Category Archives: Writing

Creativity, Dreams, Writing

Take the bones and build a story!

4 Comments

If you have ever tried to write a poem or short story directly from a dream, you will probably have come to the conclusion that it doesn’t really work. Dreams are pure subjective substance, which has to be transmuted into something a reader can share.

But although you can rarely use a dream exactly as it is in writing, dreams can be a great source of inspiration. They can energise your writing because they are fired by the very themes and emotions that are currently bubbling beneath the surface in your waking life.

One of the approaches I use in workshops for writing from dream material is to extract the bones of the dream and build it up into a story.

 

 Dream themes – building from the bones

Choose a recent dream if you would like to try this exercise because it will have more immediate resonance for you than one you had a while ago. It doesn’t need to be long or detailed. All you’re looking for is a moment of action.

Describe the dream in a single sentence beginning, ‘Someone is…’ Use non-specific nouns, ‘something’, ‘someone’, ‘somewhere’ – keep it as general as possible, with the focus on the verb. ‘Someone is cross with her husband,’ would be too specific. ‘Someone is cross with someone’ is the pure action, plain and simple, capable of supporting a whole new cast of characters.

Examples from workshops include, ‘Someone is searching for someone’, ‘Someone has forgotten something’, ‘Someone is asking questions’, ‘Someone is not what they seem…’

Write a few alternative verb-focused sentences for your dream, and then decide which one you’re going with. Don’t over-think it. You’re just playing about with some ideas.

Now forget the dream, take the sentence and build a new context around it. If your sentence is, ‘Someone is being chased,’ who is it? Who is being chased? Start by making a character sketch.

When you are creating a character, it helps to know their name, even if you aren’t going to mention it. When you’re thinking about their appearance, imagine you’re watching a video of them, or looking through their photo-album.

Then ask them a few questions to get to know them a bit. What do they like? What do they hate? What is their earliest memory? What was their childhood ambition? Ask as many questions as you need. Ask the things that you want to know.

You won’t use everything you know about your characters in any story, but knowing a lot about them gives you context; it makes the writing flow more easily, and feel more three-dimensional. Any story is like an iceberg; the bit the author shows you is just the tip of what they know.

Make character sketches for anyone else involved in the story – who is chasing them? Who gets in the way? Who helps them?

When you’ve got some good character sketches, think about the settings. Ask, ‘Where?’ Look around at the scenery. Use all your senses to be right there. Where are they running to? Where are they running from? Ask, ‘When?’ The season, weather, time of day and the historical era, are all part of the setting.

Then ask, ‘Why?’ Why are they being chased? Ask, ‘What is the issue? What is at stake? What happens if they don’t get away?’

Who, what, where, when, why, how… these are the prompts for imaginative play, and they will always take you straight into a story.

Fully imagine the scene, and when you are ready, write it. Don’t try to write well, just write. It’s a first draft. At this stage, being ‘good’ is not important. What you need is to be present.

*

Using dreams to spark creative writing not only guarantees you will find stories which feel enjoyable and meaningful to you, it is also a good way of deepening your understanding of the dream.

Furthermore, because dreams are related to waking life, writing stories from dream material can be a kind of rehearsal, a way of finding creative solutions to waking-life situations, and so feeling empowered.

Dreams, Spirituality, Writing

Life after death – the way of the dreamer

15 Comments

James Hillman, in ‘Dreams and the Underworld,’ describes dreaming in terms of sinking down, of dropping below the surface of things, into the realm of death.

In our dreams, we completely identify with the dream ‘I’, and the waking ‘I’ is no more; the assumption that we are ourselves within the dream is an illusion.

The dream ‘I’ is not the self as we know it. In different dreams, it may be a different gender from the dreamer, or a different age; it may have a different job and skill-set; it may even have supernatural powers. The dream ‘I’ is one of myriad characters which inhabit the ‘inner self.’

Writing fiction is similar to dreaming. We enter the ‘writer’s trance’ and ‘become’ our characters. We live in their lives, and grapple with their circumstances. But it is less intense because we are still aware of our own physical body, sitting at our desk, dipping in and out of the writing dream to answer the phone, pick up email or make coffee.

