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.

A Sustainable Rhythm of Writing

I made a bad mistake a few years ago that I've not yet gotten clear of.

I attend a writers' group. In such a group it is customary to bring something to read each week. It is bad form to bring more than a few pages. First, it monopolizes the group's time. Second, one's attention tends to wander after several minutes. I don't recommend you take more than three or five pages each week. This can be a trap, because you can think your written output per week should be three or five pages and that's wrong.

That's a trap I've fallen into and am trying to escape.

You should write as much as you can with quality. Or, if your project is at some points without quality. Let's go back to Heinlein's five commandments the first of which is "You must write." It's really easy for me to get out of the habit of writing, realize it's going to be writers' group tomorrow nite, then dash off 3-5 pages. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

You can't improve as a writer at this rate. Remember, you've got to write a million words to not-suck.

Every writer needs to maintain a rhythm of writing. When I've been on my game, I spend a while each night dashing off prose. It keeps my head in the work. And if I write last thing before bed, I've got all night for my subconscious to solve story problems for me. Maybe it's first thing in the morning for you. Maybe you can't write every day, but you have to maintain some kind of rhythm in your life where you're cranking out prose.

When you are putting together your first draft it is important that you write as much as fast as you can. For one thing you want to keep your head in the same place. You want a consistency of voice and you don't want niggling details like characters' eye color to slip out of short-term memory.

This can disrupt your rhythm of writing. I recently finished writing an important story to submit to a contest. It consumed my life in a non-sustainable way. But I got the story done, I got it edited, I ran it past beta-readers, I revised it, and I got it sent out on time. It felt pretty good to get done, but the burst of energy burnt me out for a little while thereafter. Going back to my novel was almost a let down.

That's because I have been attacking it piecemeal for over a year between distractions like this story, and before that this anthology. What I need to do is attack it as a whole, get Mycroft into and out of trouble in Kashmir, get him to Saskatchewan, and then back to London before Sherlock finds out he's been gone.

This is a sucky time for New Year's Resolutions, but here's one anyway. I resolve to establish a sustainable rhythm of writing and to finish the first draft of Steamship to Kashmir before I entertain anything else.

One Amazing Pigmy

The brain is a neural network. It works by establishing connections between cells with varying degrees of connectedness then sending electro-chemical pulses through it.

The brain is continually tweaking these connections and it uses sleep to make adjustments. During sleep, what you learned during waking hours is contextualized and adjusted to fit everything you already know. All this happens below the level of conscious thought.

When you cudgel your brain into solving a problem it is a conscious effort that puts all the facts into your mind.  In this you load up the brain with all the puzzle pieces that the subconscious uses to solve your problem. And the subconscious will continue working after you've nodded off to sleep.

When I write a story, I have to think of how I'm going to get from where I am to the next point. It can be as easy as putting Mycroft Holmes on horseback with a couple sepoys and sending him into the countryside of Kashmir. Or it can be as tough as figuring out how a bunch of boffins can miss the solution our young adult protagonist finds at the climax of your story.

One of my favorite grand masters of the golden age of Science Fiction was A. E. Van Vogt. He spoke of how he went about engaging his brain to write:

"I took the family alarm clock and went into the spare bedroom that night, and set it for an hour and a half. And thereafter, when I was working on a story, I would waken myself every hour and a half, through the night--force myself to wake up, think of the story, try to solve it, and even as I was thinking about it I would fall back asleep. And in the morning, there would be a solution, for that particular story problem. Now, that's penetrating the subconscious, in my opinion. It's penetrating it in a way that I don't think they'll be able to do any better, thirty centuries from now."

What Van Vogt did in his spare bedroom was to alternate between conscious and unconscious thought every 90 minutes or so directed toward the goal of solving the story problems of his work in progress. I think this approach will work with any kind of problem solving, but I particularly want to use it on one of my future writing projects.

A. E. Van Vogt was characterized by Damon Knight as a pigmy at a giant's keyboard. If this is so, then he was one amazing pigmy.