I think the otakukin movement has also contributed to that negative reputation ....

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...don't you just love brainfarts? >.> That's what I was thinking of when I mentioned the people who really thought the characters were talking to them, lol. I just didn't remember what they were called!

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There's a very thin line. When I was in highschool I knew people who started out just joking "Oh, this character wouldn't leave me alone until I wrote this..." and eventually moved on to "Soulbonding." (Believing they were actually talking to a person on the astral plane. If they wrote something depressing for that character, they would be in a bad mood the whole day because ~the character~ was depressed.) If one of my adult friends now joked like that I wouldn't bat an eye, but if it was someone I didn't know too well I'd have to make sure they were joking.

Little conversations between author and character in the authors' notes are just annoying, imo, but not because it's like astral planing.

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That was me.

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An author talking to characters and/or muses in the authors notes of a story is just silly. Other than that, I don't really care.

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Talking about having a 'muse' in its original sense of a source of inspiration, or talking about how the characters sometimes seem to be more in charge of a story than the writer, is just being a writer? I don't see anything wrong with that, but tbh I've never had anyone jump on me for doing it in moderation, either.

The problem with the roleplay-muse conversations is that, oh, 99 times out of 10, they are utterly boring to anyone other than the writer. The problem with the sort of people who talk endlessly about how they have a muse for this character and that character and set up entire mindscapes for their muses to live in and have complicated relationships with them, which they must then describe in detail to all and sundry, tend to be a) very boring, b) very self-involved, and c) not very good writers. Being overly invested in muses is annoying in and of itself, yes, but it's mostly a diagnostic symptom of all sorts of other annoying. (Having other people share one's mindscape doesn't make one annoying. Expecting everyone else to care about them as much as you do is the warning sign.)

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A few years back, judging from fanficrants (or at least the people who did a lot of commenting on fanficrants at the time) talking about having a muse was pretty common, though people did seem to agree that talking to them in your author's notes was annoying. And actually as I seem to remember it the person who said muses were romanticizing schizophrenia got deservingly jumped on.

Or maybe that was just my perception? Because I don't have muses and my characters don't talk to me even theoretically or control stories. And I never quite get what people mean when they say things like that... so maybe it's just that I felt alone in being someone who just wrote. (Though I can't always make myself write, far from it.)

Anyway, to get back to your main question, if people are that against talking about muses I don't get why. I certainly don't judge people harshly if they talk about a character wanting them to write something. I may not get it but I don't have to. It's just the conversations in the author's notes that bother me, and I haven't seen one of those in ages. And if someone talks about a "smut muse," well, that makes perfect sense to me... I just interpret that as "getting motivated to write smut" and there's nothing wrong with that.

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Sometimes the characters do seem to want to take a story in a different direction than the author wants, and that's an important thing to listen to. But I think it has a bad rap because some authors use that as an excuse for nothing bad happening to their characters. (Though for some reason when that happens to me, the characters are usually pulling toward something terrible happening to them.) Also a handful of people given the "muse" thing a bad name.

For instance, Laurel K. Hamilton is rather well-known to lots of people who mock on the internet, and she buys her characters presents, doesn't want bad things to happen to them because they are so important to her, and seems to confuse herself and Anita Blake an awful lot.

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I'll admit to having been a "Soulbonder" as a teenager, but I grew out of it (in part because of seeing people take it waaay to seriously). And looking back on it, I can understand why it would have weirded people out, but I don't consider my personal experiences as having been detrimental; it was a nice escape at a stressful time in my life.

But I do think the worst of a given group always become the representation and the ones through which the group as a whole are judged (see furries and nerds of all colors). So even if, for most people, it's just a colorful and interesting way to deal with character voices for writing, the whole idea of muses is going to be flavored by the extreme example.

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Muses have simply been overused; the joke has been flogged until nothing but a fine red paste remains. Much like fanfic Japanese, it's largely gone out of fashion.