Choosing to engage with dreams is like a kind of suicide. We let go of the waking ‘I’ and willingly become the dream ‘I’, walking the underworld. In this way, the dream ‘I’ is like the soul – it lives on after ego awareness is gone.

Some of my guests here have described dreams in which they have been or become animals, and some of my workshop participants have reported dreaming in the ‘I’ of characters from different places and times, ages and genders. Have you had a dream in which it’s obvious the dream ‘I’ is not your waking self?

Creativity, Dreams, Writing

The dark place where talent leads

13 Comments

When I wrote about talent before, I was thinking about the personal qualities a writer needs to develop if they want to be published and make a career of writing.

Recently, I read a quotation by Erica Jong which reminded me of a quality writers need whether they want to be published or not. She says, ‘Everyone has talent; what is rare is the courage to follow the talent to the dark place where it leads.’

A dark path to hidden places

You need courage to even embark upon the path of writing, let alone move towards publication, because when you write you are opening up to the hidden places of the self, and you can never be sure what you might find there.

People in workshops will often express surprise at where their writing has taken them – that’s part of the magical and sometimes mystical experience of any creative endeavour.

But occasionally that delighted surprise can give way to something much darker. Dismay, for example – ‘But I don’t want to write sad stories.’ Rejection – ‘That’s not really me!’ Even disgust – ‘I hate the character I’ve conjured into being.’

This is another reason the image Ted Hughes offers for writing as being like fishing is so apt; you might catch a tasty gorgeous trout, but you might equally snare a big angry pike or a grotty old shoe. There could even be alligators circling your bait, ready to pull you down.

What lies beneath the surface?

Again, dreaming with awareness is wonderful preparation for creative writing, because in dreams we will inevitably encounter our own darkness, as well as our light. In intending to recall our dreams, we willingly surrender; we undertake to engage with that inner world, whatever we might find there.

In dreaming, as in writing, we may find more than we might wish to find, but that is the lesson of any inner work; we are much more than what we want to be.

If you are a writer, has your writing ever taken you to dark places that you didn’t know were there?

Creativity, Dreams, Writing

Guest post: The dream that sparked the book

Leave a comment

The Saint of Florenville, by Alfred J Garrotto

On the morning of July 26, 2010, something quite unexpected happened to me. I had published five novels, the most recent in 2005. Since then I had turned my attention to nonfiction projects. I thought I’d told all the stories I had in me, except for one half-finished and dead-in-the-water novel.

That’s why I was surprised to wake up from a dream that July morning with a rough, but complete, narrative arc in my head, plus three strong characters who would carry the story from beginning to end. I even had a working title, A Train to Bruges (later discarded).

For the next six weeks, I continued to awaken most mornings with additional snippets of story and characterization, all of which I scribbled in a notebook I keep by my bedside, just in case (rarely) I think of something brilliant during the night.

As always, writing the first draft was exhilarating. My “dreamed-up” characters came to life. My villain was insanely evil. Best of all, I knew from Day 1 how the story would end.

Studying the completed first draft, I realized as most novelists do in that situation, that all I had in hand was a skeleton. My story needed flesh, which came only with grinding effort through subsequent drafts.

I embarked on the research I needed to make the settings ( Brussels , Bruges , and Florenville , Belgium ) and my characters (an American priest, a Belgian nun, a young female reporter, and a psychopathic villain) jump off the page.

By mid-July, 2011, I had arrived at Draft 9 and could finally add the # # # symbols, indicating that I had come to “The End.”Somewhere along the way, my working title had yielded to the published title, The Saint of Florenville: A Love Story.

For more information visit http://saintofflorenville.wordpress.com

Creativity, Dream skills, Dreams, Writing

How to incubate a dream

9 Comments

Last week, in the comments, Abi said she wished she could visit her dream house more often, and I suggested she might try incubating a dream.

