The muse’s radio

I’ve noticed a weird thing recently. No mat­ter what kind of mood I’m in when I sit down to write, the qual­ity of the writ­ing itself is the same. It’s like I’m just a radio, and when it comes time to write the words just flow through my fin­gers onto my key­board. It doesn’t mat­ter what’s going on in my head, the words are the words. I’ve writ­ten funny scenes when I’m depressed, excit­ing action scenes when I’m tired. It just doesn’t mat­ter. The book is what it is, and I’m just writ­ing it down.

Of course, I know that can’t pos­si­bly be the case. I know that the qual­ity of my writ­ing is a func­tion of my study and prac­tice of the craft over the last two decades. I know that the story I’m writ­ing now I wasn’t capa­ble of writ­ing ten years ago, five years ago. I know that at a neu­ro­log­i­cal level, I’m mak­ing up a story, not recount­ing some­thing that actu­ally hap­pened. I’m delib­er­ately choos­ing each word I string after the one before it.

Only it sure doesn’t feel that way.