The Women Are Plotting
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The Women Are Plotting
From Greek Goddesses to Rock Gods: the Muse Finding Us
We explore muses as myth, metaphor, and practice, from Greek goddesses and Homeric invocations to who or what inspired a few rock-and-roll gods. We connect inspiration to memory, trauma, and discipline.
• a film about a muse
• The creative catalysts for some Beatles and Clapton classics
• Greek Muses as daughters of memory and the role of invocation
• Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic and the idea-migration concept
• mundane routines that trigger ideation
• a subway story as a study in noticing what's around you
• trauma-informed character building and credible villains
• ethics of borrowing from real life
• the unreliability of memory and writing from subjective truth
• empathy as a creative muscle that strengthens storytelling
• discipline, time management, and finishing the work
Email us at info@thewomenareplotting.com
And of course, you can find us on all the socials
Thanks, and until next time, be safe and be excellent to each other
Email us at info@thewomenareplotting.com, and find us on all the socials. Be safe and be excellent to each other.
[00:00:00] Etienne: Welcome listeners. This is The Women Are Plotting. I'm Etienne Rose Olivier and I'm here with my friends and co-hosts, Heidi Willis and Jane Gari.
[00:00:15] Etienne: Today's episode we'll be talking about muses. And my fun, interesting fact for this episode is about a 1999 Albert Brooks movie called The Muse. I love Albert Brooks, but I think I was one of the many who caught this film on television, not in the movie theater, since it didn't gross more than its original budget.
[00:00:34] Etienne: It starts Albert Brooks as a screenwriter who gets a lifetime achievement award at the very beginning of the film, and then his career immediately takes a fucking nose dive. He is turned onto a muse, played by Sharon Stone, who makes expensive demands on him while inspiring him to write what seems to be a very bankable film.
[00:00:54] Etienne: I really like that movie. I thought about this like last night when I, I think I need to rewatch it. So Heidi, what was your
[00:01:01] Heidi: I'm so glad you brought that one up. 'cause yeah, I haven't watched it since it first came out. That was a good one too. So mine is, there's a famous muse from music, Patty Boyd, and she helped inspire Something, so George Harrison's song Something and then she got with Eric Clapton and was the inspiration for Layla and Wonderful Tonight. So she, yeah. One of the famous muses out there for, yeah.
[00:01:33] Etienne: She must, she must be something.
[00:01:37] Heidi: Well, and, and apparently George Harrison was going somewhere and had Eric Clapton like, Hey, can you look out for Patty? And while he was looking out for Patty,
[00:01:48] Etienne: He looked out for her a little too closely
[00:01:50] Heidi: yeah, he fell in love and yeah.
[00:01:54] Jane: Oh,
[00:01:55] Heid: Lucky girl
[00:01:56] Jane: I am actually, I'm wearing a Beatles shirt today because I'm a Beatles freak, and so I love that fact because I always wondered what was it about Patty Boyd? She seems lovely. I've seen her in interviews and as a Beatle freak I've read, she has a memoir about that, and I think the memoir is actually called Wonderful Tonight, and she was with both of these guitar heroes from rock and roll, and what was so amazing about George Harrison is that even though he was obviously devastated, but he saw that Patty fell in love with Eric also. And so he said, okay, now you guys can be together and they still remain friends.
[00:02:42] Jane: I mean, I think that it just shows how evolved.
[00:02:46] Heidi: Yeah,
[00:02:47] Jane: They all were
[00:02:48] Heidi: very adult.
[00:02:49] Jane: cause that could have gone really badly and involved all kinds of violence, but it didn't because I guess that's what so much transcendental meditation will bring to you. 'cause that was George's whole gig. But, my fun fact is about the muses from Greek mythology.
[00:03:08] Jane: 'cause in addition to being a Beatles geek, I am also a Greek mythology geek. 'cause I used to teach English. In high school. So I had to teach the Iliad and the Odyssey, and we talk about the muses because, so the nine muses in Greek mythology were obviously the goddesses who presided over the arts and sciences, but they started as nymphs, right? And then they eventually evolved into these powerful goddesses. But in the stories they started as nymphs who would just whisper inspiration to anybody who asked. So you had to sit there and be open and kind of say like, muse come to me. You know? They'd be like, Hey, I got a cool idea for you.
[00:03:49] Jane: So eventually they morphed from nymphs into goddesses, and then they were ascribed responsibility for human inspiration and various artistic and intellectual pursuits. And they were the daughters of Zeus and the Titan, the female Titan, Mnemosyne, who is the titans of memory. And I really like that combination of like a Titan and of memory and then a god because it's like the birth of the muses reflects the power of memory. And it's to me really important culturally because I when they were being invoked and when people believed in them, besides the poets themselves, it was a largely illiterate society. So remembering the works of poets and scientists and storytellers was really essential.
[00:04:40] Jane: And, that's why all the old epic poems were sung. And at the beginning of, if you read the Iliad and the Odyssey, they all start literally with a section called the Invocation of the Muse. And there's just a couple of lines that are asking like, okay, muse come and help me.
[00:04:55] Jane: So the poet wrote that down. But then that means then that the storyteller who would be singing it at a get together would then sing that part. And it was meant for them to also invoke the muse as they told it so that they could tell it well, and everybody would be like, that's an awesome story. So, so I super, super geeky fact, but I still kind of believe in, in muses, so had
[00:05:30] Heidi: Well, Elizabeth Gilbert, she talked about ideas as things in the ether. So I don't know. I think there's a connection there. There's something out there that's sending you ideas for sure. It feels very mystical sometimes.
