Thank Your Muse: Gratitude Enhances Creativity

If you don’t appreciate the beauty of the flame, you take away its oxygen.

If there’s one thing we writers specialize in, it’s self-loathing. We tend to beat ourselves up, whether we’re stuck in the muddy middle of a rough draft or slogging through a seemingly endless revision of a novel. We somehow forget the wondrous flow of a mellifluous sentence we write one day as we clank our way through a ragtag snarl of words the next. The novel idea we were once so thrilled by too quickly becomes a burdensome yoke around our neck.

Our demands are akin to a candle snuffer that smothers the flame of a candle. We forget how to appreciate the beauty of the flame, so we take away its oxygen without even knowing it.

Despite all the artistic mythology built around the anguished artist creating great works in fits of dark thrashings, ideas are like people: they’re attracted to positive energy, warmth, kindness. They don’t like being taken for granted or used and tossed aside. They don’t like to be ridiculed or disparaged or abused. They yearn to be lifted by the love and excitement around them — and when they feel the buoyancy of such exultation, they call out to their friends to join in the merriment.