Interview with the Writer

My palms were sweaty, as they always were right before any public appearance. My heart pounded in my chest and I felt a stir in my gut that was all too familiar. A wave of almost unbearable uncertainty washed over me as I tried to push my negative thoughts away. I wasn’t any good at all, my writing sucked worse than that of the average social media user, and I was nothing but a scam and a fraud. As the audience applauded on the other side of the dark curtains, I took a deep breath and remembered the soft words of encouragement from my therapist; It was normal to feel uncertain and insecure, all creative persons have that, better still, every single individual experiences these kinds of feelings at one time or another in their lives. It was called the imposter syndrome, and that meant that in her words; I was my own worst enemy. As I rubbed my sweaty palms against the sides of my trousers, knowing the time to shake hands with my interviewer was inching closer, I tried to take solace in those words. If I was my own worst enemy, I could easily overcome myself, it was just me, after all.  How hard could this be, right? I’ve done dozens of interviews before, if not hundreds by now. Comes with the territory of being a famous author. A careful smile played across the corners of my mouth at that thought. I was that, wasn’t I? A famous author. Even more so now than before, after the big streaming services started airing one adaptation after the other. This would be my first prime time television interview, and it would bring even more fame to my name if I wouldn’t bungle it.

As I took another deep breath, a skinny guy in a suit at least two sizes too big signaled three fingers to me, nodded with a slightly too pedantic expression for his years, and disappeared behind the curtains again. Three minutes, this was it. My heart pounded even louder in my chest and I tried to wipe my hands dry in one last futile attempt to appear calm and steady. The host who would be my presenter said something in his typical upbeat way and as the audience exploded again, the skinny pedantic guy appeared again ushering me onto the stage. My gut clenched itself together in a desperate attempt to dissuade me, but I put one trembling foot in front of another trembling foot as I rushed towards the light. It was time to shine!

My senses were bombarded as I stepped onto the smooth wooden surface of the stage. Bright and unexpectedly hot lights captured me from multiple sides as the roar of the audience mixed with the auto-tune jingle of the evening show I was about to star in. I forced a smile on my face as I looked out into the darkness of the studio where the audience was seated. The host stood from behind his desk and walked over to me, with a smile almost wider than his orange tanned face and voluminous blonde hair. The man appeared bigger than life, and from close up, almost as a caricature of the man I knew from television. He stretched out his hand, and acutely aware of my sweaty hand-state, I reluctantly offered my hand in return. When he released me, he shook his hand dramatically, as if shaking off water, and looked at the audience saying:

“Do all writers have such clammy hands?”

 The audience exploded in laughter as he gestured me to my seat. I sat down, heart beating in my chest as I instantly disliked the guy. The host took his seat and as he continued laughing, prepared to milk my unease to the last second, I forced a smile on my face and caught myself saying:

“I mean, we have to, it’s in our contract, just sprayed my palms with fresh readers-tears before coming onto the stage.”

The host turned to the audience, pointed at me as if I wasn’t even there and said:

“Do you hear this guy, readers tears, absolute legend.”

As the audience laughed some more, the man turned to me, and put his serious face on. He said:

“So all kidding aside, it must be exciting for you to be so famous all of a sudden, right?”

I had done a lot of interviews before, in small bookshops at first, at increasingly big nerdy conventions after that, but never before had I been questioned like this, or expected anything like this. I swallowed my initial sarcastic response and just nodded before smiling. I said:

“I still can’t believe it! I mean, I am a writer, which is one of the things you become to avoid meeting lots of people.”

The audience laughed and the host nodded. Then he asked:

“So what do you think about the upcoming series? Have you been involved at all?”

I nodded and as the sound of the audience died down I said:

“They asked me to be their creative consultant, so you know, I could voice my opinions here and there, but in the end, writing is a vastly different medium than the silver screen, which again is vastly different from creating a binge-worthy series. So I think it is important that people do what they’re good at, and stick to their lanes.”

The audience applauded and the host asked:

“So what do you think about it? Is it any good?”

I laughed and said:

“I certainly hope so, as I will earn a lot of royalties if it does well.”

