Creative Genius: Inspiration, Dedication, and The Muse By Charlie Melkonian

In his book, “The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present,” Paul McCartney writes, about the Beatles song “Yesterday,” “Somewhere in a dream, I heard this tune. When I woke up, I thought, ‘I love that tune. What is it? Is it Fred Astaire? Is it Cole Porter?’...it became clear that no one knew the song and it didn’t exist, except in my head.” 

This is an exhilarating story; McCartney, one of the greatest songwriters of all time, wakes up one day and suddenly writes a song that will become a classic. How do we explain this? Did some otherworldly power give McCartney this song in his sleep? Was it simply a stroke of luck, or an indicator of McCartney’s true genius?

This has long been a question within all artistic mediums: are artists born with streaks of brilliance, of genius far ahead of their time, or do they spend 10,000 hours perfecting their chosen craft? 

Paul McCartney was fascinated with songwriting from a young age. McCartney writes, in the foreword to “The Lyrics,” “There’s a whole process to learning songwriting…the first thing was to copy other people, like Buddy Holly and Little Richard - and Elvis…learning the standards of early rock and roll.” To McCartney, songwriting is a “process,” something that he experimented with by imitating the greats, not simply by being born with extraordinary talent. McCartney’s testimonials throughout the book illustrate that voraciousness and curiosity may be the qualities that lead one to levels of artistic exceptionality. In other words, a fascination with the inner workings of one's artistic medium could be what separates the good from the great. 

Another creative genius comes to mind when discussing intuition vs. artistry: William Shakespeare. In his book, “The Genius of Shakespeare,” Jonathan Bate discusses the contrasting ideas of the natural-born genius, and the genius of learning, craft, and community. Bate writes, “It has been suggested that genius became a romantic obsession because it was a conception that seemed to guarantee individuality.” As a society, we are consumed by stories like that of McCartney’s “Yesterday,” genius coming in the form of the Muse. Bate, however, doesn't opt in for this simple explanation. He posits that, “...By ‘Shakespeare’ we mean not an individual, but a body of work…shaped by many individuals - by the dramatist's education and his precursors, by the actors of his company, by the audience without whom no play can be completed.” 

“Precursors,” as well as an artistic community, were just as important to McCartney. McCartney had Lennon, The Beatles, and their producer George Martin. Shakespeare had an entire troupe of actors and fellow playwrights. In Bate’s eyes, geniuses like McCartney and Shakespeare are indebted to those who came before, as well as their contemporaries who influenced their work. 

It is worth localizing these ideas: how does the general person deal with this question of inspiration vs. dedication? In “Writing Down the Bones,” a creative writing guidebook, Natalie Goldberg writes, “First thoughts are…unencumbered by ego, by that mechanism in us that tries to be in control, tries to prove the world is permanent and solid, enduring and logical.” 

Perhaps McCartney’s experience writing “Yesterday” could be explained as a “first thought:” his subconscious, in a state of purity and stillness (lofty words though they may be), is able to come up with “Yesterday.” Inspiration, then, could be an allowing of the subconscious to run free, permitting the creative to write about subjects they weren’t necessarily setting out to write about. 

Another fascinating tid bit from McCartney about “Yesterday:” “It’s been suggested to me that this is a ‘losing my mother’ song, to which I’ve always said, ‘No, I don’t believe so.’ But, you know, the more I think about it - ‘Why she had to go I don’t know, she wouldn’t say’ - I can see that that might have been part of the background, the unconscious behind this song after all.” This space of the “unconscious,” overruling the logical brain, may be what some refer to as the presence of the Muse. 

The idea of the Muse itself is a complicated subject. Does it really matter who or what the Muse of “Yesterday” is when it is interpreted as a song of grief and loss? Regardless of the artist's personal connection with their own work, the listener’s experience is just as, if not more, important. Singer-songwriter John Mayer, on this topic, states, “I don’t like telling anyone that a song is about somebody. Because…it takes people away from themselves.” When the artist and the Muse are removed from the work, art becomes a bit like magic; an illusion of reality is created that varies in experience from individual to individual.

To ask this question of what makes a creative genius is really just that: asking a question. We may see patterns across numerous artists, of great stories like that of McCartney’s “Yesterday,” but there is certainly no precise formula. Scholar Brett Candlish Millier writes, of famed poet Elizabeth Bishop’s extensive revision process, “More than once in the drafts of Bishop's published poems, one finds that she came to express in the final draft nearly the opposite of what she started out to say.” Bishop was a poet who was intent on reworking and reworking, on finding the perfect lines to express her inner life. While inspiration may have originally struck, she revised her work unwaveringly until she was satisfied with her final draft. 

Likewise, McCartney writes, “Putting the music together [for “Yesterday”] went well, but for the lyrics I still only had the line ‘scrambled eggs, oh my baby, how I love your legs…I wanted to keep the melody so I knew I’d have to fit the syllables of the words around that…you [begin] to have possibilities like ‘yes-ter-day’ and ‘sud-den-ly.” This demonstrates that even “Yesterday,” a song that was born in McCartney’s sleep, actually had an extensive creative process from start to finish. 

Perhaps creative genius, or really just creativity, can be defined as: inspiration followed by a progression of chiseling and chiseling until the artist is eventually content with calling their product a final draft. An initial melody followed by lyrics, a general sketch of a poem followed by an abundance of revisions. As Leonardo DaVinci succinctly put it, “Art is never finished, only abandoned.” The Muse appears, vanishes, and leaves the creative to chisel until it is time for them to step back, and abandon their creation. The work is then in the hands of the reader, the listener, the viewer, “the audience without whom no play can be completed.”