Best Not to Resist the Muses

The muses come at inconvenient times, and there are always two of them. The first one, Jasper, is a little dick. He lounges on my sofa like he owns it, kicking his feet up over the armrest, hands folded behind his head, and talks to me incessantly.

I'll be sitting there, calmly trying to do my Spanish homework, when:

"Hey."

I ignore him, continuing to conjugate trabajar in the nosotros form. My pencil scratches against the paper as I write down the answer: trabajamos.

He sits up, swinging his feet over the arm and onto the floor, and starts tapping his toes. He knows I hate it when he does that. That's why he does it so much. Jasper is a master of irritating me into compliance.

"Hey."

I don't look up. "What do you want?"

Jasper grins. "You should make me something."

I pinch the bridge of my nose and close my eyes. If I react, he'll only take it as encouragement to keep badgering me, and I don't want that. "Buzz off, I'm busy."

He leans forwards, resting his elbows on his knees and croons, "But we both know that's not what you really want to be doing," then whispers, "You should make me something." And as much as I try not to, I always end up giving in.

My collaborations with Jasper are always messy, hurried things, scribbled in the margins of my papers or written in felt tip in notebooks when I should really be paying attention to my math and science teachers. Jasper doesn't exactly work in terms of plot or character, just tossing me vague ideas like "What if we had feet for hands and hands for feet?" or "That lady you talked to in the Kwik Trip is really a mastermind in charge of a ring of criminals bent on taking over the world. Go."

If, Doucette, I ever tell you that my creative process is panicking until the very last second, then coming up with something sort of passable, rest assured, Jasper had something to do with it. I like to call writing with Jasper "writers on whee".

The other one, Anya, is a different kind of irritating. I call her "writer's ennui". She doesn't lounge around on my furniture, refusing to go away until I do her bidding. Instead, she shows up at completely random times when I'm distracted. I'll be just about to fall asleep when:

"Wake up." The light flicks on and Anya leans over the bed, a manic grin on her face and short blond hair flopping in her eyes.

I pull the covers over my head and groan. "What do you want?"

She whacks at my shoulder and drags the blankets down, shoving me over to sit on the edge of my bed. "Okay, I know you're tired and I don't want to bother you or anything, but you should really consider this." Anya pauses, holding out her hands. Then she'll launch into a fully worked out idea, gesturing wildly with her hands and speaking rapid-fire so that I'm forced to pay attention. Her enthusiasm is contagious.

Anya's ideas are always beautifully detailed, so much so that I'm almost afraid to use them. Especially since while I write, she stands behind me, reading over my shoulder and constantly interrupting me.

I'll be writing away when:

"I don't like the phrasing of that sentence. You should change that."

So I do it.

"Are you sure about that word choice?"

"I don't think that character would really do that."

"You wrote "the" twice in that sentence."

If writing for Jasper is a rush of words flowing out of my pen in a whirl of ecstasy that makes absolutely no sense, writing for Anya is like driving in rush hour traffic. As soon as you really get going somewhere, you have to stop again to change phrasing or think about character motivation for a good twenty minutes or cross out words before you can get started again.

The two of them rarely agree on anything, which is just another version of infuriating. When they're in the room together, I'm caught between speeding down the freeway and a constant stop start that, when combined, give you writer's whiplash.

And of course, both of them are useless at coming up with endings. I'm often saying to people how much I hate writing believable endings for things. So I'll come to the end of whatever it is I'm writing, and look over my shoulder for one of them.

"So what about the ending?" I say.

Both of them are nearby, Anya craning over my shoulder and Jasper lounging on the chair next to me. Jasper pulls a face, and Anya shrugs.

"Seriously?" I say.

Jasper raises his hands in a gesture of pacification. "Hey now, I'm just here to get you started. You know you're on your own for the ending."

"Thanks, guys," I tell them, and get back to work.