[00:05:48] Jane: A hundred percent. And I actually like to bridge the worlds that we've been chatting about. Said to go back to the Beatles
[00:05:54] Heidi: Mm-hmm.
[00:05:55] Jane: Paul McCartney, when he wrote the melody for Yesterday, said that it was like it came to him. He woke up and he had had a dream about this melody and he was just kinda, and he was like writing it down and he didn't have the words yet, so he just called it scrambled eggs at first 'cause it was like scrambled eggs, you know, like he. He said, I'll figure out the words later, but just the idea came to him and they said that about the seeds of a lot of their songs. And I do feel like they were channeling something like sometimes really great art is like that. And Elizabeth Gilbert, for those of you are listeners who aren't familiar with her work, you might know her from Eat, Pray, Love, fame, um, but.
[00:06:47] Jane: She also wrote a book called Big Magic Creative Living Beyond Fear. And that's what, you know, Heidi's alluding to. And there's the premise of that book is that ideas are living entities, kinda looking for a person to bring them into the world. And I love that idea so much. 'cause it's like we're a conduit or maybe it's more collaborative, like we're, we can be the idea doula, like, so then the, the act of writing is like giving birth, right?
[00:07:14] Jane: And maybe you could carry the metaphor all the way through, like the beginning is the hot sex part, but then it gets uncomfortable, super messy. But then right after your idea's born, you're like, you're so beautiful. It's amazing. And so. Yeah, but in Elizabeth Gilbert's book and also how I feel, and I would love to hear you guys' thoughts on this is if you're evoking, you're trying to invoke the muse yourself.
[00:07:36] Jane: It's like just being open and just literally being like, all right, I am ready for you. Like you would be out in the world trying to court or invite a romantic relationship into your life. You're like sending out the vibe, like, I am open for business. Maybe business isn't a good word for it.
[00:07:53] Jane: We don't wanna be a whore
[00:07:54] Heidi: But I'm a, I'm a open channel.
[00:07:57] Jane: Yes. I'm open. I'm open.
[00:07:59] Etienne: Open channel. Is that what you said, Heidi?
[00:08:00] Heidi: yeah. Open channel.
[00:08:03] Etienne: Well, did you guys also, was it also this book that talked about, because I haven't read the book yet, it's actually on my list. I probably will be reading it next week, which makes me a little mad
[00:08:11] Heidi: it's really thin. It's a quick read too.
[00:08:14] Etienne: Well, I mean, it's through the library, so it's coming. So was it this book that talks about the idea of the Muse gives you an idea and if you don't start executing it, then they might take it to somebody else. Okay.
[00:08:28] Heidi: Yeah, she illustrates the story. What was it, Anne Patchett, or who was it that she was at a conference with? She had a very distinct idea, Elizabeth Gilbert did, and she let it kind of stagnate. And didn't get back to it. And she had this conference with, I think it's Ann Patchett. But anyway, she's at this conference with this other well-known, woman writer, and she feels like through osmosis, that the idea jumped from her to this other author because this other author came out with a book and it was, the details are eerily similar, like it's.
[00:09:11] Etienne: Holy cow.
[00:09:12] Heidi: Yeah. So I mean, it goes to show you, 'cause there's so many times where people will be like, oh, they pirated my idea or they stole my idea. Or, multiple books or movies come out with similar story themes or whatever. And it's because it's in the ether. Like this idea wants to be born and so it's lending itself to multiple people, and whoever gets to it first gets to claim it. So yeah, when you get an idea, you kind of have to jump on it and start working on it. 'cause otherwise it's gonna be like, all right, you're not doing anything with it. I'm gonna move on.
[00:09:52] Etienne: Yeah. Yeah. I love it. Oh.
[00:09:54] Jane: yeah, I don't wanna belittle, I don't wanna take away from the fact that IP theft and stuff like that is a real thing happening out there.
[00:10:01] Etienne: Yeah, it does happen.
[00:10:02] Heidi: Yeah.
[00:10:02] Heidi: yeah, for sure.
[00:10:03] Jane: but, I think it also is a testament that you have to show up and have your shit together and,
[00:10:07] Heidi: Mm-hmm.
[00:10:08] Jane: be committed and disciplined enough once the muse talks to you to act on it, or she gonna go elsewhere to be born.
[00:10:16] Heidi: For real. Yeah. I've had so many story ideas that I didn't act on and then you see someone else come out with a book or a movie with that exact same idea and it's like, dang,
[00:10:30] Etienne: I haven't had that happen, but the world happens like, you know, I've been working on the. End the World Book forever, and then COVID happened, which was not exactly, but I mean, I literally had it as a sort of Spanish flu that,
[00:10:46] Heidi: Hmm.
[00:10:47] Etienne: almost the entire world, which did not happen with COVID, but I mean,
[00:10:51] Heidi: Thank God.
[00:10:52] Etienne: a pandemic. Yeah. Yeah. No. Still dreaming about that. Sorry.
[00:11:00] Heidi: Speaking of dreams. So I don't know about you guys, but I've had so many ideas come to me through dreams. Like full stories in my dreams. So, Paul McCartney having that dream about the song, I really resonate with that because I've even woke up a few times where. A crazy song that I've never heard of before is playing in my head and I'm like, okay, somebody,
[00:11:27] Etienne: Really.