Muses can be perfectly fine if the person writing them into her/his story has talent and some wit, but since such a huge percentage of fanfic is terrible, the chances of finding decent muses are equally wretched.

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My problem with muses I find most written conversations with muses annoyingly forced-funny like the "KEKEKEKE I'M ALL HYPER ON SUGAR WHEEEE" authors' notes that a lot of young authors think are actually clever. Even the well-written ones just feel kind of out-of-character, since this character does not exist in a plane where it can converse with the author. At very best they leave me with the feeling like I'm kind of missing a page since I may or may not have read anything that author wrote before. I don't think they're inherently bad or wrong, they're just not anything I ever read.

Speaking of muses as a figurative device, I have no issue with people who talk about their muses. I mean, I just wrote an exasperated post about how this story idea that won't leave me alone is like my senile old cat, so it's not like I have room to criticize people for the metaphors they want to use to talk about their writing process and progress.

Also if there are muses like this one (it's not bad for Oglaf, but that only means it's NSFW instead of OMFGNSFW), I totally want one.

(of course shift-tab means "post the half-finished comment," computer. Of course it does.)

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I think it probably is only the ones who are blatantly obnoxious, boring at length, or making the readers believe they have undergone a severe break from reality who give muses a bad name. If it's short, funny, and not taken to extremes it can be quite amusing to have the author imagine the characters commenting on the fic or replying to reviews. Or else fandom muses were just a trend that had their day and don't seem likely to make a huge comeback. After all, if they're not obnoxious or batshit they are trivial, and probably not the main aspect of the fic that readers notice anyway.

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I don't like it, and don't tend to read fic by people who are all "ooh, Spock caught me in the shower to tell me how this next bit happened!" It strikes me as a lot of "LOOK HOW SPECIAL I AM, REALLY SPECIAL, LOOK LOOK!" Conversations on blogs and groups that hinge on what the muses said and "can you ask him this" made me start to actively avoid the author's-note thing when before I had just rolled my eyes at it.

Fundamentally, except in the context of conversations about the writing process and its silly moments, I am not interested in how exactly the writer got an idea, managed a characterization, kept going on a story, realized the next plot point, etc. I'm equally bored and put off by the kind of writer who tells me what music she was listening to for every scene and which color and make of pen she uses to make notes for each character. Must-have paper, the Only True Font, My Favorite Coffee Shop, "I blocked this scene with my action figures, and then Spock wouldn't let go of Kirk," all of that. Yes, a lot of us have writing rituals of varying degrees of nuttiness, and they are completely irrelevant to how the reader experiences the fiction that results, so really, put a sock in it.

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It's analogous to method acting, which is also weird and annoying when teenagers* try to do and start talking about the astral plane or foisting their feelings on you! The end!

*Do not necessarily need to be teen-aged. It is a state of mind.

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I think there's a difference between how self-absorbed a writer actually is (or needs to be) and how self-absorbed she allows herself to appear.

Actually having muses, in one form or another, can be an incredibly helpful thing. Not everyone needs them, and people who have them for one kind of writing might not have them for another, but when they "exist" (meaning, when the author has a deeply felt connection to her imaginary creation), they can make writing a lot more easy, and a lot more fun. Even if the writer ends up experiencing displaced feelings that are sad or negative in relation to their imaginary muses, in the end it can feel wonderful to get so wrapped up in one's imagination. It's like being a kid again.

But to talk about it a lot, to go on about muses in one's author's notes, to talk as if the muses were real... even if it's just in a joking way... is going to make an author appear unhinged. Does it matter if she is actually unhinged or not? No. Because what all that excessive muse talk does is show that the author lacks self-restraint, and self-restraint is a critical aspect of being a good writer.

An author needs to know what to omit as much as she needs to know what to include, and this is as important in day-to-day conversation as it is in actual writing. A writer who wants to write well needs to learn how to moderate the impulse to talk endlessly about her muses, since it's really just not at all good for her image. And maintaining a decent image is critical for writers: just look at all those writers who end up running off at the mouth, saying racist/homophobic/thoughtless/cruel things, and who end up being hated, their writing less loved.