Creative dreaming is all about ‘flying on the wings of intent,’ to borrow a phrase from Carlos Casteneda. Setting an intention is how we start to establish regular dream-recall, as I explain here https://jenalexanderbooks.wordpress.com/tips/

Once we have begun to experience regular recall, we can use intention in the same way, to incubate a dream on a particular topic. I sometimes do this with a group.

The first time I did it, I asked my workshop participants to intend to dream about a tree. Of the six people in that group, five reported tree dreams the following week.

Two people dreamt about saplings, and another about ‘baby trees.’ I dreamt about a tree-lined avenue. The fifth person, frustrated by a marked no-show of trees for the first few nights, wrote a poem about a tree to help set her intention, and then dreamt she was on a ranch in America, where she saw a single tree in the distance which looked like a child’s drawing of a tree.

This person thought, either in her dream or upon waking – she couldn’t tell which – ‘There was a tree!’ The same thing happened in my dream, where I thought, ‘Ooh… lots of trees!’

This is the waking ‘I’ being aware during the dream, and an interesting bonus of dream-incubation is that you’re likely to become lucid at the point where the dream meets the conscious expectation.

I incubate dreams to resolve plot problems and develop my writing ideas, as well as to gain insights into anything which might be bothering me in my everyday life.

If you want to try it, think about your dream intention at points throughout the day, affirming, ‘Tonight, I will dream about…’ Repeat your intention as you go to sleep.

You can reinforce your intention by writing it down, or drawing an image to represent it. Promise yourself that you will record any and every dream you recall when you wake up.

This last point is important. If you don’t automatically record everything, your conscious rational mind can click in too early and push your dreams away.

Besides, if you’ve asked for a dream, it would feel rude not to note down the answer. The dream will not co-operate if it thinks you’re just messing around.

Creativity, Writing

How to make a block-busting collage

14 Comments

As I was writing the introduction to Katherine Roberts’ guest post last week, I suddenly remembered that a workshop exercise I did with the Scattered Authors Society on another occasion had in fact previously appeared in a book*

I called that workshop ‘Busting through blocks,’ and it explored a basic collage technique I use a lot in my own writing practice. You can use it to create characters, examine relationships between your characters, develop settings, find titles, spark stories… pretty much anything.

Creating a character using collage

Whatever the issue is, hold it in the back of your mind as you flick through some magazines. Don’t think about which images, colours, patterns, words you need, or how they will relate to your project; just tear out the ones that draw you, and trust they will be the right ones, the ones you need.

This works through synchronicity, like tarot or other divinatory practices; the outer world reflects what is going on in your inner world.

You can use collage to spark a story

Limit the time you spend on tearing out pictures to 10 minutes max, because you don’t want to overthink it. The whole process should feel instinctual.

Now get a pritt stick and a piece of plain paper or card. Again, follow your instincts and don’t overthink it, as you put your collage together. Take 10 minutes max for this stage, too.

Sometimes, your collage will give you the inspiration you’re looking for straight away, but there will always be more, so put it somewhere you will see it, on your study wall, for example. Look at it often. It will gradually reveal more of itself, and its relationship with your writing project.

There are always work-in-progress collages up on the wall in my study!

What are your top block-busting tips?

*The book is ‘How to write a blockbuster,’ by Lee Weatherly and Helen Corner. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Write-Blockbuster-Yourself-Creative-Writing/dp/0340916915/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1329746460&sr=1-2

Lee’s a bestselling children’s author, who attended the workshop, and Helen runs the Cornerstones Literary Consultancy http://www.cornerstones.co.uk/

Creativity, Dreams, Guest posts, Symbols, Writing

Guest post: The waking dream that sparked the book

6 Comments

Today, I’m delighted to welcome children’s author, Katherine Roberts, to the House of Dreams, on her blog-tour to celebrate her new book ‘Sword of Light.’

It’s especially exciting for me because this is the first time, as far as I know, that a book has been published which was helped along by one of my workshops, in this case, for the Scattered Authors Society  http://www.scatteredauthors.org/

My Heroine’s Journey for SWORD OF LIGHT, by Katherine Roberts

Katherine Roberts

My inspiration for ‘Sword of Light’ came in a waking dream, when I attended a workshop led by the lovely Jenny Alexander, who guided a few of us children’s authors on a ‘Hero’s Journey’ along our personal writing paths. It went like this.