[00:11:27] Heidi: Somebody has mixed me up with a musician. 'Cause I'm not a musician, I'm not musically inclined at all, and I love music, but I am. Yeah. Can't read it. Can't. Yeah. I am in awe of people that can compose and write their own music. But yeah, it was weird. Like for a full week, I woke up with original songs playing in my head and I'm like, all right.
[00:11:51] Heidi: The muse, the muse is very confused and is sending me stuff that I can't use.
[00:11:58] Etienne: That's crazy. It sounds like you're just so open to the mystical, the, the, the ether that you're just getting ideas that you can't even run with.
[00:12:07] Heidi: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
[00:12:12] Etienne: I love it when I would hear people, you'll hear if you ever go to a writer's conference, which obviously all three of us have gone too. Quite a few. Yeah. We all, we met at writers' conferences. Yes. But whenever you, here at least one time, somebody go, where do you get your ideas from?
[00:12:28] Etienne: Or they'll ask the keynote speaker or they'll ask the, one of the teachers who happen to be a published writer of course. Like where do you get your ideas from? And it's like, oh, I just wanna say I feel bad for the person getting that question 'cause it'd be really hard to not get a little snarky about it.
[00:12:45] Etienne: Like, you know what, they're just gonna come to you when they come to you and you just keep working on your craft. So when they do come, you can actually execute them in a great way. That's what you do. You just stay open. I get ideas everywhere. Not every single day, but I mean they come to me driving in the car or walking the dog.
[00:13:07] Etienne: Usually something I'm doing that's mundane or cleaning the house. It's usually a mundane thing. I hate it when it happens when I'm meditating because I'm not supposed to be doing that. But I've thought of sometimes if I'm ever stuck I might try meditating just to see if I can get the ideas to flow better.
[00:13:24] Etienne: I haven't done that yet, but I think I'm gonna try that 'cause that happens a lot when I'm meditating.
[00:13:30] Heidi: In the shower, too.
[00:13:31] Etienne: but yeah, I haven't, oh, the shower, that's a good one. It hasn't happened too often with dreams. I usually, I'm one of those people who has weird dreams about dating celebrities, for my whole life.
[00:13:41] Etienne: This is funny about dreams, totally off topic, but my ex-husband, so I literally never had a dream about him when I was married to him. I was still having dreams of my life before him, so he never existed in my dreams. We were together
[00:13:57] Heidi: Hmm.
[00:13:58] Etienne: for six, 15 years, something like that, and then as soon as we separated, I had dreams.
[00:14:05] Etienne: We were separating, like what happened? We just skipped over the whole married part. I don't even know,
[00:14:12] Heidi: It's like your subconscious knew. We don't, yeah, we don't need to.
[00:14:17] Etienne: I don't need to be married him this
[00:14:19] Heidi: Yeah.
[00:14:21] Etienne: because especially in the beginning, like the first two years with him were amazing. They were, I mean, if I could recapture that with somebody else, I would do that in a second. I mean, he's not that person and he stopped being that person. But if I could find somebody to be in a relationship with me in that capacity, a hundred percent would do that in a heartbeat.
[00:14:40] Etienne: I don't know if that's possible or if they exist. But yeah, that's how great that relationship was for the first two or three years. So I don't understand, he really was great in the beginning, so should I should have been dreaming about him a little bit.
[00:14:54] Heidi: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:14:55] Jane: Maybe you write about the, that first two years the next time you write something where there's a romantic relationship,
[00:15:02] Etienne: Oh
[00:15:02] Jane: You tap into the magic of those two years. And I think that that's what, when people say, well, okay, where do you get your ideas? I'm like, all right, well, from living, you know, um, but, but, but.
[00:15:14] Jane: Mining your experiences in an intentional way and thinking, what is it about some of my experiences that could speak to something universal and for other people? And I think it's about curating a collection of experiences that are relatable and then tapping into them when necessary. Even if it's not apples to apples, you know?
[00:15:41] Jane: So I recently did a really big overhaul of my novel manuscript. And I was having a problem with the main character not being relatable across the board. And so one of my friends who's a writer, and she's published mostly short stories. She does. But, she gave me some great advice and she just said if you're having trouble with a character not being well-rounded enough or relatable enough, pick somebody in your real life that has characteristics that you want to imbue your character with and just have them in mind. And I actually renamed the character after the person in real life so that they would be in my head the whole time I was doing the revisions.
[00:16:25] Jane: And I would just with little small strokes, give them some more empathetic trait, a small gesture, how they treated other people, the tone of their voice, just small things throughout, and it made a world of difference. But as far as just a wholesale idea, I mean, yeah, it's like, I don't know, just from real life
[00:16:46] Etienne: Outta the sky, you don't get those little drops in your backyard. You know, the idea packages, they drop in my yard.
[00:16:52] Jane: They come by drones now.
[00:16:53] Heidi: yeah, yeah.
[00:16:54] Jane: they come via drone. I'm
[00:16:56] Heidi: Used to be pigeons.
[00:16:58] Jane: Now it's upgraded to drones. how the muses are operating these days. I know I used to get, I do miss sometimes my days in New York, I miss being on the subway 'cause there were always, always ideas on the subway, snippets of conversations I would overhear or just something weird would happen on the subway.
