Using Dreams

I have noticed that some of the best stories come from dreams while some of my most boring conversations are listening to other people recount their dreams.

I hope that if I ever tell you one of my dreams, it'll be a one-liner and relevant to you: "I dreamed you were a CIA agent and your mission was to seduce Rani Mukerji." To the contrary, I've found that I'm seldom any more bored than when someone tells me something they dreamed that might be quite significant to them, but it is significant only to them. By keeping things short, I hope that if you are bored by my fevered ravings, you won't be bored for long.

The fact that I dreamed about you can be majorly creepy because it means you have invaded my subconscious and you might not appreciate the unwanted (subconscious) attention. Thus, if you were Rani Mukerji and if I had dreamed about you (I haven't.), I probably shouldn't say anything to you.

If you can relate to what I just said about dreams, what makes you think anybody wants to hear about your writing project?

Particularly, that hot chick or dude you made into the hero's love-interest who bears a creepy resemblance to the hot chick/dude you're talking to. I know a guy who who wrote all the attractive females in his writing group into his stories. Repressed sexual fantasies aside, most people need a more compelling reason to hear about your work-in-progress than the mere fact that you are writing it. World-building is a most enjoyable past-time, but sharing the details of your future-history with someone at a dinner party is a great way to not get invited back.

Talk about works in progress should be confined to strategy sessions with other authors wherein you trade hints and tips about how to get over tough plot points or other mechanical details of bringing a work to completion. If you're in the midst of such a session with another author and think, "what's WITH this guy?" you should do everything in your power to make sure he doesn't think the same about your work. I find it delightful to read conversations between authors advising each other on howto make the magic happen.

Of course, those conversations are more interesting when they are between writers you admire. You might be less enthralled by exchanges between unknowns.

There is a time and a season for you to shout from the rooftops, "Sir, or Madam, will you read my book. It took me years to write, will you take a look," but that comes after your work is at a mature state, or you have a reputation and a following. Until then, I suggest you only tease out the choicest details.

But I said that sometimes the best stories come from dreams. The modern mind doesn't quite know what to do with dreams. I am not one to interpret them, but I will try to mine them for story ideas. I don't try to write up my unconscious mind's jumbled narratives unrefined.

Instead I've had story elements occur in dreams that I adapt into stories. For interest, a dream of my High School (that you'd find boring) was distinguished by the appearance of a certain trouble shooter. He wasn't quite human, and he wasn't quite divine. I didn't understand this character, his motives, or his means of solving problems, but I thought this general impression would make a useful depiction of a "trans-human" character. Such would be dispatched by Serious Adults to Fix Something. That turned into my first novel, which is safely ensconced within a desk drawer.


I think that dreams are a treasure-trove of story-ideas and solutions to story-problems, but they are unruly beasts who need to be pointed in the right direction, and their content never taken at face-value.

Axe-grinding vs Story-telling

Unless you receive a Federal subsidy large enough to blind you to things like sustainability, liberty, and basic mathematics, you might not like the direction the USA has taken in the last decade or so. Or you might think that the government exists to tax your enemies, subsidize your friends and get large enough to make sure nobody can escape its clutches.

The citizens of a representative democracy are responsible to know what its gubmint is doing and replace corrupt rascals with just statesmen. The only problem is that both parties prefer to put no one but weenies on the ballot.

Let's be clear: I think the Republican Party is every bit as corrupt as the Democrat Party.

This poses a problem for the writer who is also a citizen: what do do about this?
 

I've seen Sarah Hoyt, Ric Locke, and Larry Correia tackle this problem in turn. If you like guns, you can get an articulate argument for training responsible citizens in gun handling, and defense so that the crazed murderer can be immediately confronted with a violent response. (When seconds count, the police are only minutes away.) And if you hate Communists, Sarah Hoyt can regale you with tales of Portugal under the left. I have no doubt that if Ric Locke or Robert Heinlein were alive to day they'd be doing likewise.