Imagine you are walking in a familiar place, when you see a sign saying, ‘To the Treasure…’

I am in the local wood on the boardwalk, and it is raining so no-one else is walking today. The trees are dripping and the bluebells are out. All smells green and garlicky. I am approaching my favourite bridge over a stream, where I often imagine fairies, when I see a new path twisting through the trees where there are no marked trails. A sign says TO THE TREASURE. I think it is one of the farm’s treasure hunts for children, so I hesitate because it might be something tacky and disappointing. But since no-one is around to laugh at me, I decide to take a look.

You find the path blocked…

I push through some ivy and find the path blocked by a monstrous dragon that some local artists have strung up in the trees by the boardwalk for the annual Arts Trail. It is a fantasy creature made of old grey canvas, black feathers, and a scary triangular beak/snout. It is meant to be a future people’s idea of a bird they have never seen because birds are extinct in the future, and it has come alive. It hisses at me. It has been tied in the trees long enough, and now it has escaped. But it can’t fly because its wings have not been made the right way, and they are soggy with the rain. Also, it has no eyes, so it is blind.

How do you get past the block…?

The ‘future-bird’ cannot see me so I freeze, trying to make no sound. I think about going around it, but the undergrowth is too thick. Also, it’s boggy because I am off the boardwalk. I am too afraid of its huge sharp beak and its powerful claws to try climbing over it, so I decide to fool it. I pick up a stick and throw it into the undergrowth. The dragon hears the stick land and flaps off after it, getting  its wings entangled in the bushes and shrieking as it flounders in the bog. I hurry past before it can get free, a bit afraid of meeting it again on the way back.

You find the treasure…

As I leave the dragon behind, the sun comes out and the path emerges in a clearing where there is a barrow covered by greenery. I push aside some leaves and crawl inside, where I find a gleaming sword. This is the treasure! I take the sword, thinking it might be useful if I have to fight the dragon, although I don’t really want to soil the beautiful blade with its blood, nor hurt the ‘future-bird’ because it is the last of its kind. Also, I doubt my fighting skills because I have not been trained to use a blade. So I venture back warily along the dripping path, where the sun now sparkles through the leaves and gleams off my treasure.

What do you do next…?

The dragon is still stuck in the bog, but it has exhausted itself and the sun is drying its feathers. It steams gently, its wings spread in the warmth. It still cannot see me, but the sword is magic so it can see the light coming off it. It crawls towards me, as if hypnotised. It seems less afraid now, maybe because it is no longer lost and alone. I stroke its beak and it does not attack. Murmuring to the creatuire, I climb on its back, and since the sun has dried out its wings it can now fly. Although it is still blind, my eyes will guide us. As we take off and circle above the trees in the sunshine, I see the glint of water below where fairies live. We both feel amazingly free. As long as we continue to trust each other, we can fly anywhere in the world, and my sword of light will defend us from enemies, past or future.

Sword of Light

I was writing the first draft of ‘Sword of Light’ at the time of this workshop, and am quite spooked by how many elements have ended up in the book:

The sword – Excalibur, the Sword of Light that was forged in Avalon.

The dragon/’future-bird’ – a shadrake, a dark dragon from the underworld of Annwn which breathes ice instead of fire.

The heroine – Rhianna Pendragon, King Arthur’s daughter.

***

SWORD OF LIGHT is published this month by Templar in hardcover, and you can follow Rhianna Pendragon on Twitter at www.twitter.com/PendragonGirl

Katherine’s website is at www.katherineroberts.co.uk

Dreams, Symbols, Writing

Death and the dream book

24 Comments

Well, I didn’t see it coming. When I finally finished my dream book last week, I was planning to break open the bubbly, but I just felt bereft.

Before I was ever published, I knew I wanted to write a book about dreams, and for twenty years, that book has been the heart of my writing life, at first a secret addiction, later an open obsession.

