5 Things Kittiez Teach Us About Creativity and Finding Your Muse

Kitties at home. Kitties on the web. Kitties on my kitchen table. (Darn it all, not again. There goes the cheese. Where's the squirt gun?)

Cats are everywhere. Sooner or later, you either get tired of tripping over them and throw them outside, or you start paying attention to their little quirks and actually learn a few things.

Being physically incapable of saying no when a sick, puny, helpless stray cat shows up at my door, we’ve had a lot of cats over the course of the last five years. Hours spent watching the furry darlings chase each other around the house all day has imparted many bits of invaluable knowledge on grabbing onto inspiration with all eighteen claws.

Interesting Things Happen After Naps

If it seems like a cat sleeps all day, it’s because they do. Cats sleep an average of 15-20 hours a day. When they’re feeling tired, they sleep. When they wake up, they’re frisky and happy and ready to go. They know that the best things in life happen when they’re rested and ready to go.

Writers too often think they need to hold on to the starving artist persona, clinging to the belief that sleep is for the weak. But when you don’t sleep, your brain is too busy keeping you alive to come up with any moments of true brilliance. Take a nap. Let your mind rest. Then get up and do that thing that you do.

If It Moves, Pounce On It NOW

There hasn’t been a sock or a Barbie in this house in the last three years that hasn’t been dragged 

across the floor by a cat at least once. They don’t care if it’s four in the morning, those toes wiggling under the blanket gotta be chewed

To put it in more modern terms, most cats have an impulse control problem. The minute something catches their attention, they’re after it. How brilliant could your writing be if you were able to grab onto whatever sparked your imagination the second you saw it, instead of going back to what you were doing and hoping you’ll remember it later?

Don’t Be Afraid to Hang Out on a Window Screen or Two

Four cats. Three kids. Two adults. At least one electronic going at any point in time. Volcanic amounts of noise.

"Meow!" says the poor kitty that’s stuck outside, but no one can hear him.

Given that we live in the snow belt of upstate NY, being stuck outside isn't exactly something our cats love. One of our tomcats has come up with the perfect solution. If we don’t open the door the first time he meows, he takes a lap of the outside windows. One leap, a couple of claws through the mesh, and the next thing you know you’ve got 16 lbs of window ornament outside your glass. 

Needless to say, no one is ignoring that. To this day, he’s the only cat I know that does that.

Don’t be afraid to do something wild and unconventional (and a little bit creepy) so your voice can be heard.

Awesomeness Can Be Found In Unexpected Places

I never knew how amazing the belt on my housecoat could be until I had four cats chasing me around my kitchen while I was trying to make coffee. Cats are born knowing what we mere humans forget over time: That the world is a place of endless wonder, and awesomeness can be found in the most humdrum places if you're willing to set aside your preconceived notions and give it a go. 

Don’t Be Afraid to Snuggle

Snuggly kitties are one of life’s great joy. From our point of view, that’s easy to explain. They’re small. Warm. FLUFFY!

And they know it, which is how they get away with so much.

The amazing thing about cats is that it doesn't matter what else they've been doing all day. If you sit down, your lap is theirs for the taking. They can set aside whatever it is they planned on doing and enjoy that safe, warm spot that they know will always welcome them in.

Everyone needs a lap to snuggle on, whether that's a person or a favorite bookstore or a group of friends you see every Friday night. Find that one place where you know you'll be welcome, and that wants you to be uniquely you, and make yourself at home.

Image courtesy of Tina Phillips/FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Be You, or Be Real?

 

They always say that writing comes from the heart, right? So whatever you put on the page should be you in your purest form. 

Funny, but that’s not usually what I find when I read people’s writing. All too often, what I find is that they’ve tried so hard to establish a persona for themselves that they’ve stopped being real. They’re speaking from the head, but not from the heart. They’re being who they think they are, or who they want to be, instead of they REALLY are.

You can't see me! That means I can be anyone

I want to be...right?

I’m all for people trying to become, but until you’re there, your writing needs to be you. It needs to be YOUR voice, not some random stand-in of you that happened to stop by and say, “Hey, I could write a best seller!”

 Pro Tip: That guy's a jerk.

“But it is my voice!” you say.

Is it?

Is it really?

This, my friends, is the hardest lesson you’re ever going to learn about writing, so listen up. 

If you wouldn’t say it when you’re talking to your friends at the dinner table, don’t say it in script.

I’m not talking about “That One Character” that sounds like he’s from a Bronte novel. Sometimes that’s just fun. But it’s not the kind of thing you can keep up. Even authors on the bestseller list will have characters whose speech slips out of their “character voice” and into their “real person” voice.

If James Patterson and Nora Roberts and Rick Riordan can’t keep a character’s speech in character for an entire book, how are you going to do it for every word you write?

You’re not. You can't, because the minute you get into a good groove your dialogue and narration are going to slip. Your readers will notice. Your editors will notice. The most tolerant will shake their head and move on. The not-so-tolerant will crucify you.

So here’s what I want you to do. The next time you’re getting ready to write something, stop. Think about the message you want to send. Then say it to yourself in the mirror. Look yourself right in the face and say it again. How does it sound? Does it trip off the tongue? Or does it kind of stick there, forcing you to twist your face into grotesque proportions to hack it out like your cat did that hairball last month? 

If it’s the latter, don’t write it down. Look at yourself and, instead of saying what you thought you were going to write, say what you would say if you were trying to say it to someone sitting next to you at the dinner table. THAT is your voice, and that’s what makes your writing real.  

Image courtesy of Photostock/FreeDigitalPhotos.net. 

So You Want to be a Writer

“I’d always loved to read…but I never thought about writing as a career.” ~Nora Roberts

Back it up. I call bologna, a big, stinking pile of it. There’s not a soul I know that hasn’t entertained, however briefly, the idea of being a writer. I suspect that most of it has to do with the idea that writers can grab their notebooks and laptops and work wherever and whenever we want. Or maybe it’s the mental picture of getting paid millions a year to sit around in our pajamas, eat ice cream and wait for our muse to crawl out of bed and tell us to say something brilliant. 

Do you want to know the difference between the people who entertain the idea of being a writer and the people that actually become one? Do you want to know what makes Nora Roberts a bestselling author while thousands of beautiful, brilliant people sit around hoping a publisher will notice them and launch them to the top of the NY Times Bestseller List? 

(Waits while everyone sucks in a suspenseful breath.)

I feel like I should say something inspirational here. Something moving, like, “The people who write are the people who can’t stand not to.” Or something like that. But I’d be lying. At the end of the day, the people who write are the ones that sit down at that keyboard, day after day, and make words spill out onto the page…whether their brain wants them to or not!

Writers, real writers, know their job rocks. They get to get up every morning, grab a cup of coffee, and spill their lifeblood all over a page until the end of the day. Which, let me tell you, is a whole lot harder than picking up a phone or coding a computer program or asking if they want fries with that. Sometimes they do it in their pajamas. Sometimes they do it on the beach. Sometimes they even do it in pants, just to shake things up a bit.

They can do it anywhere, any time, because when you're pulling your craft out of that part of yourself you never let anybody see any other time, the time and the place doesn’t matter.

People talk about times and places to write all the time. When’s the best time of day to write. Where’s the best place to write. Everyone is different, and at the end of the day it’s going to be all up to you. Are you a writer, to craft a word to a page even on days you feel like you can barely speak? Or are you going to spend the rest of your life waiting for that elusive muse to swing by and give you a push in the right direction?

I know where my bets would be.