Don’t turn the page. Stop reading. Pick up your pen or touch your fingers to the keyboard. Start writing. Now.(137)
There is a warmth and an affirmative coaching quality to this book, but it isn’t only about urging you on. There are also some useful suggestions and exercises designed to help you work through your fears, and find out exactly what you need to write. There are exercises for overcoming a block, even when it seems overwhelming, ways of coping with distraction and transition, and ideas you can use to deepen your characters, enrich your settings, and extend your plot. Voice of the Muse contains chapters for working in writing groups, and also a chapter on how to edit your work without being too brutal to your ego or ideas. It contains a number of anecdotes and suggestions from things that worked, and didn’t work while Gerson was writing his novel The MoonQuest. Gerson isn’t afraid to share his own experiences as a writer, a teacher, and as a person, and his honesty with the reader encourages trust as he effectively practices what he preaches.
Voice of the Muse is certainly a spiritual approach to writing, and it may not be suitable for every kind of writer. Some people may dismiss the book as being too much of an incantation – continually pushing the reader away from the page and into the (foul) rag and bone shop of the heart (where all ladders start…), but Gerson’s point is that there is little that a writing teacher can provide in the way of pragmatic advice because, as Yeats himself said so beautifully, the true voice comes from within the writer. The one thing that you can do is encourage and coach, and Gerson has been doing this for 15 years in his successful classes, and does this very well in Voice of the Muse. The book provides the tools to guide us towards our own stories, urging us that we must open our hearts and allow ourselves the space, and the self-trust, to do so. We not only have the ability; we have the responsibility.
Voice of the Muse: Answering the Call to Write
Mark David Gerson
LightLines Media
Paperback: 248 pages, Feb 2008, ISBN: 9780979547553
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