How to Listen to Your Muse

There is nothing more valuable to a writer than an inspired idea – the story, or character, or line of poetry that seems to appear from nowhere in our minds, bright and brilliant and needing to be written. And there is no better feeling than when writing feels more like dictation than thinking, as if something is speaking to us and we are just trying to keep up. Many writers call this experience “listening to muse.” Yet just as many writers wonder why she sometimes seems to go silent? In this class, William Kenower, author of Fearless Writing: How to Create Boldly and Write With Confidence, will teach writers how we ourselves block the muse unintentionally, and how we can, with practice, learn to hear her every time we sit down to write.

In this class, students will learn:

· Why they aren’t always in the mood to write, and why that doesn’t matter.

· Why writing is listening, and not thinking.

· Why writing is really a relationship with your muse, not something you do alone.

· Why having a muse sometimes leaves us feeling as if we aren’t good enough.

· How to recognize an inspired idea when it comes, and why sometimes fear them.

· Why it’s okay to be “lazy.”