There have been various versions along the way, non-fiction, autobiography, novel, work-book… each new one rising like a phoenix from the ashes of the one before. I liked them all – my agents liked them too – but none of them felt exactly right.

The dream book defined me to myself, as a writer, far more than my growing body of children’s books. I’ve loved it, felt impatient with it, hated it in equal measure. I’ve wished I could put it down and get on with my  proper writing career.

And now I can. It feels like a death, but all week, I’ve been dreaming about babies. This reminds me of the Death card in Tarot, which is sometimes called Death and Rebirth.

Death in Tarot is deep change. As one situation ends, a new one begins. I don’t know what kind of writer I will be now that a third of my writing life won’t be channelled off into this dream book any more.

When I blogged about it before, I discovered that not every writer has a ‘dream book.’ https://jenalexanderbooks.wordpress.com/2011/10/13/does-every-writer-have-a-dream-book/ Although at times it has felt like a curse, I feel very blessed that I’ve had mine.

So farewell and thank you, grand passion of my writing life, and hello and welcome dream-babies of whatever is coming next.

Bubbly wine, anyone?

Next week – great excitement in the House of Dreams – Katherine Roberts will be calling in on her ‘Sword of Light’ blog tour to tell us how a workshop session she did with me helped her to find the story

Creativity, Dreams, Writing

And another thing about blogging…

13 Comments

Someone asked me last week, ‘What makes you want to follow a blog?’ Before I started this one, nearly six months ago, I read a lot of blogs about blogging, and everyone agreed that your goal should be to get people to sign up rather than call in from time to time.

Now that I’m blogging myself, I can feel the difference this makes, because the signed-up members feel like a community, and the result feels more like a conversation.

Most pundits seem to agree that the way to get people to sign up is to offer an incentive, usually in the form of a free download. Following that advice, I offered my printout about dream recalling and recording, which I had been intending to put up on my Tips page.

But when this friend asked me last week why I personally subscribe to the blogs I like, I realised that for me it’s all about content. I subscribe if I like the content enough not to want to miss a post. In fact, free downloads are a disincentive to me, after my experience of them so far.

I’ve only signed up to three blogs because I was curious about the free download, and each time, it’s lead to a slew of nuisance emails about topics I never asked for information about. In two of these cases, they also quickly went on to try to sell me downloads or get me to sign up to courses.

So as of today, my sign-up offer ceases. You can see my recalling-and-recording dreams info on the Tips page, and here’s a heads-up on some great content coming in the next few weeks.

How to use dream material to energise your writing… guest post from one of my fave bloggers, Katherine Roberts… interview with lovely dreamworker, Toko-pa Turner… the Death card and the end of the dream book…

If you haven’t done so yet – I do hope you’ll sign up!

Dreams, Writing

Guest post: The dream that sparked the book

10 Comments

Once upon a dream novel, by Dawn Colclasure 

Can dreams inspire a writer to write a novel? Mine did – and they still do.

When I was 16 years old, I started having dreams about a man named Jonathan. These dreams happened almost every night and lasted for many years. Two years after the dreams started, I dreamt that all of the dreams combined were turned into a novel titled, ‘November’s Child.’ I even saw the title of the novel in this one dream!

I was 19 years old when I finally completed that novel. During this time, I had to work out how to make the dream ‘story’ work as a believable story. After all, I had no idea what kind of connection Jonathan had to me, the dreamer, so I had to think of what kind of connection he would have to my story’s main character, Malissa.

This name did not come from my dreams; I needed a name for a character that represented ‘me’ in the story, and I decided to use an alternative version of my sister, Melissa’s, name.

As to the connection dilemma, I discussed this with one of my other sisters, who happened to have just seen a movie about Druid characters. She suggested I turn Jonathan into a Druid. After researching Driudism and reading about their belief in the transmigration of souls, I decided that, yes, that could work. Voila! I had my story figured out.

My novel was published when I was 20 years old. Shortly afterward, my publisher went bankrupt and the book went out of print. I rewrote the book and gave it a new title: ‘Shadow of Samhain.’ This new version of my ‘dream novel’ will soon be published by Gypsy Shadow Publishing.