The Place For My Writers Notes

Original Posting April 2, 2016

Over the years, I've had various folks recommend a dream journal. The idea is that when you wake up at night, you scribble some notes on your dreams. And hope that they make sense in the morning!

I have to admit, most of the time my dreams slip away from me. Although sometimes I do manage to wake up with a fragment stuck in my head, and I do try to scribble some notes. Anyway, how about picking a number from 1 to 6?

Now here's a fragment from one of my dreams that you've picked.

1. A group of Wolfmen and a protector. Is he protecting the Wolfmen or the humans?
2. A big book with a cover with Velcro on it that's sticking to things.
3. A pot full of sausage stew
4. Hitting a Frankenstein dog, sewn together out of various parts, with a stepladder
5. Bleeding blisters on someone's leg, and trying to find a Band-Aid to lend them
6. Giant gray pine cones with mouths full of teeth, eating their way up something. We were trying to climb the trees and kick them away, but they grabbed someone's foot.

Please don't dream analyze or psychoanalyze these, okay? I really don't want to know :-)

Your task, should you choose to try it, is to add setting, characters, and whatever else you like, and stretch that fragment into a scene or even a whole story. Simple, right? It's just a dream. So go for it.

Write!
tink

Original posting 3 September 2008

. . . and call me when you have a fire?

"Dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of our lives." William Dement

"Nothing is so awesomely unfamiliar as the familiar that discloses itself at the end of a journey." Cynthia Ozick

Dreaming lets us be quietly insane at night, while writing allows us that same freedom in our daily life. Daydreams, imagination, role playing -- being more than we can be any other way. What's writing to you?

Now add in that notion of awesome unfamiliarity. At the end of a journey, when we look around, even the well-worn bits and pieces of our home often seem brand-new and surprising. And maybe sometimes in the morning, after we've been insane all night?

Go ahead. How does that license for freedom and the awesome unfamiliarity at journey's end go together?

Write?

The pad by my bed says, "alien waiting room."

I keep a pad and pen by the bed just in case one of the thoughts that I stumble over while drifting between sleep and waking seems likely to be useful. I don't dream very much, or at least I don't remember my dreams very much, but occasionally something will come to mind in that half asleep half awake transition and seem like it should be useful. I've learned to scribble down a few words, and can usually figure out what they are later.

Last night, I realized that sometime this week I had scribbled something down. So I stopped to read it. "Alien waiting room." Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to resurrect the line of thought behind it. An alien in a waiting room? A waiting room in an alien society? Or is the waiting room alien itself? As an SF fan, I tend to think of alien as nonhuman, but it could be the simple foreigner -- an alien to the shore?

In any case, let's use it in a slightly expanded form as a prompt for writing. So, here is your one line starter.

She looked up and said, "There's an alien in the waiting room."

Feel free to give her a name. Oh, and why is she looking up? What kind of alien, the local foreigner or the more exotic visitor from the stars? And what kind of a waiting room is this, doctor, dentist, automobile repair, or something else?

You can use this one line as is to start a story or a poetry. You can modify it and use it somewhere in your writing. You can even simply let it inspire the writing, without ever explicitly using these words. But . . .

WRITE!

tink
(I shall try to avoid pondering just what I was thinking when I wrote "alien waiting room" on the pad by my bed. I'm sure I had something in mind, but it seems to be gone now. Oh, well. :-)

original posting: Thu, 3 Aug 1995 14:46:24 EDT

[for those who haven't had the pleasure before--first, a few words from me. then the answers you might have thought you would find here. and, if we're lucky, something to end it all...with a BANG!]

the smoke hovers. your eyes sting.

the ancient figure that ushered you into this strange cavern of shadows seems to have vanished while you were blinking.

and...

in the east, sunrise blares up from the darkened hulks of sleeping mammoths and other detritus of the city. streaks slide in and up, widen, and slowly feed blood into the dark sky, beating it into blue life for another day.

in the west, a hungry thunderstorm slavers and scratches across the quivering backs of foothills. from time to time, it roars out a challenge to the world, afraid of nothing and showing it. do not tease it, for it is cornered and sorely fearful, and its bite is worse than its bark.

in the north, the frozen wastes quietly snore their way into crystalline dreams of glory. They glint, remembering the ancient days when ice gripped the wide spaces to the south in a clean white glove of tender glacial calm. They crackle in the cold air, as ears ache and noses drip, with sympathy for the poor enslaved relatives forced into cubes by human technology. They snort, nightmares recurring, as they think of being dunked in soda or alcohol at the hands of a human. Imagine! melting, melting, turning into mere water, just for human tastes.

in the south, outlaws cuss, horses rear, and other quaint relics of a mythical past fan their six-guns and stand tall, no matter how short they may be...

all this, while in the mystical write direction, words tumble and shimmer, coating ideas with fractal colors and incoherence, cracked! and limited by punctuation, mere passing letters on the river of ink...

in the center, spinning slowly inside a tangled web of grammar, lies...

[oh, heck, let me put down my tropes and yack at you.

this is writers. glad you could drop by. feel free to take part in the continuing mailstorm, and don't feel too surprised if things aren't exactly what you expected. just keep on writing, keep on reading, and you may be surprised to find that while it isn't what you thought you wanted, it may be exactly what you needed...:-]

and with a flashing clash of ? and !, he brought the wild sentence to a .

and there was a submission:

the beginning.
by a. writer

(next, your words, please?...yes, fill in the blank and send it soon!)

tink
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[Please feel free to print this FAQ and keep a copy for when you have questions! In fact, the author would be pleased if you did that.]

The meat in this sandwich - v. 17, July 4, 1995

[long out out of warranty, and so removed]
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the end with a bang?

well, ignoring the bad jokes which the phrase may suggest, let me recommend:

Write until it hurts.
Then write about the hurting.
Submit, and submit again.
And bang!

they sold happily ever after...

that's it!