One of the great mysteries of writing is how to access your “muse”—your writing inspiration. How do you get it to speak to you? How can you take advantage?

If you follow Greek mythology, the muse of prose is Calliope. How can you hear her better? 

Intuition Matters

My contention is that our muse is none other than a voice echoing the basic preferences wired into us by evolution. We have within us those preferences. They are our basic desires, and our readers’ basic desires. 

Our muse, in other words, is our intuition as to what our readers’ brains will find rewarding. I outlined how this intuition arises via the reward circuit in my last post. The circuit motivates people to keep reading when you give them pleasing language and thought.

The task of accessing your muse starts by understanding how people’s brains seek rewards and then how this motivates them to keep reading. 

Some Principles

If we follow the evidence from science, you can as a start access the muse in four ways: 

• Go inside before outside: Recognize that a sense of how to produce great writing resides in yourself. It’s as if Calliope sits in your inner ear. 
• Recognize the power of the universal: At your core, what motivates you motivates others. Everyone has unique tastes, but we all get pleasure from the same basic drives.
• Think broad instead of narrow: Recognize the menu of reader desires is long, so you can please readers in many ways. I’ve listed eight on my Craft page.
• Rise to Calliope’s demands: Although readers thirst for knowledge, they want more than information for a reward. Listen to your muse’s aspirations.

The lesson, above all, is that you can write better by generously dishing out rewards—the ones you like and the ones your reader will like. Let the whispers of Calliope be your guide.

Image: The Nine Muses by Johann Heinrich Tischbein, 1780, public domain via Wikimedia Commons