Importance of a muse for artists

The word muse comes from old Greek stories. The Greeks believed in nine goddesses, the daughters of Memory, who gave poets and musicians their songs, and a poem in those days opened by asking one of them for help. We still have their name in two everyday words: music, which was their art, and museum, which was a temple built for them. Over time the word came to mean a person, usually the person an artist was in love with, who inspired the work.

I use the word more widely than that. For me, a muse is whatever your work is reaching for, beyond the point where it is merely correct. It can be a person, and it often is, but it needn’t be. It can be a sound you’ve heard in your head and haven’t yet managed to play. It can be a picture of how a finished thing ought to feel. The job it does is the same whether I’m playing a raag, taking a photograph, hitting a serve, or writing code, and this essay is about what that job is.

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Table of contents

1. Where practice stops
2. What a muse is
3. Effort and inspiration
4. The practice still has to happen
5. What changes

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Where practice stops

When you learn anything, the first goal is to get it right. On the sitar that means a phrase played in tune and in time. In photography it means a frame that is sharp, with the light handled properly. In tennis it means the ball landing inside the lines, and in code it means a program that does what it should and passes its tests. There’s nothing wrong with this goal. Early on it’s the whole job, because your hands are still catching up with what your ear and your eye already understand.

The trouble starts once you can get it right every time, and the reason is a little surprising. When you can do something without thinking about it, you tend to stop getting better at it. Think of driving a road you know well: you do it on autopilot, and ten more years of driving that road won’t make you a better driver. Skills work the same way. The day a skill becomes good enough to get by is usually the day it goes on autopilot, and years on autopilot add very little. The people who keep improving do something different - they set themselves a target a bit beyond what they can do today, and they pay attention every time they miss it.

There’s a second problem - and it’s the one this essay is really about. Once a phrase is correct, what should you do with it next? Play it faster? Play it cleaner? Add a little decoration? Skill can’t answer that question, because skill only tells you how to do things, never which thing to do. You can keep polishing the same phrase for years without ever deciding where it’s going. That’s the gap a muse fills. It gives you something to aim at, so that “what next” has an answer.

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What a muse is

For most of history a muse was a person. There’s a famous example from medieval Florence: a poet saw a girl when he was nine years old, met her again nine years later when she greeted him in the street, and spent the rest of his life writing towards her. He promised to write about her what had never been written about any woman, and in the long poem that kept that promise, she is the one who guides him through heaven.

What she gave his work was a direction. That’s the part that matters, and it carries over to everyone, whatever your muse happens to be. It helps to know that inspiration has two halves. The first half is being inspired by something: you hear a recording, or see a photograph, and think “that’s how it should be done”. You can’t force that half. It happens to you from the outside, when something shows you a better version of what you’re already trying to do. The second half is being inspired to do something: wanting to carry that better version into your own work. The first half is the muse. The second half is you answering it.

Once you have one, the question you ask about your own work changes. Without a muse, the only question is “is this correct?”, and there’s always a little more correct to be had, so the question never really ends. Once there’s a muse, the question becomes “did this get any closer to the thing I’m reaching for?” That question has a real answer, even on the days when the answer is no.

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Effort and inspiration

Can more skill get you a muse? It can’t. Technique is like vocabulary: knowing more words tells you what you’re able to say, but it never tells you what you should say. A person who knows a huge number of words but has nothing to say just has a longer list of words. A musician with a huge technique and nothing to reach for is in the same position.

Inspiration hasn’t been studied much, but this part of it has, and the finding is simple. Researchers looked at people writing, and measured two things: how much effort went into the writing, and how inspired the writer felt while doing it. Effort made the writing technically better, meaning cleaner and more correct. Inspiration made it more creative. Neither one could do the other’s job. When a writer was at their most inspired, the writing was at its most creative and a little less polished, and inspired writers also wrote more in less time, using shorter words. So effort gets you to correct, and inspiration is what gives you something worth saying.

An old Greek argument goes further than the study does. It says the muses bring a kind of madness, and that a poet who turns up at their door without it, sure that craft alone will be enough, gets nowhere - his careful, sensible poems vanish next to the work of the ones who were carried away.

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The practice still has to happen

The strongest argument against all this says that inspiration is for amateurs, and that the rest of us just show up and get to work, because the ideas come out of the work itself. The argument is right about the showing up. Inspiration is like a guest who doesn’t always come the first time you invite them. So you work every day anyway, and meet the mood halfway when it comes. It tends to come to the people who can get past not feeling like it.

The writers in those studies show the same thing from the other side. The more inspired ones weren’t the lazy ones - they also put in more effort. So inspiration and hard work were never rivals. A muse doesn’t excuse you from practice. What it does is give the practice a purpose beyond its own routine, and a purpose makes practice much easier to keep up. It also shows you, sometimes uncomfortably, how much of what used to feel like dedication was only going through the motions.

The old Sanskrit books on poetry say the same thing in their own way. A poem needs three things: a gift you’re born with, learning that is wide and clean, and practice that never lets up. And even someone born without the gift can earn some grace from Saraswati, the goddess of speech, by bringing her the other two. So she is to be served day and night, without sloth.

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What changes

The first thing a muse changes is the point of a practice session. Practice used to be maintenance: keeping a skill where it was, and stretching it a little when I could. Now it’s about closing the distance between what I can do and the specific thing I’m reaching for. Research on goals says the same: over months, people make the most progress on the goals that inspire them. Every small choice inside a session gets measured against the thing I’m reaching for, and not only against being correct - the phrase I stay with, the frame I keep, the shot I go for on a big point, the code I throw away.

None of this makes the work easier. The aalap, the slow opening of a raag played without any beat, is exactly as hard as it was. So is a serve under pressure. Neither one takes a year less to learn because I have a muse. What changes is that I can now tell whether a piece of work moved towards the thing or away from it, and knowing that is worth more than another year of polish.

An old Greek dialogue has the best picture of this. It says a muse is like a magnet. The magnet holds a ring of iron, that ring holds the next ring, and that one holds the next, so the whole chain hangs in the air - the poet from the muse, the performer from the poet, the audience from the performer. Every ring in the chain is held up by the first stone, and that’s what a muse is for - it’s the thing that holds the work up.