Where do you get your ideas? (Dreams)

News! Starting with Week 22 (beginning on June 17th), I’ll be participating in the Clarion West Write-a-thon.  I attended the Clarion West Writers Workshop back in 1999, and I love the program.  It’s one of the reasons I am where I am today in many areas of my life.  If you want to support me in my push to Week 26 (and support the workshop), you can make a pledge here.

And now, back to your regularly scheduled blog post.

One of my favorite things to do is to sleep.  Not necessarily because I’m tired all the time, but because I dream pretty hard.  Even if I can’t remember my dreams particularly well (unfortunately, the Good Drugs do get in the way of that), I carry the feelings/shapes of the dreams with me into the next day.  A bit of a dream hangover.

And, occasionally, I get amazing story ideas.

Case in point: one of my published stories, “Imarja’s Children,” was pretty much written as I dreamed it out.  (Giant killer storm on another planet?  Check.  Kids trying to survive it on their own?  Check.  Dark conclusion?  Check!)  But that’s the exception rather than the rule.  How do you take an amazing dream you had and turn it into a story?

Hearing about another person’s dream can be boring.  One reason for this is that the audience is often missing out on a boatload of context, either from the dreamer’s life or from the dream itself, that the teller may not realize is important.  Even if they do, going back to fill in all of that background can get in the way of storytelling.  Exposition = information dump = boring.

Also, connections/decisions made in the dream may have made sense at the time (Of course we would go to Grandma’s house when the apocalypse comes!) but fall apart under closer inspection.  Dreams follow a certain logic that does not always translate well to real life.  And real life doesn’t always translate well into fiction.  Fiction requires a logic that real life doesn’t always have and that dreams rarely have.  Even if you’re writing something you consider to be “surreal” or “magical realism,” the story still needs an internal logic.

So you’ve had an amazing dream and want to use it as the basis for a story.  What do you do?

1. Accept that you’re going to have to make changes.  Even if the dream seems to have handed you the plot on a silver platter, as you get to know the characters and build the world/backstory, some things will need to change.  And that’s okay.
2. You don’t need to keep everything from the dream.  Keep what works or what inspires you (a character, a setting, a name, an idea) and dump the rest.  Why keep the tailings along with the gold?
3. Remember to ask, “Why?” and ask it often.  As I think I’ve mentioned before, Sarah Werner has an excellent episode of her Write Now podcast (The Most Important Question a Writer Can Ask) about the power of asking “Why?” and how it can help get to the heart of a character’s motivation.  This question can also help weed out the aspects of the dream that don’t really make sense.
4. To build on 2 and 3: Don’t waste time trying to incorporate/explain the parts that don’t make sense for the story you’re writing.  Even if they were amazing when you dreamed them, you may not be able to use them now.  But fear not–you don’t need to throw them out.  Write them down and move on.  Perhaps you can use them later.
5. Get into a habit of writing down your dreams.  Note recurring images, characters, events, etc.  Often, these are ideas that resonate with you.  If a particular element is missing from the dream you’re trying to mine for story ideas, there might be another dream you can use to fill in the gap(s).
6. Not everyone enjoys their dreams or wants to remember them.  Some people don’t ever remember their dreams.  If this is you, don’t feel like you’re missing out.  There are plenty of other places to look for inspiration!

These stories I’ve written so far were based on dreams:

• #1 (“Reborn”):  I used the basic idea of someone returning who wasn’t quite the same person who’d left.
• #5 (“Your Name Shall Be Known”): I woke up with this title in my head but no idea what the story was about.
• #7 (“Incorporation”): The dream gave me a crazy scenario (the main character slowly being eaten by an alien), but I had to figure out why/how this came to pass and how/whether he got out of it alive.  I had this dream years earlier and didn’t use the idea until that week.
• #15 (“The Tunnel”): This story is based on a recurring dream I’ve had about (you guessed it) a tunnel down in the basement.
• #17 (“Time Capsule”): This story was based on a dream about some amazing historical finds being hidden behind a wall in an aircraft hangar, though I think the dream was based on a news article about a similar situation.

What is the craziest dream you’ve ever had?

Week 20: Synthesis (4,581 words)

Excerpt: It waits.

It does not know what it did before it came online, but a likely answer is more waiting.  Waiting for parts to synthesize into a whole.  Waiting for circuits to complete.  Waiting for programs to compile.

It waits.

Then there is another.  A not-self.  The not-self moves with intent though without precision.  As the not-self approaches, detected by the heat and motion sensors, the cameras’ irises open.

A second joins the first.  Microphones pick up sounds, which resolve into speech.

“Sothisisthebattlearmor?” asks the first.  It parses the speech into language, into words: So this is the battle armor?

“Topoftheline,” replies the second. Top of the line.

Take-away: Trying to be particular with the voice makes the writing slow.  You need to be careful with the diction (word choice).  Toward the end, I abandoned care in favor of getting the story written, but I know when I go back to edit it, the voice of the piece is going to be one of the most important (and picky) considerations.