is wrong, but this also means that no interpretation can be universally correct either.

Ironically, Wemyss wrote a second, lengthy post in reply to comments on the first post. Now, I was not the only person who questioned whether he “got” Stellaluna’s post in the first place or was accusing her of a liberal agenda where he wanted to see a liberal agenda (versus where there was actually evidence of a liberal agenda versus generally good advice using examples clearly aimed at a liberal audience). Yet, he doesn’t address this point at all in the second post.

However, perhaps most revealing, he does use the second post to go off on a lengthy diatribe attempting to debunk the notion of privilege, using a definition of privilege that likens it to an abacus: earning privilege here and losing it there (+5 for being gay! -5 for being male!) to come up with a sum total at the end. This, I think, reveals that he not only misunderstands terribly the concept of privilege but also that he entered into this debate with his own agenda, which I suspect was baiting a contingent of fandom into an argument over the existence of privilege and “political correctness.” I could be wrong here and guilty–as I think Wemyss is–of reading too much into the words of someone with whom I clearly disagree politically, but I find it interesting that as many people questioned whether Stellaluna was saying what he thought she said, that their concern was ignored entirely in his rebuttal in favor of disproving privilege.

Regardless, I think it was much ado about nothing. I believe Stellaluna was saying that writers need to be conscious of the fact that readers may take messages from even the most innocent and frivolous of writings. Therefore, it is prudent to think about these things when writing and revising, and writers should be prepared to take responsibility for their words. I would mostly agree with this, subjective interpretation notwithstanding. And I really think that was all that she was saying.

One of the thoughts that has crossed my mind and is currently sticking in my mind like a cockleburr and annoying me and refusing to be dislodged is how a similar conflict exists between writing and fandom. I say “fandom” because this blog is largely aimed toward fandom and because fandom is where I am most comfortable, but really, I think it applies to any sort of group that encourages (or is even based solely or primarily on) creativity and is maintained by a collective effort by members of the community. For example, I am also a member of the Society for Creative Anachronism, and I find many of the same conundrums that I experience in fandom arising there as well.

Writing or creating artwork is a selfish endeavor. It is done alone, usually in solitude or silence (as, indeed, I am alone right now in the house with the only sound the humming of my laptop; even the dogs are outside). At times, the drive to write and escape from social obligations drives me to the brink of madness, and I become a truly unpleasant person to be around. Luckily, Bobby understands this and packs me off into an empty room with my laptop and a couple of hours to write. I am not the first writer to lament the words on the page and how they might have translated better into folded laundry or dishes put away or time spent in the company of others who might feel hurt that I am not around. I sometimes feel like an exceedingly selfish person for my writing. (In fact, I should be finishing a school paper right now and even feel a little guilty that I am writing this instead.) For the few years that I participating in NaNoWriMo, November was such a time of peace and relief. It was something official and even impressive-sounding (”I am a participant in this year’s National Novel-Writing Month” *polishes fingernails on the front of waistcoat*), and it was a good excuse to avoid other activities and write instead. I remember when Bobby was playing in a particularly far-off hockey league, and I used to go to all of his games so that he was not driving home exhausted and alone, and I used to take my laptop and write while he was playing. And, sometimes, people I knew would sit down with me and make conversation, and how I longed to say what I was thinking: “Would you just fuck off and let me alone to write?” Only that was exceedingly selfish, so I never did, and who knows how many words didn’t get written because of it. I feel guilty, even now, lamenting those lost words when, clearly, socialization was the right and proper and human thing to do, and people were just trying to be nice to the lonely eccentric woman over by the soda machines. But when NaNoWriMo was going on, everyone was warned up to a month in advance, and I was left alone, and I didn’t feel guilty about it. I was, after all, serving a project larger than myself; it was not so selfish as writing simply because I wanted to.

Fandom, on the other hand–or groups like the SCA–are entities that value unselfishness in the form of service to the community. Forget the above paragraph for a moment and meet Dawn the Archive Owner and Webminister and Volunteer. One of my most passionately uttered values is the importance, as part of a community from which one derives as much enjoyment as I do fandom and the SCA, of contributing in some significant way to that community. Fannish communities are built almost entirely on the contributions of members of that community; if, tomorrow, the co-moderators, volunteers, writers, and reviewers of the SWG all decided that they wanted to leave the time and effort that they spend on their various contributions to someone else, then there would be no SWG. That is the surest way to shut us down.

But the SWG (and many other fannish groups) is by name and definition a group of writers and artists, people whose work is by its very nature selfish and solitary. Almost four years after I formed the SWG, I’d have to say that my only regret, in creating this group for fandom and doing all of the service that that entails, is again, the lost words: the stories that I wanted to write and didn’t because obligations to the community. I am beyond proud, delighted, and thrilled with the SWG and what it has accomplished, and I would never ever unwish it, but sometimes–in the midst of doing the fannish equivalent of changing dirty diapers or playing stuffed-animal tea party–I lament the lost ability to be selfish and wonder what I could have produced in the last four years if I’d never created the SWG.