Being too vocal about muses is going to make a writer look kind of crazy, unfortunately. So usually I like to encourage writers to tone it down, and when it comes to my own muses, I try to keep it more or less on the DL. Not because I'm ashamed to have them, or feel them unimportant to my writing process, but because they really aren't important to anyone else but me, and most critically, aren't real, so they don't have feelings to hurt if I end up neglecting to talk about them here and there and everywhere.

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For me, it depends on how over-the-top the writer is acting. A conversation with muses in the author's notes? I'll just scroll past it (though I do get annoyed in those cases where the "conversation" is longer than the actual fic chapter). Making posts about their muses' pasts and how other people who read those posts had better respect their muses, which largely seems to mean agreeing not to talk about certain subjects or agreeing to treat the muses as real people? Yeaaaah, that's going to be the sign for me to back away.

For me, some of it comes from personal experience with a couple of people who took it too far and talked about how their muses were more important to them than real people, thus giving them the perfect excuse to treat real people badly. But I also see it as a demand that I care as much about the writing process as the writing. Frankly, I don't. It doesn't matter how "real" the character is to you; if you can't write them well or, for fanfic, in an IC manner, then you haven't succeeded in making them real to others.

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This type of things has bugged me for a really long time, and it's hard to put a finger on why, exactly. I think it's a combination of things.

First, I find that people who go on and on and ON about their muses, or the characters "talking" to them, come across as nothing so much as affected. What they're saying tends to seem forced and unnatural, moreso because it seems like they think it's very clever, or that it makes them seem very special. It's not so much that it bothers me that they seem to really believe it. It's that I never believe that they believe it, and thus it always seems very artificial and put on.

As someone has already remarked, it mostly just screams "Look how clever and artistic I am!" As if our evaluating their talent at writing a good story isn't enough, they want props for what a great performance-artist they are. When I get subjected to that, I get irritated. Look, I'll read your story or I won't read your story, but don't force me to become a participator and audience for your performance art, okay?

Second, it grates on me because it often strikes me as a self-sabotaging habit that can be used by someone as an excuse for why they did or didn't do something. Or is it just that they're using it as a convenient thing to blame so that they won't have to admit or examine their own failures? Here I am thinking of people wailing about how they didn't do this or that story because "the muse wouldn't speak to me" or "the characters weren't cooperating". So you're blocked. It happens. If it really does you good to blame your blockage on the silence of your "muse", fine, I guess, but it feels to me like it's dodging the issue, that's all.

All that said, I think anyone can use these allegorical references in ways that aren't grating. But I think they got a bad rap because they became very "fashionable" in fandom. It's like any meme that takes over and gets over-used. It gets irritating. That doesn't mean it can't ever be used again; but people should think twice about whether to trot it out.

I also totally agree with those above who observe that those inner workings of one's creative process -- particularly one's relationship with character and story -- are only seldom interesting outside of one's own head, just like dreams. And yes, there are writers who can make the uses of any of those themes genuinely fascinating and enjoyable to read. There are, however, very few writers who can carry it off; and many more than that who THINK they can, but who are just tiresome about it.

I think the "danger" of employing those tropes is that the person employing them knows what she means, and she knows what she thinks when she reads someone else doing it -- but she can't predict whether her audience will share those views. I have this feeling that everyone who heavily employs the "muses" theme, or the "this character made me tell his story" theme, once saw someone else doing it and thought it was the cleverest thing they'd seen; and thus, they think that if they do the same, others will think they're clever. But that's the problem. It assumes that everyone thinks it's clever in the first place. And then, the further problem: once everyone is doing it, it's not fresh any more, and it stops seeming all that clever.

I guess I'd say that whether I judge someone on it depends on how elaborate they are about it. A little goes such a long way. I won't completely reject a writer for a little muse reference here, or a "man, this character was not cooperating" reference there. But when it gets built into a huge thing, that's when the "affected performance art" warning bells start ringing, and I lose my patience with it.

