WEEKLY WRITER'S PATH #6
I HAVE AN INSISTENT MUSE. She is as demanding as a small child and mollified almost as easily. But that is because I have not betrayed her or lied to her. When I tell her I will write, I do. When I explain that walking and thinking are as much as writing, she listens. She likes to change her mask to create new attention—becoming a handsome actor, tricking me into listening with a fresh ear. But she has a consistent, intense, barely controlled, positive energy that is hard to disguise.
I drove east of Santa Fe this week to take an important walk on a little trail in Cañoncito. I have walked this trail in the past when I’ve had to make large decisions, and I was looking forward to an hour of silence.
On a side road, over narrow-gauge tracks, the Mendelssohn symphony on the radio went fuzzy and gave out altogether when the road turned to dirt as I downshifted the truck over the gravelly washboard.
It happened then: my muse stopped being patient and picked up where I’d left off over a year ago on my second book. Sarah said this would happen; as soon as DIZZY SUSHI was finished and on its way to agents I would have a new shot of energy. My muse began an entirely new scene with two of my characters without me, as it were. They just started talking, and the narrative voice describing the setting was like a low base line in the background. Meanwhile, the editor part of me immediately began repeating phrases, something I have trained it to do in crises situations when I cannot put my hand on a pen and scratch out thoughts on paper.
By the time I had arrived at the trailhead I had convinced my muse to relax and wait until I was back at my computer. She barely agreed. As I started down the trail, I suggested naming Newton’s laws of physics. I bet she couldn’t do it. Here’s what she came up with.
Law #1: Inertia. A rubber ball in its package at Toys R Us is at rest until a little boy comes along and begs his mom to buy it.
Law #2: The Application of Force. At home, the boy tears open the package and throws the ball hard against the linoleum floor in the kitchen and it bounces up into the air.
Law #3: Gravity pulls it back to earth.
Law #4: Degradation. The ball loses its momentum and rolls under the refrigerator where not even the cat can get it. Which brings us back to Law #1: Inertia.
Do you remember Newton’s Laws without referring back to his 1687 Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy? I had to look them up when I got home.
Imagine the last paragraph of today’s blog upside down to see how close my muse remembered Newton’s laws of physics. And when we got home, I did type three sentences into a new file to remind me of the scene begun in Cañoncito. She’s been OK with this, but I must feed her more regularly.
#1: The Law of Inertia. 1 point for muse.
#2: Force and Acceleration. Another point for muse, though she left out the simple quantitative rate of change: velocity is directly proportional to the force and inversely proportional to the mass.
#3: My distracted muse considered only the earth’s gravity on the bouncing ball and again not the messy calculation: R (F = G(m1 m2)/R2). ½ point for muse. Technically, gravity isn’t a law of motion, but a law unto itself.
#4: Equal and opposite reaction: my muse missed this entirely. “Degradation” doesn’t quite explain it. 0 points for muse.
2.5 out of 4. How did you do?
Newtonian Physics Link: http://abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/glossary/laws_of_motion.html
