Searching the Universe for Ideas

I've been blogging about writing in a more literary fashion.  The first critical step in any writing endeavor is to seek out an idea, a story concept.  There are many ways to do this, but some are likely to lead to more literary works than others.  Writing in a literary fashion is about building and revealing meaning beyond the surface.  If one plans to do so from the very beginning, it can be easier. 

You can just wander your world and look for interesting events, bits of dialogue, or people.  Observing the world may help you come up with a quirky or interesting alternative explanation for what you find.  This, alone, won't necessarily lead to literary stories, but it could give you some vivid descriptions and characters, which can be added to a story you're working on.  It's possible that observation can lead to some fascinating and literary stories.  As I said, literary stories are all about building and revealing meaning beneath the surface.  Sometimes, that can be harder to do when one starts with reality than when one starts with something already rife with cultural meaning.  In books like 1984 and Animal Farm, Orwell started with cultural observations and turned those observations into social commentary still impacting our lives today.  In A Modest Proposal, Swift merged satire with social commentary in order to make a biting and literary piece.  Writing from observation can certainly be done and done well, especially if one approaches it from a social commentary perspective. 

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You can also find story ideas from historical events.  Many of Shakespeare's famous pieces turned history into literary fiction, as did Homer's Odyssey and The Illiad, among countless others.  Books like these form the backbone of modern western literature. The key is not to just recount the events as they occurred but to imbue the events with meaning beyond just the facts of the story.  Otherwise, it's just history.  Every line and event needs to have more than the obvious meaning, and every scene needs to have multiple layers like you may find in books like The Help. The story should not be simply a recounting of facts but an interweaving of story, meaning, and fact. 

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A reader can also use dreams to shape meaning and tell stories.  A dream is full of personal and sometimes general symbolism.  There are countless books of dream interpretation, or one can take a dream and turn it into whatever you want it to be.  You may dream of yourself, but your main character doesn't have to remain you.  You can use your dream as a starting point to spin something new, as several writers have done such as in The Strange Case of Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde, Catch-22, and Frankenstein.  However, if you just record the events of the dream, it probably won't make coherent sense, let along literary meaning.  As with history or fact, the dream is just a jumping off point.  It's up to you to build meaning and literary merit. 

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Also, a writer can use a literary source to create something new.  This can be done to an extreme like in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, wherein the original text is simply added to with new motifs and zombie-fighting events.  However, more commonly, a writer will take a fairy tale, Shakespeare play Jane Austen novel, the Bible, or any such text and turn it into a new story.  James Joyce's Ulysses and Eudora Welty's The Robber Bridegroom come to mind. 

Any of these sources can produce effective literary weight in its subject matter if the writer is careful.  The important thing is to read a lot within whatever genre you want to write and figure out what works for you. 

Writing from Dreams

On Dreams: 

Another possible source for creative writing is from dreams.  When I was in undergrad at Vassar College, I took a class on dreams and dreaming.  It was an enlightening class that taught me a technique, one of many, I'm sure, for translating dreams.  I often use it with my friends to this day.  Step one is to start a dream journal.  If you record your dreams, your subconscious is a lot more likely to let you remember more dreams.  This generally works for me.  Once you have a dream you find fascinating and that feels significant, you can take apart the dream for meaning.  You can look at each symbol--each person, each item, each word, each emotion--and look at them in relation to each other and your life.  If you're frustrated at your inability to learn something in college, that may come out as frustration with a magic talking pen, frustration with an ogre you know is your roommate, or something like that.  If you're scared of something new, that may come out as something you're scared of in your life.  When I was going through stress and fear as a child, I often dreamed of spiders, which symbolized fear for me.  Spiders rarely appear in my dreams anymore since I no longer fear them like I once did.  

For Instance: 

You can go look up symbols in one of many dream dictionaries, but in my experience and according to that class, a symbol in a dream is a personal thing.  There are cases where these dream journals apply but many cases where they don't.  One can look up meanings suggested by such journals and then figure out if that interpretation is right in a given situation or not.  If not, this method can perhaps suggest to the mind ideas about where to go from there.  A pop tart in my dream may symbolize a treasure hidden in something bland, a boring obstacle I need to work through in order to discover something sweet.  If I hated Pop Tarts, it may symbolize something nasty, some trial I would have to go through.  Meanwhile, a friend of mine had a dream of a Pop Tart wherein she kept trying to toast it in the toaster where she thought it ought to be, but it wouldn't work.  Then she tried nuking it in the microwave and it did work.  When I walked her through the emotions in her dream, how she felt about the situation, she realized she was the Pop Tart.  She was trying to make her current situation work, and it wasn't working.  She realized if she went home and tried something else, it may work better.  That dream became part of her decision making about a life change.  The best person to translate a dream is the dreamer because they would understand what the symbols mean to them.  It's also best to translate within a week, so the symbols still mean the same thing. 

