Stealing From Our Muses

I was lingering over lunch here at my desk (which is a short story in its own right) and I got to thinking about the stories we tell as we go through life. I was thinking about that point where our lives intersect with other people’s lives and inspiration flares.

There are two types of inspiration that happen at that intersection.

First, there is purely imaginative inspiration. Purely imaginative inspiration happens when something about the event or person fires a spark and your imagination creates another tale, completely removed from the current tale, based on the most tenuous of sparks. An example of this type of inspiration would be walking down the street and seeing a stranger almost stumble on the curb, which leads your imagination into a tale about a person who stumbles on the curb and pitches headlong into an alternate universe where no one believes them when they tell the tale.

Second, there is what I could call “imaginative imitation” inspiration. This takes the form of the classic “inspired by true events”, where you are sitting at lunch with a friend and they tell you the tale of the time they went to visit their aunt and their aunt’s cat attacked them without warning, sending them screaming from the house, with a tabby in hot pursuit. A simple change of name and perhaps place and a tale is born.

My question, my contemplation, involves the second type of tale. The first type is pretty clearing our imagination at work, weaving imaginary threads together to create something out of almost nothing. In those cases, I think it is pretty clear that the tale belongs to the first person to tell it.

But, what about the second type? Who does the tale rightfully belong too? The person writing the story about the cat attack or the person who initially told the story about the cat attack, or both?

What about the other areas of inspiration in our life? Who does inspiration belong to? Who should get credit? Who is the creator? Who is the imitator? At which point does imitation become imaginative theft?

As usual, I don’t have any answers, save to say that as a creative person I am often uncomfortably telling tales that do not belong to me, especially when the tale is very close to the true event. Part of this train of thought is something that T.R. inspired in me, and that is a sort of question at well. At what point are we stealing from our muses?