[00:17:18] Jane: Something weird was always happening on the subway, but when I was riding the subway regularly, I was in school. And I didn't have time to write long, but I wrote a lot of short stories and I wrote a lot of poetry, when I was a student, and there were always stories happening on the subway that would inspire a poem.
[00:17:36] Jane: Like there was one time there was just this butterfly. Got stuck on the, I don't know how it ended up on the subway train.
[00:17:42] Etienne: Oh no.
[00:17:43] Jane: And immediately, the doors closed and this yellow, tiger Swallowtail was just flapping around the subway. It turned everybody into kids immediately.
[00:17:56] Jane: Everybody was just full of, oh, and look at that. And everybody from like, there was a little kid, there was this little old lady who was sitting there who looked miserable and all of a sudden her face lit up and it was just really magical. And then it got off a couple of stops later and everybody seemed really sad.
[00:18:14] Etienne: It reached its stop and
[00:18:16] Jane: It reached its stop and I was happy for the butterfly 'cause I thought, okay, that would suck if you just died on the New York City subway
[00:18:21] Heidi: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:18:23] Jane: please find your way back to Central Park or something. But it was a amazing to see the transformation of people just, head down, no eye contact, and all of a sudden we're all talking to each other and sharing this moment.
[00:18:35] Jane: So little things like that, right? You could just let that fly and don't latch onto it type of thing. Or you could take it and make something with it. I don't know. Read the newspaper. I don't know. Edgar Allen Poe used
[00:18:49] Heidi: what I do.
[00:18:49] Jane: to get weird ideas from like the Cask of Amontillado, that famous story where this guy.
[00:18:55] Jane: Literally walls up another person and buries them alive in a wall because he insulted him. And you never find out what the insult was . That was from a news story that Edgar Allen Poe read and where they just found the bones of somebody shackled to a wall and in a kind of a recess in a wall that had been bricked up, and Edgar Allen Poe was like, what the fuck would possess somebody to do that?
[00:19:20] Jane: And then that turns into a cask of Amontillado. So.
[00:19:24] Heidi: That's kind of where I get a lot of my ideas too. Not just dreams, but, I'll see a news story or hear a story and I'll just go, what if this happened? And what if that happened? And I just keep going with it, running with it. So yeah, ideas can come from everywhere. So, yeah. If you're not having ideas come to you, I don't know what to tell you because it's like, just live life, you know? Get out there, meet people, talk to people, read news stories. And I don't know, ideas come from everywhere.
[00:20:01] Etienne: Yeah, I would feel bad if somebody really can't come up with any ideas to write about, that would almost scare me a little bit. Like maybe they might be psychotic or, sorry I didn't go right there, but like, why can't you come up with a story, you know?
[00:20:16] Jane: Or they're too distracted. It's very easy to be distracted. It's very easy to have your head up, your own ass or your head in your own information bubble and be so. I don't know, maybe you're doom scrolling without stopping for a second and asking like, Heidi, those are two magical words. Like what if you know, well, Etty, was that what you asked yourself with the pandemic story that you have?
[00:20:40] Jane: Did you say like, what if someone weaponized the Spanish flu today? Like, is that how that came to you?
[00:20:45] Etienne: yeah, yeah. And then how would I do it if I were them? Yeah. How would I disseminate it? How could I kill everybody at once? You know, like, yeah, that's how it started, but that doesn't even really get covered. That's the backstory. I know what caused it or what happened, but not the people in the book.
[00:21:01] Etienne: So. Yeah, that and plus the really sad story is that mostly stemmed from me wanting to always get rid of my family. Growing up, I loved Stephen King's The Stand and I wanted that to be real life. I wanted my family to just die so that I would just be away. Like I could finally be rid of them.
[00:21:19] Etienne: And I was like, if that means I have to die too. 'cause I'm part of the people that get, I'm like, I'm fine with that. Or if I'm the only one alive, I'm fine with that too. Like, I'm fine with everything as long as my family was gone. We're talking about my growing up family, not my family. Well, I don't actually really have a family except for my little dog now, but like,
[00:21:40] Jane: Your chosen family is different.
[00:21:42] Etienne: My chosen family. Yeah, my family, I did not choose. That's the one I wanted to be rid of. Yeah. 'cause that was, yeah. Whenever I somewhat think a little, I can't actually a hundred percent put myself back in those times. Of being in the house with my adoptive father and my half brother and my mother, and really literally spend a day there in my mind, I can't do it.
[00:22:06] Etienne: Like I think I've blocked out most of what happened. I can just only have snippets here and there of things. I don't, I could never, I don't think I could do a full day of it. So yeah, pretty traumatized.
[00:22:21] Heidi: yeah, I think, the brain has a weird way of protecting itself, by a lot of trauma. I read it recently. A lot of traumatized adults don't remember a lot about their childhoods and so, yeah.
[00:22:39] Etienne: Yeah, I mean at the, when I finally went to a therapist when I was like 28 or 27 years old, she said that I definitely had complex PTSD from growing up with my family that I was always on alert. I was always waiting for somebody to attack me verbally or physically or something, something was going to happen and I had to be ready for anything at all times.
[00:23:03] Etienne: One of my favorite stories, that really illustrates this in a nutshell was the day that I walked into my bedroom. It was a summertime, and so my mother and my brother were home, but I didn't think about that. I just happened to walk into my bedroom. All of a sudden I hear duck and I just hit the floor.
