The Enemy Soulmate is a perfect example of such a caprice. I began it near the beginning of this year, and, as mentioned in my previous blog post, hoped and planned to get it finished in time to publish in July; and at the rate at which it was progressing, that seemed entirely possible.My muse loves to play the following trick on me. She gives me masses of inspiration for a story, so that I feel I must write it immediately, and I temporarily drop the piece I’m currently working on, telling myself that I’ll write this new story quickly, get it out of the way, and return to the piece I was trying to work on. The inspiration then suddenly dries up, and I’m left with two half-finished stories: the one the muse just inspired me to write, and the one I dropped in order to write it. I glare at the muse in frustration and resentment, and she shrugs and disappears, leaving me to slog, at times painfully, through my attempts to finish the story that she dumped in my lap. Eventually she will return, but not to help me finish any of the stories I have half-written: no; she comes to bring inspiration for yet another story.
She is a brat, but she is also what will make me great. I am nothing without her, and she knows it. Occasionally she takes pity on me and helps me to finish, or at least make progress on, a story that is currently incomplete, but this is rare. More often, I am left to finish alone what she urged me to start.
And then the muse vanished with a flutter of glittery wings, leaving me knee-deep in the swamp of a first draft, her illuminating glow fading with her; and as I continued to slosh, step by step, through the mud, the fog gradually lifted to reveal that the shore, which I had thought not far off, was in fact nowhere to be seen. And I have been slogging, at varying speed, ever since. O inconstant fizgig, that trifles with my very soul!
Because of this 'adorable, playful little quirk' (read: 'cruel, deceptive, nasty little vice') of my muse's, I invariably write multiple stories at once. I currently have approximately fifteen stories in varying stages of first draft, with other, fragmentary ideas in waiting. When the muse abandons me in the midst of a story, and I cannot squeeze anything more out of my brain regarding it, I skip to another one, so that I can always work on something. The downside to this approach is that it takes forever to get any story actually finished, but the upside is that I can always feel that I am making progress on something, even if it's not the book I'm currently trying to complete.
For The Enemy Soulmate, however, I wanted to see if I could get the story finished within a few months, if I focussed solely on it and persevered with it even when uninspired. I wanted to finish it quickly and get back to the story I had been working on when the muse decided that I was going to write The Enemy Soulmate instead. I am told that that is what 'professional' writers do – finish the book no matter how uninspired they feel – so it must be achievable, mustn't it?
The result of this intention is that I have spent a disappointing number of hours staring at the manuscript on my computer screen, cudgelling my brains, frustrated and impatient and half-inclined to throttle my mercurial muse next time she has the impudence to appear.
My deadline of July scuttled past, and then my next deadline of August ... and although the shore of the swamp seems to have appeared, hazy in the distance, it could simply be a trick of the murky light, and I am loath to set a third deadline lest I miss that one too and the concept of 'deadlines' start to become rather meaningless.
It appears that I cannot write to a deadline. Hours spent trying to write do not equate to progress being made. The stories will be finished in their own time, and I cannot pressure them into hurrying. I had always suspected that this was the case, but I had hoped to be proven wrong.
In fact, trying to finish the story by a certain date increased my frustration when the muse disappeared, and certainly took a lot of the pleasure out of writing it. I cannot say whether I would have made more or less progress had I not been trying so hard, but I am sure I would have been less frustrated.
Still, it is good to know, so that I can avoid setting deadlines in the future. Apparently, I have no say in when my stories finish themselves: I'm just the writer, and all I can do is make sure I have the tallest, most waterproof boots I can find, and plenty of snacks in my backpack.
