Chasing the Dragon Muse

A STORY ABOUT IDEAS

Every day I wait for the next one. Not as a passive observer, but I wait with intention, trying to make something happen with thoughts of words in constant flux and development. At any given time I have several storylines in my head, each forking into further possibilities until I cast it all aside to make room for something new. This is the process of a failed writer. But more specifically, it is the process of a failed writer obsessed with no longer failing and only doing worse for the effort.

For as long as I can remember, those thoughts have been there. Not always to the point of obsession, but they have been there to some extent through all the years of my writing and dreaming. A longing for something uniquely inspiring has been with me from the moment of my first word on the page.

It’s not that I disregard my creations, but even through my growth as a writer, I seem to raise my standards continuously beyond reach. And adding further difficulty, my intentions move in two directions at once, one toward the audience and one toward my own interests, making it impossible to balance the two in a single coherent work. From one shoulder I hear shouts of self-absorbed artistic purism, while on the other, words of preoccupation with an audience I’ve never had.

Fire and Time

I send out pieces regularly, and when I have to, I ghostwrite. But along with all that daily work is the big one in the back of my mind, looming with a hope for a premise far too relevant for agents or publishers to ignore. A single idea, I imagine, can break through all of it, from the silence of a few chance followers to a true and engaged audience in the millions. The right idea, with the right pull and the right prestige, could give my words a new, global significance.

All I need is one bright thought from the midst of my imaginative shadows, something bold and uncompromising and yet still somehow universal in its appeal. And when it comes, I need it to hurt with obviousness, so there can be no doubt. I need the fires of a new Romeo, an archetype of my own, and with my own era’s equivalent of rabbit dreams in the wasteland. I need the enchantment of the past in the heat of tomorrow, and I need it in a single notion, clear and centered on a page of its own. The more days that pass, the more desperate the need becomes.

The Quest and the Compromise

Late in the evenings when a day’s work is behind me and my words fill the screen like a rough outline I’ve seen more times than I can remember, I can feel my temperature drop. A deep urgency rises to the fore, and it is in every way the opposite of inspiration. All I can think about is the fire that isn’t there. If I just had a spark, I tell myself, I could find the words. And if I could find the words, I could find the magic. But new thoughts arrive like an unending supply of cold banality. And the more commercial my ambitions, the less I recognize my own craft.

With another day siphoned into the machine, I begin to consider the journey over the destination. My one consolation is that, in the absence of an ideal hook or pitch or premise, I can somehow find the inspiration for something true and monstrous in its own right, simply because it holds value as a creation. The hunt will go on indefinitely, but if the dragon continues to elude me, despite efforts that border at times on mania, then it is my hope that the work I settle for, day after day, will in time take me to extremities of another kind, far from the pining of wholesale dreams. I may not be a commercial writer, I admit, but I will always believe in the dragon muse.