Preparing for the muse

"I start all my books on January 8th," says Isabel Allende. "Can you imagine January 7th? It's hell.

"Every year on January 7th, I prepare my physical space. I clean up everything from my other books. I just leave my dictionaries, and my first editions, and my research materials for the new one. And then on January 8th I walk seventeen steps from the kitchen to the little pool house that is my office. It's like a journey to another world. It's winter, it's raining usually. I go with my umbrella and the dog following me. From those seventeen steps on, I am in another world and I am another person.

"I go there scared. And excited. And disappointed -- because I have a
sort of idea that isn't really an idea. The first two, three, four weeks
are wasted. I just show up in front of the computer. Show up, show up,
show up, and after a while the muse shows up too. If she doesn't show up
invited, eventually she just shows up." *

"I
write eight to ten hours a day," Allende says, "until I have a first draft, then I can
relax a little. I am very disciplined. I write in silence and solitude. I
light a candle to call inspiration and the muses, and I surround myself
with pictures of the people I love, dead and alive.”

"One of the hardest things to do with a novel," says Philip Pullman, "is to stop writing it
for a while, do something else, fulfill this engagement or that
commitment or whatever, and pick it up exactly where you left it and
carry on as if nothing had happened. You will have changed; the story
will have drifted off course, like a ship when the engines stop and
there’s no anchor to keep it in place; when you get back on board, you
have to warm the engines up, start the great bulk of the ship moving
through the water again, work out your position, check the compass
bearing, steer carefully to bring it back on track … all that energy
wasted on doing something that wouldn’t have been necessary at all if
you’d just kept going."

"I don't know where my ideas come from," Pullman says, "but I know where they come to. They come to my desk, and if I'm not there, they go away again."

* The first quote is taken from Why We Write, edited by Meredith Maran (Plume/Penguin, 2013), published in aid of the 826 National youth literacy program. Please consider ordering a copy to support this worthy cause.