Literal Dream Use in Writing: 

I have often turned dreams into short stories or used them as a spring board for a scene or character in a book.  Sometimes, it's after I have taken apart the dream and figured out what it meant for me.  Sometimes, it's after I lay in bed post-dream, in daydreaming mode, and transform the dream into story that makes narrative sense.  I dreamed once that I was a child prince who was challenged by a dragon to participate in a contest.  He was looking for someone special, so he had several kids throw plastic utensils at a wall to see if they could get it to stick in the wall.  Several other kids tried and failed.  When I threw the plastic fork, he threw a dagger at the same time, and the dagger stuck the knife into the wall.  I turned that into a scene in a fantasy novel I wrote in high school, without the plastic knife, about a little abused boy saved from his miserable family life by a dragon who discovered his true worth.  I am in good company when I use dreams in this fashion.  According to many sources, Jo Rowling's original creation of Harry Potter came through visions and dreams.  

I did not then understand how to translate dreams, but I was still able to use the dream in a story.  It's hard to know this far removed what the parts of the dream meant to me at the time, nor can I recall many of the emotions surrounding it.  If I used a Freudian dream interpretation, chances are the dream would come out sounding sexual, even if it meant nothing of the sort to me at the time.  

I have heard that everyone in a dream somehow represents the dreamer.  I can sometimes learn something different from a dream, interpreting it both ways, with me-as-everyone and with people in the dream representing relationships or people in my life.  If I had to guess, on a figures-in-dreams-represent-others level that the dragon was something intimidating, possibly high school or a teacher.  I clearly felt isolated from the other kids in my dream, as I did in high school.  But I also felt special, like I was, perhaps with the help of someone intimidating [a teacher?], able to overcome a challenge that others were not able to overcome.  If I translated the dream in the me-as-everyone way, I would say that the dragon was my sense of responsibility to be perfect in school, which intimidated me.  However, because of the help of my own perfectionism, I found a way to overcome challenges.  Both meanings work.  

Symbolic Dream Use in Writing: 

I used the events in the dream on a literal level when I was in high school to write a story about a dragon and a little boy.  That is one possible use.  On the other hand, if I use my translation of the dream, I can broaden and deepen the meaning.  For instance, I could write a story about a young person, possibly male, who feels isolated from his peers because of some unique ability or disability.  He has a lively fantasy life wherein those around him become dragons, fairies, or monsters in his imagination.  One particular "dragon," a teacher he finds scary, gives him an intimidating challenge that at first scares him but then allows him to shine with the help of the teacher.  That story could be written as a children's story, a short story, or a piece of a bildungsroman,  or coming of age novel, wherein this was a formative event in his life.  

In other words, dreams can be used on at least two levels, literal and figurative.  If we concentrate on the literal level, we can write a story inspired by events of the dream.  If we use them on a figurative level, we seek the meanings and emotions behind them, inspired by our own experiences, to give them a deeper meaning.  I could still use the dragon as a dragon, for instance, but also use him as a symbol for intimidating people in a child's life who turn out okay.  Our dreams can inspire us to a more exciting and sometimes more profound level of writing than we might if we're limited to our own waking consciousness.  

Fulfillment

For the last year and a half, I have been working on the first novel of a sort of LDS romance trilogy, a tag team novel that starts with After the dream and is about Julia and Pedro, who discover that the illusion of happily ever after doesn't last and then have to pick up the pieces and start anew.  The next one will feature one of the major characters from the first one and will be called Pigs Fly.  It's about Connor, a man who decides he will only marry when pigs fly, then he meets a female pilot with a pet pig.  The third, Drama's Queen, features Connor's mentor, Gayle, who is a woman in her late fifties/early sixties and has decided since romance has never worked out for her, she only ever needs to worry about taking care of her elderly mother and running a community theater.  Then a man comes along to complicate things.

I have been wanting to get properly published in a popular market for as long as I can remember.  I have children's books and other short pieces to send out, but it always feels like pressing things get in the way of moving forward on my dream.  There is no satisfaction like seeing that email that publishers have received your manuscript after a lifetime of wanting that.  Of course, it will be better yet when I get an acceptance.  But that email ranked among the best Christmas presents I've ever had.  It means I followed through on a commitment to myself at long last.  Now, to push forward with the next.

I hope everyone who reads this had a wonderful Christmas season.