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It can be done well; I've learned that from umpteen classes about epic poetry. However, in most epic poems, the invocation of the Muse(s) comes off as a literary device, part attention-grabber, part quick summary of what the epic was about. When you consider that the original epics would have been recited aloud (not read), this was probably a very good idea. Sort of like the "blurb" on the back of a paperback, nowadays.

But author's notes are probably not the best place to talk about how you got the idea for XYZ, unless it's a 11 on the "Unusual Scale*". Save that kind of thing for your diary.

* (with 1 being boring and 10 being Kaoru masturbating with Kenshin's sword or Ranma as a balloon boy)

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Oh dear.

To be honest, I think that you have to at least be able to hear the characters - in that, you have to be able to imagine them acting out something to bring them to life. I think that's an integral part of the entire transformative works genre - and in fact, I think it's the very crux. After all, you kind of have to imagine the practicalities of Castiel having sex with Dean (aside from the fact that one is an imaginary being sent from the skies while the other is...an angel) to write it convincingly, and I've always found that playing the characters out in my head helps with that.

The problem is, when you say you hear voices in your head, people tend to think you're...crazy, for lack of a better word. And, for what it's worth, I think your presentation's been that a lot of people see the word "muse" as a pretentious codeword for "voices in my head." But as you've demonstrated, there isn't a bright line when you step away from normal.

For what it's worth, muses should be judged on the basis of their application. Are they a side thing? Or do they kick down the fourth wall and threaten to use your testicles for ostrich hunting unless you write some fucking poems? (If you are not presently in possession of male gonads, presume that you will be provided with a pair to be torn off.) As long as it's a side thing and not an "OH LOOK HOW QUIRKY AND CUHRAAAAAAAAAAAZY I'M BEING" thing, then it's all good.

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My problem with muses is twofold:

First, as previous posters have mentioned, it's...twee and self-indulgent. If that's how the writing process works for you, cool; I do not need to know about it.

Second, it's often a pretentious sort of excuse: oh, I simply cannot write today because I am having a Disagreement with my Muse. Which is a "sure, whatever" annoyance in fanfic, but my day job is editorial, so any sort of "I have to Feel the Writing because every word must be a sparkling diamond of inspiration" bullshit bugs me. ("No, you have to SIT YOUR ASS DOWN AND WRITE so you can send it to me and I can send it to production...oh, wait, I'm not actually getting paid here. Okay, move along.")

So that's my thing. Also: soulbonders.

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I don't suppose you might happen to have a link to the schizophrenia wank? I have a mild form of schizophrenia and I'm apparently I'm feeling morbidly curious today.

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I guess what I'm getting at is...how did muses get such a bad rap, and do they always deserve it? Do people who do the muse thing always deserve to be judged harshly, or only the ones who are blatantly obnoxious or batshit about it?

My problem with the 'muse' talk isn't the talk itself, it's the motivation(s) for it. So often you hear such talk as justification for - or just narrativization of - choosing an easy thing over a hard thing. 'I couldn't get XZY to behave so I...' is often nothing more than 'I don't know how to write this story so I'll attribute my lack of knowledge to a fantasy character.'

It's not as if this maneuver is hard to see. (1) Muses don't exist, but (2) people are drawn to the image because (3) they don't know how else to describe or explain the process of synthesis/improvisation/elaboration/exploration that is fiction writing. It's a superstition, and those aren't always bad, but (surprise!) this one seems to pop up most often just at the moment when the alternative is to shut the hell up and do the challenging task you're procrastinating over. Thaaaaaaat's not suspicious at all. :p

If I can't get correct on the page, it's my responsibility to either work harder at it or do something else. The 'muse' defense is a way of dodging that responsibility. That it's also a handy-dandy way of dramatizing the chaotic, joyfully irrational process of 'inspiration' is just a bonus: it lets dabblers describe the obstacles they're facing as Symptoms of Their Deep Creative Passion or whateverthehell. Yawn.

