I was listening to, as the hosts term it, my favorite podcast, full stop, that so happens to be about movies: What Went Wrong. It really is an excellent podcast and if you have any interest in movies or the creation of any art, I highly recommend it. They were discussing Kill Bill volumes one and two and discussed how Tarantino saw Uma Thurman as his muse. And it reminded me how much I dislike the idea of a muse. Or at least, how muses seem to be discussed.
Now, this may be completely nuts. I am perfectly willing to say that this is a connotation peculiar to me. However, I cannot escape the implications every time I hear the word. Muse seems to be used as something deeper than mere inspiration. An inspiration is someone or something that causes a single burst of creativity. A muse is someone — almost always a woman — or something that drives all or the majority of the creative output of a person. That puts a lot of weight, a lot of responsibility, on the back of the muse. It seems to me to be a way to avoid the artist taking responsibility for his or her own work.
If you put your work onto a muse, then what happens when you don’t produce? What happens when the work is subpar? How much do you blame the muse rather than yourself? If they are responsible for when things go well, are they responsible for when things go bad? I am probably making too much of this — okay, I am certainly making too much of this — but it feels off to put your own creativity on the shoulders of another person. They didn’t ask for it, they don’t deserve the potential downsides, and it seems wrong to take something that should be intrinsic to yourself and transfer it to another person. When you add in the fact that most of the time, we are talking about men pushing the responsibility onto women, the whole thing feels a bit icky.
Or, you know, I am really, really overthinking this.
Weekly Word Count
4400 this week. Again, less than usual but life has been busy. The Encyclopedia Brick book is moving along, and I feel as if the outline, so far, is solid. I’m not deviating that much from it, which is usually a good sign. I always expect to get into the writing and find that the outline doesn’t fit together with the characters and their motivations as well as I originally thought it would. But so far, that hasn’t really happened.
Probably means the character motivations are crap.
Have a great weekend everyone.