Muses and Main Character Energy
In the months before I left Glasgow, the whole city felt claustrophobic. Layers of memories lined the streets, stacked haphazardly on top of each other until my past held greater weight than the present. For a long time, my favourite thing about London was the vastness of it all. London feels endless. When I’m sad or stressed or lonely, I take the tube to a new part of the city, and walk for miles until the feelings vacate my body. There is so much left to explore.
But I’m finding new pleasures now. As I build layers of memories here, I don’t see them as ghosts, I see them as signs of life. This is what it means for a city to be lived in. It’s a beautiful sunny day. I walk from Old Street station to Columbia Road Flower Market, Taylor Swift’s Daylight playing in my headphones and sweat dripping down the back of my neck. Three days ago, I powerwalked down this same street, listening to Вечорниці as the rain soaked through my shirt. The layers begin to stack. I have lived a few lifetimes during my nine months in London, played many characters who didn’t quite feel like myself. Lately I feel as though all the pieces are clicking into place.
My favourite thing about London now is the people. Everyone I’ve met here feels like such a character. Fun characters, infuriating characters, delightfully unexpected characters. I imagine how I would write them, how I would describe their walk and their hands and the fullness of their laughter, the warmth of their hugs. Being a writer means falling in love with the humanness of it all. Humanity as a concept, yes, but also being human as a practice. Humanity that lives in the quirks and details, humanity that catches you off guard in its rawness. There is nothing I love more as an artist than having a muse.
Before I left Glasgow, I was writing a novel. I’m still writing it, technically. But it feels too disparate, there are too many parts that don’t quite slot together. The story adds up, but the characters feel hollow and the pace is erratic. So I let it be, the way I often do with my writing. I neglect my creative side and pour my energy into academia. Don’t get me wrong, I love academia. My PhD is the most important thing in my life right now. But I have always been split in half, I have always had two great loves. My PhD is finally going well, and now there is space in my brain to remember that I have barely written my novel in a year. I have barely written, yet I feel more creative than I have since my teens. Why? Because I’m surrounded by people, I’m surrounded by characters. All the characters in my novel feel flat in comparison. The more I connect with real people, the more flaws I see in my writing.
When you are depressed and isolated, it is hard to be creative. The worlds you do create end up mirroring your reality. Sparse on connection, filled with hollow characters and storylines that never quite make sense. I read the current draft of my novel, and see the emptiness I felt in Glasgow. If I took the exact same plot and wrote it for the first time now, it would be an entirely different story. But I don’t know how to rewrite it, I don’t know how to unravel the threads I have woven thus far. But the biggest issue is that this isn’t the story I need to tell anymore, and I don’t know what story I do want to tell. I have so much to say, and it doesn’t slot neatly into a fantasy novel. I look at my own life, at the characters I’m surrounded by, and imagine the story I could live in.
When we were students together, my best friend and I had a running joke that we were living in a TV show. It was often a sitcom, but had its moments of drama or downright telenovela. As with many TV shows, covid made it weird and it fizzled out to its unsatisfying end. Since starting my PhD, the show has been rebooted. The storylines are bigger and better, and I highly approve of the writers’ choice to make the main character a lesbian. I don’t know what genre my TV show is now, but it feels like I’m living in the right story for the first time in my life. The writers know the character they’re working with; they know her fatal flaws and hidden strengths, and the throwbacks to the early seasons are humorous rather than cliché. I’m learning to step into my main character energy again, to step into the spotlight instead of hiding in the shadows. But I am too much of a writer to go with the flow, I want to control the narrative.
Sometimes I wonder how I ended up in academia, with my artistic temperament. I look at the world with a novelist’s eyes. I am all romanticism and feelings and an inbuilt desire to tie the plot in a neat little bow. I don’t spend enough time around other creative people. My academic side is well-fed by now, but there is an artistic hunger within me. When I talk to creatives, I feel seen, I feel known. To be an artist is to live life as a work in progress, to understand the need to edit, to redesign, to destroy and rebuild. You know you will never reach perfection, but you claw closer towards it, inch by inch. You don’t just have a vision; you have a roadmap. Art is a practice of devotion, it’s not about the finished product, but the process of creation itself. In a world where people are increasingly outsourcing their creative tasks to AI, real art means not taking shortcuts. It means creating because you need to create, not because you want to say that you have made something.
With creativity also comes a desire to be seen. At least, a desire for your work to be seen. This visibility is part of the creative process. The way I write here is different than the way I write in my journal, because my words here are not complete until they are read. I go back and forth between wanting my writing to be seen, and wanting to remove it all from the world and kill the part of me that needs an audience. Maybe if I spent more time around other artists, I would feel less shame around wanting to be visible.
Lately I’ve been taking creative risks, letting myself feel more, pushing myself to take action and step into the spotlight. Each time I step out of my comfort zone, I imagine the character I could be, the story I could tell. I stopped making this part of myself smaller, stopped crushing my creative urges to meet someone else’s vision. I am not their character; I am my own. I am a woman of too many words, many of which I stumble over. I am a little awkward, a little loud, a hopeless romantic, and I talk entirely in anecdotes. I am a storyteller, and I want my stories to be read, I want my stories to be heard. When I stopped feeling ashamed of my desire to be seen, the story I lived in changed. I met new characters, found better muses. I realised recently that when you meet the right people, it will feel easy to be yourself around them. If you feel like you need to change every part of yourself for them to like you and every interaction feels like pulling teeth, maybe they aren’t your people. When you do meet your people, you will know. They will speak your language, they will give affection freely, they will like the parts of you that you thought you had to hide. Maybe the same is true of novels. Writing is hard. I have written novels for fifteen years, and I still find it hard. But if the entire process feels like pulling teeth, maybe it’s not the right novel. If you are censoring your storylines and contorting them into shapes that don’t feel authentic, maybe it’s not the right novel.
I don’t know what type of novel I need to write, but I know what kind of people I want to write about. I live in a city that is filled with plaques to its great writers, I am surrounded by literary heritage and history. I will find my inspiration; I will reconnect with my creative voice. But for now, I get to be the main character in my own story, and watch the narrative unfold.