I have friends whose politics are as contradictory to mine as night is to day. And they've poured their politics into their writing making all the villains like me and all the heroes like them. This makes their stories as readable as a Jack Chick tract. Tolerable if you agree, intolerable if you do not. The ratio of axe-grinding to story-telling is over ten to one.

I've also seen slightly more sophisticated tales wherein the labels are scrubbed from the heroes and villains, but they act out allegories of good and evil while sermonizing about the virtues of their position. Atlas Shrugged comes to mind here. It's a little better than a Chick tract, but I still skipped past the 20 page sermons by John Galt, et al. Here the ratio of axe-grinding to story-telling is improved, but still heavy-handed.

I thing Michael McCloskey gets the balance right in "The Trilisk Ruins" (5 stars). The gubmint is the antagonist and it doesn't matter whether the administration is Republican or Democrat. (Both parties signed onto the USA PATRIOT Act after all.) The heroes are "criminals" who aim to misbehave. They spend a fair amount of time when they're in civilization scrubbing logs of incriminating evidence and bribing bureaucrats to overlook minor infractions. And they find the Feds like to infect everyone's computer with dormant spyware.

None of this gets in the way of a ripping good yarn. The hero and her handsome male companions go rocketing off into space in search of treasure with the gubmint a few steps behind trying to stop them and/or steal the treasure for themselves. I figured the axe-grinding to story-telling ratio was fairly light-handed, but I should get a 2nd opinion from a statist.

Many times you'll read an SF story wherein the aliens are just like us, but with some prosthetic makeup on their nose and funky jewelry (Bajoran), or pointy ears and eyebrows (Vulcan), or spots on their skin (Trill). Why, you might ask Gene Roddenberry? Because more elaborate makeup and alien get-ups cost too much, he'd say.

McCloskey has no such constraints. He devises aliens with tri-lobed brains, or 20-lobed brains, and he gives them really alien forms. Like 40 limbs, no sense of smell or hearing, but a sense of mass. And he gives this a plausible explanation without getting bogged down in technobabble. High marks for making his aliens alien.

Often you'll read Science Fiction with artificial intelligences and lots of networked computers and there's a sense that technology is just magic with wires. Not so in "The Trilisk Ruins." Communications protocols, encryption, and other terms of the geek's art are handled intelligently without any hand-wavy bull.

"The Trilisk Ruins" is the first novel in a series. If you buy this and like it, be prepared to buy a few more follow-up novels. I just did.

Isaac Asimov vs Gene Roddenberry

Isaac Asimov is a Science Fiction demigod. And he was a Science Fiction demigod back in 1966 when he wrote an article in TV Guide wherein he ragged on the science fiction shows airing at that time. In addition to being a Science Fiction demigod, Asimov was also an author of textbooks. I don't write textbooks, but I get annoyed at bogus science when I see it in science fiction stories. In 1966, I was an 11 year old, and I picked up on some of the same errors that he did.

In addition to savaging Lost In Space, Asimov also made disparaging remarks about the other TV show that premiered that fall: Star Trek.

The fella getting disparaged over Star Trek was another Science Fiction demigod: Gene Roddenberry.

And they exchanged letters as described here. You really should read their correspondence. It's amazing.

What I found particularly helpful reading the Roddenberry/Asimov correspondence is how Asimov did not create an enemy with his critical remarks about Star Trek. Instead, Roddenberry came back with a gracious reply to Asimov's criticisms that displayed a great deal of admiration for Asimov's work. (Did I mention that Asimov was a Science Fiction demigod back in 1966?)

Both men were adults and nobody felt so insecure that he got mad or defensive. Instead, they went on to correspond most profitably and Asimov provided helpful suggestions to Roddenberry. I think that it was because both men loved Science Fiction and that could put criticism into an appropriate context.

That's what we should do when someone rubs our fur the wrong way. If there's something wrong with The Aristotelian or Finding Time, then I should hear it, own up to what's real in the criticism, and fix what I can. The fella pointing out the flaws isn't my enemy as much as my ignorance of the writing craft or my laxity in not paying attention to detail.