[00:23:21] Etienne: Like I didn't even think about it. I just hit the floor like a burpee, right for the floor. And as I'm going down, I could feel the wind of something going over my head. And I guess it was my brother had walked right behind me into my room with a whiffle bat and was gonna smash me right in the head.
[00:23:38] Etienne: And my mom saw him walk into my room with the whiffle bat and decided to follow him. Yelled out just in time. So I mean, that's why I was on alert. Like you could, something horrific could happen anytime if you weren't ready for it.
[00:23:54] Heidi: Wow. We're, we're just like stunned right now. Like what?
[00:23:59] Etienne: I know. So it's so nice. It's been so nice all these years without my mother, my brother, at least my brother, the way he was then. He's actually a normal person today. He grew out of the main problem that he had as a child. My mother never grew out of her problem. It only got worse over time and she died.
[00:24:18] Etienne: So when she died, it was like, oh, I can finally relax. Nothing is, she can't do anything to me anymore. I'm good. Yeah. So that was the end of all of that. So there's nothing that could, nothing scares me honestly. Hardly anything scares me. Like at least people wise.
[00:24:36] Heidi: Mm-hmm.
[00:24:37] Etienne: I can usually see bad people from a mile away. Like they just give off this energy. I should know that energy really well. Totally off topic. Don't know why. I'm so sorry.
[00:24:47] Jane: Well, no, this could be fodder for like, that's probably though. Useful when you're crafting a character, right? And if you like, you could imbue somebody you're writing about with that kind of situational awareness and imagine what would be in somebody's backstory that would lend them that kind of preternatural ability to just have that read on people, to be able to just respond in a way that's super protective.
[00:25:18] Jane: I think that. You talking about these experiences and showing how much you are, first of all, willing to be vulnerable and sharing, and then also knowing yourself really well now and knowing what you do not want in life, like I think that bringing that kind of self-awareness to the craft of writing and building a world is also a really great skill.
[00:25:46] Jane: Like if you're trying to write people and you don't know yourself,
[00:25:51] Etienne: Oof. That's impossible.
[00:25:53] Jane: how could you? Right. Like, so I, I think that everything would end up sounding superficial.
[00:26:00] Heidi: Yeah.
[00:26:01] Etienne: yeah, like two dimensional instead of three
[00:26:02] Heidi: Mm-hmm.
[00:26:03] Etienne: very flat. Mm-hmm.
[00:26:04] Heidi: Well, if you had to write a villain. You could take, you know, you could, you can make a well-rounded villain 'cause you've experienced a real villain, you know, in your own life.
[00:26:17] Heidi: So
[00:26:17] Etienne: Although I would give a villain like, a good quality, or
[00:26:22] Heidi: she had zero quality?
[00:26:26] Etienne: honestly, I'd have to sit and think for a long time.
[00:26:29] Heidi: really, oh my gosh.
[00:26:31] Etienne: Well, she didn't had the capacity to love herself, so she couldn't love others. She couldn't empathize with others. She couldn't. If you can't empathize with others, I mean, you basically are like, you're very mentally ill, you know, like that, that makes it hard for you to care for the world around you.
[00:26:49] Heidi: Mm-hmm.
[00:26:50] Heidi: So. She didn't care about like pets or weren't any pets that
[00:26:54] Etienne: Yeah, she cared about, I think, no, I mean, the stories are just never ending. I had this one dog and he used to wiggle out of his collar so much when I take him on walks, and I would just have to be ready for it and just go into a run and go get him, you know?
[00:27:09] Etienne: Well, I came home from school one day. My mom's like, yeah, he got out of his collar. And I'm like, so where are we gonna go? Look you. Is he here? Did you get it? No. Like, wait, what? What? What? The where? Like, I don't understand. I never saw him again. I mean, that shows you right there. If it's not something that she cared about, it didn't matter to her, you know?
[00:27:34] Heidi: Hmm.
[00:27:35] Jane: I was actually just reading an article about, narcissists and their relationship to pets. For
[00:27:41] Etienne: Oof. Oh, really?
[00:27:42] Jane: research I needed for a situation I will not talk about on the podcast, but it's in my orbit someone's dealing with narcissism and trying to just work through it. And, this person in my orbit there's a pet involved. The narcissist is definitely, and I'm not obviously giving a clinical diagnosis. This is just a purely subjective, I'm surmising from observation, but they use this pet just for their narcissistic supply. It seems like, just like this,
[00:28:14] Etienne: Wait, the dog gave
[00:28:15] Jane: Yeah, the dog. Well, because the dog just gives, yeah, the dog gives them unconditional love
[00:28:20] Heidi: Yeah,
[00:28:21] Etienne: okay. Well,
[00:28:21] Heidi: so they eat it up.
[00:28:22] Jane: then, but the second, that dog is inconvenient. This was making me think about your mom. The second the dog is inconvenient. It's ignored because it's not there serving the person's
[00:28:33] Etienne: The needs. Yeah,
[00:28:34] Heidi: for love and validation.
[00:28:37] Etienne: yeah. Which is what I was for her. yeah.
[00:28:39] Heidi: Mm-hmm.
[00:28:40] Jane: Because as long as the dog is adoring them, there's like,
[00:28:43] Etienne: Oh yeah. Yeah.
[00:28:44] Jane: love me, lick me. Like follow me around. You know? Like literally follow me around like a little puppy because you are a little puppy, but then the second you do something I don't like, or you're inconvenient, fuck you, I'm not gonna chase you or I'm not gonna tend to your needs because now you're inconvenient.
