The Writer Waiting on the Other Side
Have you ever actually felt the Muse alive in you as you’re writing? Last week, I actually did, and I realized it nearly in real time. Let me explain.
“Remember, a Jedi can feel the Force flowing through him.” Those are the words Ben Kenobi tells young Luke Skywalker forty-nine years ago (in this galaxy) about the mysterious energy field that surrounds, penetrates, and binds the galaxy together.
We creative types know our version of the Force. It’s the Muse. She’s there to help us create something from nothing, guiding us through our creative blocks and drawing on lessons from the past to make the best possible thing at the moment.
I don’t know about y’all, but during any given writing session, the words can flow out of me, and I simultaneously know and don’t know where they’re coming from. On the “know” side, I have ideas or notes that I use to write my prose. On the “don’t know” side of the ledger, there are moments in which the spark ignites, new ideas form, and a new branch of my story emerges.
But have you ever physically felt yourself leveling up?
The Lessons of the Recent Novel
On New Year’s Day, I began my latest novel. What I expected to write was an Emily Henry-type story. What I ended up writing was something different: a tale about two people who rediscover parts of their lives long hidden away from the world and themselves. The novel is deeper and broader than I imagined and I had to learn how to write a book like this on the fly.
And it changed me as a writer. But it wasn’t until I wrote the next thing did I see how.
During the writing of the novel, I figured out how *I* wrote a novel like this. Not a pastiche of Emily Henry or Matthew Norman, but a romance novel as written by Scott Dennis Parker. It took longer than I imagined—or wanted—but I got to The End on a book that is, to date, one of my top two or three books I’ve ever written.
I finished the book on 19 May, Day 139 of 2026. I let myself have a break until Memorial Day when I began my next writing project: a follow-up to last year’s Lucky and Unlucky in Love, a collection of meet-cute romance short stories. Same premise: every story begins with a spark as two people meet but not every pair stay together.
As I wrote my first story, the halo effect of the novel still glowed. The way I wrote the novel bled over into how I wrote that first short story. I punctuated the prose differently. I had my character think in ways I would not have prior to the novel. I even wrote prose that was different from anything I had written prior to the novel.
And I literally felt it in real time.
My weekday writing sessions are for an hour at 5:00 am. I never turn on the TV, check email, or get on the internet. It is literally wake up, get lemon water and coffee, and sit down to write. As such, the house is wonderfully quiet and my stories come alive. It’s a different vibe, those early morning sessions, than my lunch hour writing times. In some ways, it’s like the Muse is just a little more present.
With that first short story, I literally felt her guidance as the words flowed out of my imagination, through my mind and fingers, and out onto the screen. The first time it happened, I actually stopped for a moment and smiled. This is what experience feels like. This is what it’s like to have a co-creator. She was very much a welcomed presence.
The Muse. The Force.
They may or may not be the same thing, and most of the time, they are but an echo on our minds and hearts, nudging us forward with micro-corrections. But every now and then, she is present, sitting beside us, guiding us to the places we need to go in a more overt way, expanding our creative selves in ways we could not have achieved by ourselves.
And it is magical.