I have always been proud of my involvement with fandom–and this, quite unexpectedly, has increased the more that I study literature–because I see its collective, shared creativity as more of a return to the creativity that has been natural to the human race since our distant ancestors first started singing verses around the campfire at night, adding and changing where they saw fit. I see the recent turn that creativity–writing in particular–has taken, with its obsessiveness over possession and markets and profit, as the abnormality, not the desire to create based on what has already been done by others. But, at the same time, writing is largely a solitary act. How does that fit into a collective community? For me, I find that I have the same balancing act as that described by mothers who are also writers, who have to make the choice between a crying child and a whispering muse (1), only my choice is between the whispering muse and a webpage that needs updating, emails that need answering, a newsletter that needs writing, announcements that need posting … all of these things that need to be done in service of the fannish ideals in which I believe so strongly and which, almost always, trump my creative ideals, in which I also believe but are easier to defer: They are selfish.

The first creative communities, artists/authors produced songs and stories for the entertainment of an audience that was usually not artistic itself; the artist/author might find able subsistence from this audience: “singing for one’s supper,” if you will. In the modern “real” writing world, markets exist that seek and publish fiction to provide to an audience and, hopefully, these markets compensate writers fairly for their work (excuse me while I have a good laugh at that last point ………….. thanks, I’m better now). In both cases, the artist/author is independent from the majority of consumers of his or her work, and the “community” in which she or he operates is also maintained by people who are not usually themselves artists/authors. Therefore, the creation and maintenance of the infrastructure by which such creativity is produced and shared does not interfere much with the actual production of that creativity.

Fandom is different: The same people who are producing creative works are usually also those who are building and maintaining the communities necessary for that work to be produced and shared. Most archive and group owners are themselves writers; most of our volunteers (and all of my co-moderators) with the SWG are also artists or writers, and so whenever they give their time to their group, then that is taking time from their writing. The audience for fannish works is also, largely, the same people producing those works, so whenever I hear of people who review x number of stories for the MEFAs or review everything posted on a particular archive or community, then I can’t help but to think that that contribution comes at the expense of their own creative endeavors. But, of course, they are making a very necessary contribution.

What is the solution here? There is no solution. What is beautiful about our communities–that they are collective and run by those who are themselves artists and writers (versus those looking to turn a profit on the efforts of others)–is also to our detriment: Those who believe most strongly in service to their communities will feel the pull of both obligations, and it won’t always be pleasant, and the “selfish” and creative will most often lose out, which is itself a loss in words unwritten and ideas unexpressed.

I do wonder, also, to what extent this is a manifestation of fandom being a “female space,” as some like to call it (amid much controversy, of course). Most cultures teach young girls to be selfless, to be helpers, to put their needs below the needs of the group. In women, selflessness is still valued, as evidenced by the continued fervor of the debate over whether or not mothers belong in the workplace. Boys, on the other hand, are taught to value more their individual accomplishments, and it is understood that a degree of selfishness is to be expected. (I remember reading once, when I was very young, that American culture teaches us to see psychopathology in the mother who chooses her needs over those of her children but not in the man who uproots his family, takes his wife from her family and friends and his children from their peers and familiar home, in order to pursue a career that will not benefit that family in the least; in fact, might be to its detriment as the responsibilities of said career take him away from home even more than he already is and, possibly, to a city or living conditions that are ideal to no one but him. That might have been the moment when I became a feminist, being as this point has stuck with me across, literally, almost the entirety of my life. I only wish that I could remember where I read or heard it to give proper credit.)

I wonder how these values that are still taught to girls and esteemed in women have shaped fandom, and I wonder how this will affect our creative accomplishments. Is there a connection? I don’t know. There are, of course, men in fandom, and several Tolkien-based writing groups are run by men, and I do not intend to dismiss or diminish their contributions. But the Tolkien-based writing community is 95% female (at least) and so, presumably, the culture of that community is female as well. I wonder, sometimes, what male-dominated fandoms (and they do exist) look like compared to female-dominated fandoms, like the Tolkien fandom. Do they feel the same conflict between personal creation and contributing to the collective? And this goes, I think, beyond something so large as creating a group or archive. Do they drop everything to write a ficlet for a collection dedicated to a friend whose going through a rough spell? Do they read every story participating in an award or fest and leave comments for all the authors? Do they set their own work aside because a friend needs a last-minute “emergency” beta-read? Most of the people that I know in the Tolkien fandom–male and female–have done at least one of these things at some point, but the Tolkien fandom–being dominated by women–would of course have evolved a value system created largely by women.

To what extent are these values female and not merely fannish and expected parts of any collective community?

These are questions whizzing through my head lately.

An Afterword …

I don’t often write about my experiences as the owner of the SWG for the simple fact that such “confessions” seem to result in an outpouring of gratitude and back-pats that I think people feel are obligatory and that make me feel bad and slightly dirty, as though I have solicited something undeserved for an endeavor that I find very enjoyable and gratifying without people feeling the need to regularly prostrate themselves before me. I make a conscious decision to continue as the owner of the SWG because I love my group and am proud of what it has accomplished. I am breaking my personal rule about writing about my experiences with the SWG here because, as the owner of a mid-sized fannish group, I work well as an example for this topic; nothing more and nothing less. This is not a hint of dissatisfaction or a fishing for praise, pity, or gratitude, and I am going to request that people not turn this post into a session of the above. The contributions of members and associates of the SWG that have allowed us to accomplish what we have, despite being a small and very niche community, have been and continue to be gratitude enough.

References

1. Susan Rubin Suleiman, “Writing and Motherhood,” in The Longman Anthology of Women’s Literature, edited by Mary K. DeShazer, 621-637. New York: Longman, 2001.