[00:28:59] Heidi: Mm-hmm.
[00:28:59] Jane: So
[00:29:01] Etienne: Can you send me that article? 'cause I would love to read that.
[00:29:03] Jane: I sure will. It was in psychology today, but I will
[00:29:06] Etienne: Yeah.
[00:29:07] Jane: Definitely take the nuggets like that. Right? But you have to change it, right? 'cause you don't want this person in your life to be like, did you write that about me? I mean, I wrote a story called, oh crap. Now I forgot the name of it, but it was about something. It was, Little Deaths. That's what it was called. And it was about a very, very, it was micro fiction, but it was about a couple who lose a child right after it's born and it's devastating and the husband is just not responsive. And she's just gutted and it's kind of about how they're not gonna make it, you know what I mean?
[00:29:47] Jane: And you can tell just from this little snippet, I wrote this 18 years ago now, so I'm trying to remember the details. So my husband reads it. And we had had a situation where, you know, my daughter is gonna be 18 and she's fine, and she's alive and healthy, but they thought that she had this catastrophic birth defect. Heidi, you probably remember this
[00:30:09] Heidi: Yep. I do.
[00:30:10] Jane: And, but it turned out she was fine. She had all of these symptoms and they wanted to do extra tests. And, I was like,
[00:30:15] Heidi: They even wanted to do the needle that
[00:30:17] Jane: They did, they wanted to do amniocentesis and I just refused. 'cause I knew someone who had lost a perfectly healthy baby 'cause they were poking around and they were, it was kind of one of those situations where I'm not a religious person, but I was like, I have faith. She's gonna be okay. So just leave me alone and, uh,
[00:30:31] Etienne: Just
[00:30:31] Jane: leave. And leave her alone and just stop it. But for a little bit there. We thought she could have this, and what are we gonna do? Because 95% of the people who have it, they thought she had trisomy 18, 95% of fetuses who have that die in the womb
[00:30:49] Etienne: Oh
[00:30:49] Jane: the third trimester. And then if they are born and 95% of the live births after that then die within the first year of multiple system organ failure. And just horrific. It's horrific.
[00:30:59] Etienne: Wow. Oh my God.
[00:31:01] Jane: So, Brendan knew that we had gone through that together. So he reads the short story and he said, is this guy based on me?
[00:31:10] Etienne: Oh no.
[00:31:11] Jane: You know, because he knows that I have based people, like I'm gonna take a bit of this person and a bit of this person and put, and he read that and he was terrified that I had taken a bit of him and put, and I was like, oh my God. I was like, no, no.
[00:31:27] Jane: I was like, that is in no way based on you, you were. No, we were in it together. But I feel like sometimes people close to you are worried like were they your muse
[00:31:38] Heidi: Mm-hmm.
[00:31:39] Jane: In a bad way. But it reminds me of Mary Carr who wrote Lit and she wrote a couple of other memoirs, but she has this famous quote and I'm gonna butcher it, this is not exact, but a paraphrasing of something she said is like, if you wanted me to write more nicely about you, then you should have behaved better. Yeah. And so I had that in mind when I was writing my own memoir because I was like, you know what? Fuck it. This is how you were, you know, so if you're writing nonfiction, then you're just, you know, you're letting it all hang out. And this is who the person was from your perspective, and you just write that, you know. But if you're doing fiction, then you have these composites probably of people that even if it's subconscious, and forever people in my life are gonna be worried that they're, that they become part of a composite if it's a negative character there.
[00:32:31] Etienne: I was gonna say, but if they're, yeah, if they're good people in your life, they're not gonna be worried, I hope. I mean.
[00:32:40] Heidi: enemies should be worried, though.
[00:32:41] Etienne: Yeah. The ones who are bad to you should worry. That's why I thought forever. I could never write about my mother. Like I could put her in stories as characters, but I thought I could never write about her. 'Cause I didn't think that she was gonna die so young. She died pretty young. Um, as freeing, like freeing in a physical way, but freeing in like, okay, everybody says I should write about my mother. Now I kind of can, as part of this memoir about finding myself again. So, yeah, that was nice.
[00:33:11] Etienne: So, because I don't think I could actually just write a memoir about my mother, I don't think I could live through that. It's no way. No way. Yeah. We're, we're okay? We're good. I thought it'd be fun if I did actually make it as a writer and somebody, people actually wanted to read my work finally.
[00:33:30] Etienne: That would be awesome. And somebody wanted me to write more memoirs. I was thinking writing one just about the nineties, 'cause I had a lot of experiences from the nineties that were a whole lot of fun and interesting and all that. So, yeah.
[00:33:44] Heidi: Because you were in LA, right?
[00:33:46] Etienne: Yeah, in the grunge era, with the concert promoter boyfriend. Yeah. Like it was insane for those two years I was with him. And then I was also in the entertainment industry, so like on the fringe of that with my, my stepfather, who was a voiceover actor. So it was just like all of the stuff.
[00:34:04] Heidi: You should totally write that.
[00:34:05] Jane: Yeah. Gen X all the way.
[00:34:08] Heidi: Yeah.
[00:34:08] Etienne: Yeah. I had a good time. Yeah.
[00:34:13] Jane: See, the Muse is coming to you right now
[00:34:14] Etienne: Yeah, I know. It's always there. You just have to be open to it when it's whispering in your ear. You
[00:34:21] Jane: This has been a very meta episode. The muse is in Etty's ears as we speak.
