Yesterday, I wrote about how I finally figured out the ending to the epic fantasy story I’m working on. It was a fairly loose ending, a direction to head in. But last night, I had a dream about the story. It was as if I was watching a movie. I saw something happen at the beginning of the story, and then I saw that thing come back at the end of the story and take on new meaning.
I have never had a dream that has turned into a story, but this dream that I had last night fit the story so perfectly that I am beginning to work it into the narrative and I think it makes the story so much better than it might otherwise have been. I wrote another 700 words last night and hoping to make more significant progress today, as well.
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That’s wild, Jamie! Good luck and Forward Progress.
That sounds cool, Jamie! Good luck getting it in there…
Quoting from van Vogt’s essay, “My Life Was My Best Science Fiction Story” in FANTASTIC LIVES-
“When you’re writing, as I was, for one cent a word, and are a slow writer, and the story keeps stopping for hours or days, and your rent is due, you get anxious… I would wake up spontaneously at night, anxious. But I wasn’t aware of the anxiety. I thought about story problems— that was all I noticed then. And so back to sleep I went. In the morning, often, there would be an unusual solution. All my best plot twists came in this way.
“…it was not until July, 1943, that I suddenly realized what I was doing. That night I got out our alarm clock, and moved into the spare bedroom. I set the alarm to ring in one and one-half hours. When it awakened me, I reset the alarm for another one and one-half hours, thought about the problems in the story I was working on— and fell asleep. I did that altogether four times during the night. And in the morning, there was the unusual solution, the strange plot twist. Exactly as when I had awakened from anxiety. So I had my system for getting to my subconscious mind. During the next seven years I awakened myself about three hundred nights a year four times a night.”