My muse

Every writer has a muse. The spur your fingers need to fly across the keyboard at lightning speed or the light bulb your brain longs for when it has hiccupped and can't focus. Muses can be friends or family, a writers' own inner voice, or even an inspirational quote that is taped on your computer or memorized and buried deep within the writers’ soul. Every muse is different for every writer, but their sole purpose is always the same: to help the writer when they need inspiration the most.

My muse is a song – a single and simple song that has helped me through more days of writers block than I can count. No matter what problem I am having, within three times of listening to my song, my problem is gone. Every single time. Even today, while driving to work my muse helped me through a scene I became stuck on yesterday, so stuck in fact that I had to stop writing for the day because I couldn’t get past this scene. By the third time of listening to my muse, the scene blossomed in my head, and I can’t wait to write it.

It is true I found my muse in a much unexpected way. At times I have reveled in the 'stumbled across by sheer luck' manner because usually those are the best times to find a muse – the unexpected and out of the ordinary creates a level of gratitude of which cannot be explained.

One Friday evening in late October 2010, I stopped by a Redbox machine. It was movie night for our family, and since we had not taken our daughter to see it in the theaters, I wanted to rent How to Train Your Dragon on DVD. To be honest, I really didn't want to watch the movie. I cannot tell you why. I just didn't. But it was not "Angela movie night" in our house, it was "Family movie night" so How to Train Your Dragon was the movie going into the DVD player.

Set in a mythical Viking world on the island of Berk, the story is about the trials and tribulations of Hiccup trying to follow his tribes’ history of slaying dragons. With a strong voice cast of Gerard Butler and Craig Ferguson, a strong storyline, and a super cute dragon named Toothless, I couldn't help but love the movie. After watching it for the tenth time the next day(my daughter is young and going through the "I want to watch it again" phase), I began to listen instead of watch.

I have always been a fan of instrumental music, especially good instrumental music. One of my favorite soundtracks is for the movie The Last of the Mochicans. I love to write to instrumental music, and my favorite style is Celtic. It has a strong presence to it that just hits me in the core of my imagination - fiddles, bagpipes, dulcimers, pennywhistles, and harpsichords, all instruments that bring out my inner writer.

So I sat and listened to the music behind the words, then listened during the credits.

I listened, and in listening, I found my muse.

Forbidden Friendship by John Powell.