[00:34:29] Etienne: Oh my God. Memory's crazy though. I don't know if we've talked about that yet, about have, I'm sure you guys have read about how memory is supposed to work. How we don't actually remember things the way that they are. Like if things were actually videotaped or filmed while we were experiencing them, we remember them differently.
[00:34:49] Etienne: If we saw actual footage of our life, it would be nothing of what we remembered it. And I guess every time we pull up a memory and we put it back in our brain, it gets remembered a little bit differently every time. Which I thought was really interesting when I found that out. And I beat myself up less about trying to be so exact about actual events that happened in my life and how exactly they might've happened.
[00:35:13] Etienne: I'm just like, this is what I remember. My memory is not perfect, but this is what my current brain remembers. I feel like that should be a disclaimer in the front of every memoir or autobi, you know, autobiography
[00:35:25] Heidi: A lot of people, I've, I think I've read that in the beginning of several memoirs where they do a disclaimer of, this is what I remember and how I remember it.
[00:35:36] Heidi: Now, it could have been a little different or somebody could have had a different experience, but this is how I remember it. And, memory's faulty and there you go.
[00:35:49] Jane: Like, did I do that? And I totally did.
[00:35:51] Jane: I just pulled, literally while we were talking, I pulled it off the shelf and I did write this little snippet of like, memory is a subjective animal for me, I remember according to emotional impact, if it affected me deeply, I remember deeply. Writing memories so that others can follow. The thread of a story has its challenges to maintain a story arc.
[00:36:15] Jane: The timeline of some events has been compressed. Some of the names have been changed. Others in my family may remember the following events differently for their own reasons, but this isn't their story. And so that's how I handled it because I know, I know, like I probably remembered it differently.
[00:36:31] Jane: I do also think, I'm wondering if there's been studies done, maybe there have been on people who keep journals, if they remember things a little bit more closely to how they happened. If you're writing it that day, you know what I mean? If writing, because Heidi was hanging out at my house and we were looking for something I had written down during the course of a series of really bad recurring nightmares I had when I was a teenager. And during the course of those nightmares, I wrote a phrase in Latin, but I don't speak Latin. I had to have it interpreted for me by a family friend who spoke Latin.
[00:37:05] Jane: 'cause I was like, what is this? And Heidi was really intrigued by it and she was like, find that journal. And so I was like, do you remember this Heidi? And I was like, looking, okay. So, but when I was looking through the journal to find this. Scary artifact. I came across a journal entry that my mom had written.
[00:37:23] Jane: I don't know if you remember this part, Heidi? 'cause that was the same face you made at the time. So
[00:37:29] Etienne: Your mom wrote in your journal.
[00:37:30] Jane: My mom had written in my journal. Because I had left it out on a table when I had fallen asleep in the living room. And then I went upstairs without taking it with me, and my mom found it the next day, read it, and then wrote an entry to me saying, oh, some interesting stuff, in here, and blah, blah, blah. I can't remember what she, I was so
[00:37:51] Heidi: She was so snotty about it, right?
[00:37:52] Jane: furious. Yes. And I had forgotten about it,
[00:37:57] Etienne: You've forgotten that she wrote in there
[00:37:59] Heidi: Yeah.
[00:38:00] Jane: Uh, until I found this with Heidi and I was reading it, but that means that she had read things that I had written about her, about my stepfather. Yeah. Some things. And I thought, oh my gosh, what a violation of my privacy.
[00:38:16] Jane: But I could see that she had definitely then. Saw my impressions of what happened, you know, and just different things in our family. So she didn't say that it was wrong until years later. I remember it differently. But, I don't know. I'm wondering how they know.
[00:38:37] Jane: That we're remembering it differently, and how do they quantify that? You know what I mean? What a, what a tricky study it is. Like the study of ideas, like how are they stored and how are they
[00:38:50] Etienne: I know it's freaky, right? Like we have, I mean this how, how, how, you're right. I couldn't believe it more if we were actually computers and we had actual hardware up here. You know, versus
[00:39:03] Jane: like bring up a file
[00:39:03] Etienne: are bio, we're biologic. We
[00:39:05] Heidi: You know what's crazy? I just saw, this is turning into the episode on memories. I saw a video and this girl was giving tips on how to recall a memory at will, and it was, it's like some kind of somatic, you do something with your body and supposedly I haven't tried it out yet. I literally just watched it yesterday.
[00:39:32] Etienne: You should send us that too. Well, I mean, it makes sense that we're talking about memory because actually Jane, in the very, very beginning said, the Muse is the daughter of Zeus
[00:39:43] Heidi: Yeah
[00:39:45] Etienne: and the
[00:39:46] Jane: the titaness of memory,
[00:39:47] Etienne: there we go.
[00:39:48] Jane: Mnemosyne. Yep.
[00:39:52] Etienne: So we accidentally like turn this into memory.
[00:39:57] Jane: But it makes sense. I
[00:39:58] Etienne: It does. You use your memories, like your idea should come from, I believe, your life being open to life and experiencing life in all of its horror and glory and pleasantry like it, there's, it's got everything. You know, like, I mean, I really hope that your life is more pleasant than not pleasant, but even the horrible things that happen. They teach you things
[00:40:23] Heidi: It's all fodder.