I waited until the laughter died down and continued:

“I mean, These stories are very dear to me, they are like my children, so I am biased and am not the best judge about any adaptation of my own work. I urge you to have a look yourself and decide for yourself.”

After a pause I said:

“And if you like it, maybe also read my books.”

The interview went on like that for a tad longer, and I started to feel more at ease, in spite of the heat radiating from the lamps, my hands started to feel like normal again, and I didn’t feel my heart beating overly fast or loud in my chest. The host tried some more jokes at my expense, and I neatly turned them into actual humor without insulting too many people with my natural dark-sarcasm. I felt the end of the interview creep closer and almost left out a sigh of relief when it was time for the questions from the audience. This at least was something I was familiar with. I had survived!

A young woman in the audience stood and straightened her clothes awkwardly, and I instantly felt like she was one of my people, and I actually admired her for standing up in front of such a crowd and without a pause she took the microphone from one of the studio facilitators. Her voice slightly trembling, she asked:

“As a budding author myself, I was wondering, how do you summon the muse?”

I spat out the mouthful of water I had just sipped from my glass as I heard her question, and a cold shiver ran across the back of my spine. Why did she have to word it like that? What did she know? The host laughed as some other facilitator came rushing forth with a napkin to clean the spilt water. The host asked.

“Did not expect that question?”

I forced myself to calm down as I wiped off some last drops. I said:

“Summoning my muse is a very complex and might I add dangerous ritual. It involves careful and deliberate incantation of secret and ancient spells said to go back through time to the Epic of Gilgamesh itself. It is not for the faint of heart, that’s all.”

The audience burst into laughter, and a careful introverted smile showed on the face of the woman who had asked the question. They all thought I was joking, good. Crisis averted, so now I had to come up with some bullshit answer you can find on any quick google search, or how to write book that’s out there. I raised my hands in mock supplication as I said:

”Okay, okay, I’ll give you something worthwhile. Now, first of all, every writer is different, just like every person is different in almost every other aspect of life, so too it is when it comes to finding inspiration.”

As the woman nodded, and the host leant forward in his manner of fake-interest that had earned him millions with his show, I thought back to my own study, and the hours of struggling to put my thoughts to paper, writing barely related sentences that even to myself seemed dull, I had gone through before by complete chance, learning how to actually summon a muse. I continued:

“Now, and you may have heard this before, as it is not a big secret, but write what you know. Write what you would like to read yourself, but doesn’t yet exist. And write it in a way that feels natural to you. May I ask, how budding of an author are you? I mean, has your bud sprouted already? Or is it still beneath the surface draining water and nutrients from the soil?”

The audience applauded and laughed and as it died down, the woman said:

“I have already self-published something, but no-one reads it, not even if I offer it for free.”

The audience aww-ed and I said:

“Having people read your story is a different thing altogether from finding inspiration. Heavens, you could write an absolute one-of-a-kind masterpiece of literature, and self-publish it into obscurity. Whether people read your story or not has nothing to do, initially, with the quality of the story, but with your skills as a sales-person. And between you and me, us writers are generally not great salespeople. So if that’s the problem, my answer is simple: go the traditional route: find an agent you like, have them represent you in finding a publisher, and let them do what they’re good at, which is marketing, or in other words, selling stuff!”

 The audience laughed and the host wanted to stand and wrap things up, but the woman spoke again:

“That is really good advise thank you, but I meant more about the actual muse part. Do you have some more tips there? How did you find your muse?”

A flash of a hooded figure meeting me in an abandoned factory parking lot in the dead of night, played before my mind’s eye, as I looked the woman straight in her blue eyes. She did not flinch or look away, as I had expected her to. What did she know? I smiled at her and made a show of carefully taking a sip of water, and the audience applauded like I was a monkey who performed some sort of trick. I thought about the old leather wrapped book the hooded man had handed me that night, and his instructions to keep it secret at all cost, as my life depended on it. I still could not quite believe how following up on a random encounter in a pub I only by chance entered, had granted me this power. His words had been very clear so I was afraid to give anything away, after a pause I said:

“When it comes down to inspiration, I can only say: read as much as you can, as varied as you can and as often as you can, and you will almost magically develop a feeling for storytelling. So when an idea hits you, you can muse about it, to use your terminology. You take some notes, muse some more, and after you have sufficiently mused about your idea, you will have at least a rough outline for a story that is uniquely yours. Then start writing, and don’t stop. Even if you think it is bad. The bad words need to flow out of your pen first before you can find the good ones anyway. And, always remember, you can edit a bad book into a good one, but you cannot edit a book that has not been written. So, read as much as you can, and when that spark hits, write and write and write some more. Don’t stop until its done.”

