The writer’s muse sports a variety of footwear. Sometimes she leaps out of nowhere in spring-heeled running shoes. Sometimes she shuffles along in flip-flops that make a soft flapping noise heard long before she actually shows up.
And she comes from an endless variety of directions.
For A. A. Milne, she trotted out of his son’s collection of toy animals and gently prodded him to pen Winnie-the-Pooh. The muse who inspired Jerry Spinelli’s Wringer screamed up to him from a Pennsylvania pigeon shoot she couldn’t get away from fast enough. J. K. Rowling’s muse materialized after the legendary author took a train journey and the idea of a boy wizard named Harry Potter—to quote Rowling—“fell into my head.” Maurice Sendak’s muse for Where the Wild Things Are raced out of a gathering of Sendak’s unsavory relatives who had scared him when he was very young. Judy Blume’s muse marched in from a story Blume’s daughter told about a school bully and demanded that Blume write Blubber. Jeff Kinney’s muse is reluctant to show her face—a common occurrence even among the best of writers—but when she does, she’s positively quirky because of where she shows it. In Kinney’s words, she arrives as he’s “stepping into the shower or walking out the door or crossing in some sort of threshold”—and another Diary of a Wimpy Kid episode is spawned.
Kinney’s inspiration comes from everyday life, as it does for so many writers. “Everybody walks past a thousand story ideas every day,” Orson Scott Card once said. “The good writers are the ones who see five or six of them. Most people don't see any.” Anton Chekhov put it another way: “If you look at anything long enough—say, just that wall in front of you—it will come out of that wall.”
And when the muse urges, how does a writer meet the command?