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In ancient times, Greek and Roman poets invoked of the Muse. She was a goddess, a female figure that 'inspired' their work. That is, she 'breathed upon" or 'into' them their themes and deep creative ideas. They saw her as something utterly outside of their selves and set apart from ordinary human experience. Without her first impulse, they could not sing or write their poetry. Once she had breathed upon them, then their rational, conscious minds could continue the process and finish off the poems. Welsh poets of the post-Roman and medieval periods invoked a similiar figure, the Awen, the so-called "white goddess" about whom the poet Robert Graves wrote so much nonsense. Despite Graves, however, there's no doubt that this figure, the Awen, seemed real enough to early bards.
I had alway considered the Awen or Muse a poetic convention, a formal remnant of early pre-literate cultures, until I began to write fiction. Once I started the short story that grew into a saga, I understood things a fair bit better. The original short piece itself burst out of the first sentence and began to write itself. The core material of the entire series presented itself to me as long fragments of stories that began, slowly, to take on an overall if non-rational shape. For about eighteen months I wrote compulsively, often getting up in the middle of the night to "just make a few notes" that turned into ten pages of fiction by morning. It was a kind of madness, all right, except it did turn into novels that other people can read, understand, and enjoy.
