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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.
Somewhere in her diaries, Virgina Woolf talks about hearing a voice in her head that told her the story while she wrote frantically (by hand, remember) trying to keep up and not lose any of it. Yes, it's like that, though her work was art and mine, genre. It's no wonder that those ancient poets saw this process as a kind of madness or as being possessed by someone outside of themselves.
It's not, of course, but the part of the mind that writes fiction or poetry lies so deeply buried that it does seem to come from outside of one's self. To male writers -- and alas, we have very little written by women from Graeco-Roman times -- something so alien, so outside, had to be female, their ultimate Other.
Consider the phenomenon of blindsight. If someone's brain is injured in such a way as to damage the big nerve pathways leading from the eyes to the optical area of the cortex in the forebrain, that person becomes blind, even though their eyes are still in perfect shape. But oddly enough their peripheral vision still functions, though they cannot see. That is, if someone makes a move in the periphery, the person "sees" nothing -- but he knows that the other person made a move. The nerves are not damaged that lead to a far older vision center in another part of the brain. This particular center apparently functioned without any need of consciousness to know it "saw".
The build-a-story part of the brain must operate in some similiar way. Everyone creates fictions at night when they dream, while they sleep. Although the waking part of the brain has ceased activity, the neurons are happily firing and creating images and fragments of narrative. The same thing happens when inspiration "strikes" writers. Some part of our minds has created a story which eventually, in some unknown way or another, finally breaks through into consciousness. In our scientific age, we refer to this part of the mind as "the unconscious".
In earlier times, in cultures that had no idea of the abilities of the brain, or indeed, no idea that the brain was the seat of consciousness, the phenomenon seemed so mysterious that it demanded a goddess. The same part of the mind that would later produce poems in her honor obligingly produced her, the Muse or the Awen, to personify itself.
The Silver Mage, Katharine Kerr, Deverry, fantasy, Silver Wyrm, dragons, DAW
