Finding your writing balance

My book The Writer’s Process describes the fictional personas of The Muse and The Scribe to represent the different mental processes involved in writing.

The Muse represents our creative processes, and the Scribe the disciplined ones. The two must work together for us to get work done.

We all have a Muse and a Scribe, but our backgrounds and personalities may pull us more toward one or the other. The professions we choose may also favor a particular balance. A fiction writer probably brings more Muse to their writing work than the academic describing their latest discovery.

Only by understanding our personal balance of Muse and Scribe can we figure out how to approach new kinds of writing, or how to improve our existing processes.

How do you spend your writing time?

One way to assess your balance is to examine what the experience of writing feels like. That offers a clue to what’s happening in your process, and the balance of the Muse and the Scribe.

Do you have a bunch of great ideas, but rarely finish anything? That state of creative chaos happens when the Muse overpowers the…