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Here via Metafandom ...

I play in the Tolkien fandom (Silmarillion to be exact, so I certainly can't attest to norms in wide swaths of the Lord of the Rings fandom), and I've never seen anything disparaging said about muses. Talking about muses is pretty normative in the places I play, but then, it also doesn't seem to occur to the degree that I'm seeing discussed in the comments here either. Most often, the terms seems to be used to describe a connection to a particular character that generates inspiration to write about him or her. For example, I will often say that when I embarked upon a particular novel that I wrote based on The Silmarillion that I had no Maglor muse. But since I couldn't avoid writing from his PoV eventually, I just went with it and--viola!--now I have a Maglor muse. This certainly doesn't imply any connection on astral planes and such; it just means that I had trouble seeing the world as Maglor would see it, but writing from his perspective means that I now can. The term "muse" becomes a sort of shorthand for that.

I would find conversations between an author and a character annoying as well in the author's notes and probably wouldn't read that. But, in general, I tend to go with the personal rule of only including 1) content in my author's notes that the reader needs in order to understand the story or 2) obscure canon that I include in order to deflect canatic whinging (or satisfy reader curiosity about the canonical origins of the piece).

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I've been active as reader, writer, beta-reader, mod, and community owner in LotR and HP fandom since 2004, and I have to say that I've never encountered anyone scorning Muses in either fandom.

Instead, I think Muses and their cousins, the plot-bunnies, are praised and played with all over my flist and Buzz list.

There are abstract Muses that are more like ideas that come to writers or not, and very concrete Muses that take all shapes and forms from cats to dinosaurs or admired actors. We write Buzz comments to and about our Muses, and there's been more than one meme that was about writing a letter to your Muse in recent years.

So all I can say is that I've never heard that Muses have a bad reputation in fandom, quite the opposite.

~JunoMagic

(http://juno-magic.fancrone.net/)

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Granted, I am not familiar with the wider swath of fandom which sarajayechan references, but the question of the use of the term "muse" is one of the more ludicrous controversies to which I have been exposed since I dipped my toes into my favored fandom (The Silmarillion and more obscure bits of Tolkien's legendarium) about four years ago. These assessments...

"...authors with REAL TALENT just make themselves write, only second-rate writers use 'muses'" (something along those lines). There was even that one wank about how muses apparently romanticize schizophrenia.</a>

...are so ridiculous as (paraphrasing Lewis Black) to cause me to ram a sharpened No. 2 pencil in my ear because that would be more pleasant than contemplating the stupidity of those contentions. Not that I am opinionated about this or anything.

As noted by Anonymous who references The Silmarillion a few posts up, the use of the term "muse" causes no controversy in our little backwater of a fandom. More often than not, we use the term playfully, and isn't this what the crazy semi-fringe element hobby of fan fiction all about? Fun? Right?

I use "muse" in its definition as "source of inspiration." In terms of fan fic, this is not some imaginary buddy, but instead a convenient term for the darker aspects of my very own personality (the arrogant, condescending, sarcastic, prideful and ambitious bits) which serve as a not necessarily comfortable vein to mine for inspiration. However, as active an imagination as I might have, I can assure the naysayers that (with a nod to Richard Dawkins), there are no faeries in my garden.

In real-life, I had a genuine muse for a time. This muse was a bona fide live person: an actual voice on the other end of the phone line, not in my imagination. At the time, I was engaged in a very difficult research project (I am a scientist), but also a project with very high stakes. My Muse was a jazz musician who was infected with the hepatitis C virus. He would call me and provide me with encouragement, his very human presence reminding me of why I was performing experiment after experiment and working to interpret data in an arcane discipline. This guy's presence on the other side of the phone and through email was invaluable to me: he was my Muse. With a capital M. The research bore fruit: the compound I worked on was approved for market by the FDA last month.

So. Wankers, go ahead. Make my day. Tell me how lazy I am for so egregiously flinging about the term "muse." Now where's that No. 2 pencil and the pencil sharpener...

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