With that the interview was over. The host had thanked the woman for her question, and the audience for their enthusiasm. Then he had offered his hand again, which I had shook with my now dry hand, and that was it. I walked off the stage, into a hallway and to my dressing room. The face of the woman played in my mind, as I felt an urge to speed back to my hotel room and take that leather-bound tome out of the safe and into my hands, to feel the cool relief of its cover, to smell the old parchment, ink, and the dust of ages. I smiled as I thought of the book. And I tried to calm myself, that woman could not possibly know muses actually existed, and that they were terrifying creatures to deal with. I had written two books before gaining access to my muse, and while those books did well enough now, I knew in my heart I was an imposter, as it was the muse, and the muse alone who made my writing any good at all, and I could not afford to let my secret out. I mean, I had earned quite a bit of money for myself, but I also had several book contracts for books I had yet to write. Just thinking of writing them without my muse, was like thinking of going skiing without bringing your skies, or warm winter clothes for that matter, as it would not only be impractical, but, remembering the hooded man’s words, deadly.

I hadn’t been joking on stage, the ritual to summon my muse was very difficult, and incredibly dangerous. Looking into the mirror and into the reflection of my own green eyes, I thought of the preparation alone. There was the awful part of sacrifice. Where first a few drops of my blood were enough to lure out the muse, now I needed half a cup… so I had to physically prepare being able to sustain that, draw my own blood somehow, incant the right words at the right time, always at a full moon in the middle of the night. Then I had to allow the muse into my thoughts, and have her way with me, whatever she desired. At first it was like any man’s dreams coming true, but the more I summoned her, the more she desired, the more she took. I both feared and longed for her. As a siren of old, she was of a supernatural beauty, and while she possessed me, I would write things I could not even have dreamt of. Then I would awake, completely exhausted and fully spent, clinging on to my sanity with my fingernails, until I slowly but certainly found myself again, and I would need to come to terms with my mere mortal inadequacy all-over again, as I would hand another finished masterpiece to my publisher. I rubbed my blood-soaked eyes. Now there was this woman, out of the blue, asking how to find her muse. Maybe I was being paranoid, but my gut told me otherwise. It had been my gut that had made me enter that pub all those years ago, to spill my predicament of being a failed writer, and not only listening, but actually following up on the words from the barkeep. I must have been insane then to drive to that abandoned factory in the middle of nowhere, but it lead me to the here and now, and my gut told me to be wary, so I was just that.

Later that night I couldn’t help but look over my shoulder like a man with more enemies than friends as I made my way from the studio to my hotel, and from the lobby to my room. I left out a sigh of relief as I closed the door behind me. As far as I could tell, I had not been followed. People had looked at me strangely, probably because of my own erratic and paranoid behavior, but nobody had been stalking me. I let my forehead rest against the cool surface of the door for a second, as I felt the tension leave my body, and a wave of exhaustion washed over me. I could use a nice hot bath, and a long dreamless sleep. But first, I needed to see if it was still there. I needed to hold it, and smell it. I turned around and stepped into the hotel room proper.

As my hand reached for the light switch, the light next to a recliner seat at the far end of my room went on. My heart sank into my shoes as I stood there, unmoving, looking straight into those big blue eyes of the woman from the studio. All the cute shyness she had displayed there was gone. Whether it was the fact she had sat waiting for me in the dark of my own hotel room, her composed posture or the pistol she held calmly in her lap, she terrified me. I wanted to say something and opened my mouth, but I could not find any words and my mouth felt dry and raspy, so I just closed it again. As her eyes met mine she said in a voice cold as ice:

  “Now you will tell me, how you really summon your muse.”