Metro Pulse/Midpoint

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The Muse has left the building

by Stephanie Piper

You should do a column about this, people sometimes tell me. We'll be talking about aging pets or the lyrics to old rock 'n roll songs. Why don't you write about that, someone says. And I smile and shrug. Maybe.

Then again, maybe not. Here is what column-writing is like: standing on a desert highway, waiting for a ride. The horizon is empty. The sky above is vast and featureless. You listen hard for the hum of an approaching car, but there is no sound. There is only the beating of your heart, and the voice in your head repeating the writer's mantra: let's-do-this-later.

The idea that seemed so promising when you jotted it down on the back of the KUB bill? It's a no-hoper. Those suggestions from well-meaning friends? Zero. You're stuck, marooned. And you know what that means. It means you're a failure, and you might as well hang it up right now. Turn off that computer. Put down that legal pad. Learn a trade, you pathetic loser.

It amazes me to think that I used to do this every single week. My column was always due on Friday at noon. Around 11, a copy editor would start circling my desk, looking for signs of progress.

Almost done, I'd chirp brightly, leaning forward to conceal the blank screen. I would gaze out at the shabby little stretch of Church Avenue, at the stray cat curled in the window of the vacant building across the street, at the comings and goings in the bail bondsman's office on the corner. I would abandon hope. And then, somehow, I would start to type.

I once believed that the only way I could write was on a yellow pad at my dining room table at 5 a.m. In a household of three small children, it was the one quiet hour of the day. I would sit and watch the gray light creep up Willow Road and listen to the rumble of the Chicago & Northwestern train a half block away. A child would stir in a bunk bed upstairs. Not yet, I would whisper. Please not yet. And then, grudgingly, the words would come.

When I went to work for a daily newspaper, I sat at a metal desk next to the police reporter. The scanner crackled with shootings and break-ins and overturned tractor-trailers. Phones rang. City editors shouted. The first week, I clung to my yellow pad like a life raft and thought about ear plugs.

And then, incredibly, the din became a kind of muse. The jangling phones, the static-laced bulletins offered the white noise I needed to focus on the task at hand. I miss it sometimes, sitting in my silent house with the phone unplugged and the idea tank on empty.

I once read a biography of the French writer, Colette. Her lover, a fairly loathsome type named Willy, lived off her earnings. His solution to writer's block was simple. He would lock her in a room and deny her food until she churned out a requisite number of pages.

Now there's a guy only a writer could love. His motives may have been questionable, but he understood inspiration. Sometimes it just appears, like a genie in a fairy tale. Sometimes, you have to go after it with a club. You should do a story about this, he might have said to Colette, closing the door, turning the key. She would gaze out at the chimney pots of Paris, the tiled roofs, the distant glint of the Seine. And then, hungrily, she would begin.