[00:40:24] Etienne: and yeah, it's all
[00:40:26] Heidi: I, totally believe that anytime something awful happens, I get through it and I'm thankful for the lessons, but I'm also like, Hey, I can use this. Like, when I talked about that ghost haunting me, you know, a few episodes back getting attacked by a ghost.
[00:40:44] Etienne: That was insane
[00:40:45] Heidi: I can use that in my horror writing now 'cause I was terrified, just terrified for six weeks straight. So I can use that for my characters and horror stories. So yeah, I don't want it to happen again, but
[00:41:02] Etienne: You could always go
[00:41:03] Heidi: I'm actually kind of, I'm grateful that it, it happened now 'cause I can use it for authenticity.
[00:41:11] Etienne: Man.
[00:41:12] Jane: I often think the experience of living is we are, our souls are just writing a story to learn from and us doing the art of storytelling then within this life, it's almost like this weird biological fractal. You know what I mean? It's like turtles all the way down. It's like, okay, so your soul makes this contract before you get here of just like, okay, so this time what I would like to learn is, you know, X and Y and Z.
[00:41:40] Jane: It's like, okay, well, what experiences could happen to you that would really just solidify those lessons? And so you kind of turn it over to the script writers, right? And they're like, okay, now go, you know, and then you get it, you get here, but I mean, you forget this contract, but you're living it and you're like, I don't like the way the story is going.
[00:42:00] Jane: And then maybe you can choose your own adventure. You're like, all right, let's have some twists and turns. But the overall architecture has been designed to definitely teach you a few lessons and then when you're done you're like, all right, I'd like to play a slightly different movie next time and let's maybe move some things around.
[00:42:18] Jane: But I really liked the actor who played my mom last time, but this time could she be my sister? And then you're just like, that's why we had this recognition. You're like, dude, were you in the last play that we were in together? And it's like, yes. Like I think that explains a lot of weird things and I've had that experience of a weird soul recognition with someone.
[00:42:38] Jane: And then I think, and then when we get here.
[00:42:40] Heidi: You feel like you know them
[00:42:41] Jane: Yeah, so like you were
[00:42:42] Heidi: met 'em.
[00:42:43] Jane: you were in the last movie we starred in together like in the 18th century, like yes. Cool. That was weird too. And then you just, but then while we're here, we're very meta about it and we're like, I need to still make sense of this play, so let me also make another play.
[00:42:56] Jane: And then it's like. And our art is just us sitting here really struggling to deal with the bug out that we signed up for because it seemed like a really good idea at the time. And so
[00:43:09] Etienne: Oh my God.
[00:43:10] Jane: art's just how we cope with being as Sting calls, spirits in the material world, and we're
[00:43:16] Heidi: Well,
[00:43:16] Etienne: Oh my goodness, you pull out Sting
[00:43:18] Heidi: it helps people. It helps people feel less alone too. When you read a book that you really resonate with that kinda speaks to some of your own life experiences. It helps you Yeah. Recognize oh someone else has gone through this or Yeah. I totally recognize this in myself. And that's what's great about great stories is
[00:43:44] Etienne: And great art
[00:43:44] Heidi: Yeah. You, you, it makes you, it helps you feel connected to another human being.
[00:43:51] Etienne: We all have hopes and fears and anxieties and goals. And I think that there's a lot of people out in the world who forget that until they see a TV show or a movie or read a book and they can find something in the characters to relate to.
[00:44:08] Heidi: Mm-hmm.
[00:44:09] Etienne: And I really hope that I as they go on with their lives, all these people, they just start looking at the strangers in the Food Lion in the Walmarts and in the Home Depots, and the people who are driving in the car in front of you.
[00:44:22] Etienne: These are all people who have hopes and fears and anxieties, and you don't know what their lives are like. They might be trailing your ass because they just had the worst day of their lives, and the last thing they wanna do is be on the road for one second longer, and they're about to just explode.
[00:44:41] Etienne: And uh, yeah, I have to remind myself that sometimes when people are really rude on the road, but and rude in real life.
[00:44:49] Heidi: Yeah. Yeah.
[00:44:50] Etienne: But yeah, I think it's easier for us artists to put ourselves in other people's shoes. I really just want the whole world to be better about that.
[00:45:01] Jane: Yeah, experiencing art and being open to it allows you to be more empathetic. And I think that that
[00:45:07] Heidi: Mm-hmm.
[00:45:08] Jane: And as artists, I think we just are a little bit more sensitive to it. And we also are just very cognizant of we're all in this other bigger play together. I'm thinking of like, that line from Walt Whitman is like the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. It's like, okay, what is your, what are we doing here? What are we gonna do? And, if giving people some more stories where they can maybe find something relatable, is what we can contribute, I am happy to sit here and listen and wait for the muse to be like, Hey. I got a cool idea for you, and then just have the discipline enough to freaking birth that thing. So.
[00:45:47] Etienne: Yeah.
[00:45:48] Heidi: That's the key. You can get ideas, but it's a matter of executing, so, yep.
[00:45:55] Etienne: Or finding the time to execute if this, you actually have another life that pays for your life.
[00:46:01] Jane: Oh, Lord, that's a whole other, that's a whole other conversation, right? Like, how do you actually carve out an artist's life? But, but step one, be open to the muse.
[00:46:12] Heidi: That's our show you've been listening to, the Women are Plotting. If you have a story you'd like to share or have any comments, we'd love to hear from you. Email us at info@thewomenareplotting.com and of course you can find us on all the socials. Thanks, and until next time, be safe and be excellent to each other.
