Musings on the Muse

My muse is a shapeshifter. She’s indiscriminate: a divine whore and angelic trickster up to her knees in mulch and butterfly cocoons. She’s in sunshine and dogs and fleeting thoughts and pain. She isn’t something other than me, but I can’t control her. She is my daemon, my guide. 

She would also like me to tell you that I don’t understand her and have no idea what I’m talking about. 

The Only Girl: the search for female sound engineers

Trina Shoemaker at the mixing desk

I was always odd, the resident freak or weirdo in any situation. And then I became a sound engineer. As a woman, that makes me exceptional. There aren’t many of us, so when I heard about Laura Marling’s latest project, Reversal of the Muse, I gave a cheer. It’s about time there were more ladies rocking a mixing desk.

Reversal of the Muse came about when the award winning singer-songwriter realised that in 10 years of making records she had only come across two female engineers working in studios. So she decided to dig deeper and explore female creativity in the music industry. Why are there so few female sound engineers and would the presence of more women in the studio make a difference to the end product – especially for female performers?

Colouring Books: Art Therapy or Mindless Money-spinner?

There’s a new mindfulness craze sweeping the nation: colouring books for adults. It’s supposed to help you relax and be more mindful, but does it work?

Alan Moore on the magic of fiction and the imagination

“I traffic in fiction. I do not traffic in lies.”

Alan Moore reminds me of an Old English Sheepdog with a wry twinkle in his eye. You just know he’s got a juicy bone hidden somewhere. He’s best known for his comics, like Watchmen and V for Vendetta, and for the fact that he hates the movie versions with a passion. Hollywood, he says, “spoon-feeds us, which has the effect of watering down our collective cultural imagination.” Moore is an artist driven by the art rather than the market. A writer, storyteller, magician, rebel, iconoclast, and psychonaut, who like William Blake, believes the reality of imagination is paramount. Moore’s new novel, Jerusalem, is out later this year.

Fantasy Fiction: a genre distinction too far

I wrote a Fantasy novel by accident. That’s not an easy accident to have; not like tripping over your own feet or walking into a glass door. It’s not that I was trying to write something else and it turned into Fantasy. I wasn’t aiming for any genre in particular – I just wrote the story. It was only when I had to pitch the book to agents and publishers that the penny dropped. I worked down the list of literary genres looking for the best fit and ended up at Science Fiction and Fantasy.

Getting the most out of Morning Pages

I’ve struggled with Morning Pages for years. I would do them for a bit and then quit. Start again. Quit again. Repeat. Then last week I finally worked out why: I understand the problem with Morning Pages and I know how to fix it.

Being Creative in a Mad World: Stopping

So we come to the end and it’s time to stop. 

To be creative means to recognise when you’re not being creative, and be able to do something to rectify that situation. To change and move forward you must stop whatever it is you’re doing (or not doing) that doesn’t serve either you or your creativity.

Stopping links all the other active qualities of the creative person, making it possible to leave behind unproductive behaviour and negative thoughts, opening the way to freedom through active creativity.

Being Creative in a Mad World: Learning

To be creative means to be open to life and curious about what’s going on and why. If you want to create something meaningful you must educate yourself: demand to know everything there is to know, whether about the world around you or the world inside you.

Being Creative in a Mad World: Looking

Look with more care than this...

To be creative you must pay attention to the world around you. Creativity is born out of an interest in life and other people. Turn your gaze outward. Search out the telling detail, ready for the moment the mask drops and the truth is revealed.

Being Creative in a Mad World: Rebelling

Stand out

True creativity happens right on the edge of rebellion, on the edge of chaos. This is where life functions at its best: at a point of dynamic equilibrium. Always changing, always transforming into something else.

Being Creative in a Mad World: Affirming

Be Yourself

Living creatively means being you. Who else are you going to be, if not yourself? Whose life are you going to live, if not your own?

Affirming means saying yes to being here and being alive. To be creative you must make manifest who you are through your creativity, and you do that by giving voice to your unique take on life.

Being Creative in a Mad World: Acting

Act on your desire...

To be creative you must act. Creativity is meaningless if it isn’t acted upon and made real. If you do nothing, you’ve got nothing.

You become what you do.

Being Creative in a Mad World: Encountering

Encountering means confronting life and yourself. 

This isn’t an aggressive confrontation with lots of bared teeth and frowning. It's non-demanding – more like an embrace. But not clinging, not a death grip. It’s about giving your creativity space to breathe, holding it in your mind and letting it be.

Being Creative in a Mad World: Committing

Commit before it's too late...

Committing to living creatively means you care. It’s an investment in yourself, in your future, in the process of creating, and in others.

You are entangled with your inspiration and passions, like two quarks linked across time and space, pulsing with the dance of life.

Being Creative in a Mad World: Doubting

Invert your thinking...

If you are creative then you’re paying attention to the world around you and exploring your inner world looking for inspiration and passion. But the more you look, the more you will doubt.

Being Creative in a Mad World: Meaning

What is the meaning of life?

We all have our favourite answers to this question, but it’s a mistake to think meaning exists out there in the world somewhere, just waiting for you to discover it. 

Of course, you can take your sense of meaning from outside yourself, in family, career or accomplishment, but this leaves you wide open to disappointment and disillusionment.

Whatever you invest with meaning has power over your life. If you invest meaning in something outside yourself, you render yourself powerless. You will constantly be thrown back on yourself, never feeling the master of your life.

Being Creative in a Mad World: Choosing

Choose wisely...

Sartre said we are condemned to be free. But you could say we are condemned to choose. Having big brains frees us from being driven by instinct, but our consciousness only makes it possible for us to be free. We are only free if we act on it and make a choice.

Being Creative in a Mad World: Thinking

Creativity involves a lot of thought. Most of the work of writing is thinking: questioning, investigating, exploring and researching, turning the idea round and round, interrogating it from every angle.

Being Creative in a Mad World: Dreaming

If you want to be creative you will have to create the right environment to allow your imagination freedom to roam. Imagination is the essence of creativity.

Being Creative in a Mad World: Loving

Love is a condition of relatedness. True love is a recognition of the fundamental unity of all life. To be alive means to be in relationship – to yourself, to other people, to the earth, animals, plants, water, the sky…

Even though unity is the inherent nature of life and love is our natural condition, we must act on it in order to realise it.