March 2008 Archives

Who is the Muse?

If the third angel is an unexpected blessing on earth, the person who by the very act of your generosity saves you in return, then is the muse the third angel for an artist?

There are those, like Jamie Dunn, the musician in The Third Angel who can't write and is in a desperate search for a muse, who believe a muse is a person who will inspire. There are others, like Frieda, the young woman Jamie is convinced is his muse, for whom experience itself is the muse. The act of living, of being in love, of loss, all work together to help Frieda produce a perfect poem/song.

The greatest writing teacher of the century, Albert J. Guerard, my beloved mentor, believed that every writer and artist has a voice, and that voice is made up of experience, readings, dreams, along with, and most especially, childhood readings and experience. Your childhood is within you. It's part of the muse, subconsciously or consciously. It's in everything you do, part of your imagination's DNA.

All this adds up to another puzzle in The Third Angel:

Who is the boy on the train from London to Edinburgh who helps Lucy return to the living after she witnesses the accident in London?

He's mentioned throughout the book. Later in life, he becomes a great, unique artist. Although he may not have been on that exact train, he often went to Edinburgh as a child to visit relatives. When he was twelve or so he did compose the book he is writing and illustrating while on the train, Anthology, a reworking of the books he loved, including the Alice books. Perhaps Lucy influenced him as well, and years later he wrote about her, perhaps even long after he'd forgotten meeting her. Maybe he only remembered her name and a train ride and the stories he loved which had gotten him through his own troubles with loss and love.

As for me, I found that many people who I had admired and who had influenced me while I was growing up arrived in the pages of The Third Angel, as if they had minds of their own. The music you listen to, the books you read, the paintings you love, all become  part of you, and, as an artist or writer, a part of your work.

I was twelve when I went to the Plaza Hotel and waited outside with hundreds of other fans in the mad hope that we might catch a glimpse that boy on the train. Every time a curtain moved, we all screamed, hopeful. My mother took me there, she was that sort of person, as much a friend as a mother, a fan of the boy on the train as well. We stood outside the Plaza until it became clear the hotel employees were at the windows, shaking the curtains, having their fun with the fans.

I didn't see him that day, but it really didn't matter. My mother and I went for coffee somewhere on Fifth Avenue.

"To hell with it," she said to me. "Let's just imagine we saw him."

I did.

Thank you so much to everyone who sent in comments to my new website. I so appreciate the kind words and thoughts and I'm delighted to hear so many people are looking forward to the arrival of The Third Angel.

Sometimes, when I'm at work on a book I forget anyone will ever read it. I've often wondered if that's what allows me the freedom to write - a detachment from the future of the book at the time I'm working on it. The idea of publishing and being public with what has been created in private can stop writers from going forward. I knew a woman who couldn't finish her novel because she was afraid of what her mother would think. This writer decided she would have to wait for her mother to die before she could publish. Good luck or bad - the novel died long before the writer's mother ever did. 

The novel  becomes the world that I live in. The creation of that other world -- and the characters who live there--is very personal and very private. I don't discuss my work when I'm writing. I know too many people who have "talked out" a book, confused themselves with other people's perceptions during that delicate time when it's all too easy to throw a novel away.

Once a book is finished, there it goes, into the real world where it will mean different things to different people. Many thanks for all the support, kindness, and messages that have meant so much to me.

More about the secrets inside the new novel next time.

----- with gratitude,
Alice

For me, a novel isn't autobiographical in "real time" - but my life is there, transfigured by fiction. I think of a novel the way analysts deconstruct a dream - the dreamer is every character in his or her dream, including the cat and the dog. Or, think of it this way:  Your life is a mirror. You throw it down on the ground. It shatters into thousands of pieces. You can never recreate the mirror as it was, but each piece is still a part of the mirror, a part of the writer's life.

For me, reality in art is a false construct. We are creating life from ink, print, paper and wanting characters to "feel" like flesh and blood. Can you fall in love with a fictional character? Absolutely. Can you detest one? Certainly. Can one renew your faith? I think so.

Here is another clue to the identity of The Third Angel.

At the edge of the woods there was a cave. No one went there. As a matter of fact, the people in my town took the long way, around the woods, just to avoid it. A monster lived inside. He was seven feet tall.

When people began to fall ill they blamed the damp weather, the ruined crops, each other, and then they blamed the monster. I was one of the people who went after him. I had a knife, a lantern, a silver star to protect me from evil. My child had fallen ill. I was filled with something I thought was righteousness. It was thick and poisonous and it led me to the woods with a hundred other righteous men.

I got lost in the dark. I stumbled and the others left me behind. They forgot me. When I called out they couldn't hear me. But something did. The monster came out from a cave. He was a bear, seven feet tall. He had been hunted and had a fear of humans, but I had dropped my lantern, my knife, my star. I had the chance to look into his eyes before the people from town circled around. I imagined the woods without people, our lives without boundaries, the night without fear, the town without sick children, the world where we could live together. I turned to the people I had known all my life.

Imagine, I said.