Dreams, or Not Writing like Stephanie Meyer

I have not been absent.

I have been working.

And if by working, I happen to mean: reading fanfiction and watching anime, then yes, I've been working mighty hard. I'm a veritable wealth of productivity, in that case. I feel like reading/watching shows is its own kind of work, though. They give me inspiration I normally wouldn't have, and then I am able to come up with story ideas, even if they never get written down on anything other than the back of an envelope or a discarded index card. But they are there, the seeds of them lurking in my brain.

But today, I'm going to talk about dreams. Or, in other words: I Had an Awesome Dream and Now I Want to Write a Story About It, But Don't Want to Turn into Stephanie Meyer.

Here is a disclaimer: dreams are not always a good place to start for story ideas. They can so wildly outlandish and deeply personal that no one really wants to read about them, let alone wants you to write them. But sometimes, there is that dream that stays inside of your chest for days and days afterwards and you're sure, that was your adventure, boiled down into that few minutes of sleep where your brain was trying to sort the day out.

I had that dream, the other day. It was during a four-hour nap that I took because being lazy seemed a great alternative to the mountain of work that was piling up around me. Partly inspired by Doctor Who, partly by The Time-Traveler's Wife, plus a dash of helicopters and fiery monsters, and we had a story idea.

Here is where people go wrong, I think. They want to recreate that world and don't want to have all the nitty gritty part that comes with actually living in this made-up place. That's definitely where Stephanie Meyer went wrong, ignoring the weirdness that was Edward stalking Bella, in favor of this beautiful fantasy dreamworld. Dreams are not reality, no matter how closely they may mirror it. And personally, my dreams never mirror reality. Most of them consist of me beating up my ex-boyfriend or yelling at people, neither of which I do much in my daily life.

So, here are a few tips to make your dream into an awesome story:

1. Everything is more extreme in dreams, so the fight scenes are more epic, the love story more passionate (and more quickly resolved). Don't be afraid to make things a little less intense, for the sake of creating a more true-to-life story. Even if your plot is outlandish, try to make everything else a little more real.
2. In the same vein, good vs. evil tends to be very concrete in dreams, while it isn't so much in reality (or good fiction). Even if your Big Bad is truly big and bad, give him a reason to be so big and scary, other than, you know, just being an evil dude.
3. Do not make the protagonist yourself or the version of yourself you wish you could be. This is the Stephanie Meyer approach to writing. It's easy to fall into this trap, so here's an easy way to avoid it: make the protagonist like yourself in a few ways, but make him/her unlike yourself in distinct ways, especially if that's what's needed to further along the plot.
4. Don't burn yourself out. When you dream about something, it can be easy to just dash down all the parts of it you can already see in your head, but if you have a few 10k days, you're more than likely going to want to die when you have a 3k day after that streak. I did this a few months ago and now the story is sitting in my drawer, unfinished and collecting dust, because I wrote 20k in three days.

Now go forth, my wildly inspired readers. Go forth and make your dream into something concrete. (Hey, maybe one day it'll be made into a movie and you can relive the dream in theaters!)

Beginnings Aren't the Hardest Part

I've read a lot of writing advice in my day. Sometimes I just scour the Internet, pretending I'm actually doing work, when in reality, I'm just reading what other people have to say about writing. And despite being widely heralded as the greatest authors of all time, most of their advice can be boiled down to the Nike logo: "Just do it." While that's plenty inspiring, it does not change the blank Word document staring at me while I set up my work space at Starbucks. Here I set out my pens, here I flip my notebook to a blank page. Plug my headphones into my ears and scroll through my thousands of songs to find the right album to fit what I'm writing today. Check Facebook. Check Twitter. Check this blog. Play a Facebook game or two. Take a sip of my overpriced but delicious coffee. Watch kids outside play in the rain.

And lo, I have still not Just Do(ne) It.

A lot of this writing advice centers around beginnings. They say beginnings are the hardest part. I can only partially agree with this, because the lazy, work-avoiding part of me wants to do everything but write. I can sit around in my own brain for hours and hours, thinking up stories, but when it comes down to beginning, I'm just lazy. It's not that it's hard. It's that I'm being a baby.

If you are reading this, I'm pretty sure you're just being a baby. You should be writing right now, banging out that NaNoWriMo 2011 word count. Beginning isn't the hardest part. Beginning is the easiest, but we want our masterpieces to just come to us, fully formed, without any work from ourselves. Beginning may be scary and everything you start out doing may turn out to be utter crap, but, to quote another athletic adage, "No matter how slow you go, you're still lapping everybody on the couch."

I hope my procrastination was sufficiently inspiring. I'm off to actually work now.

Origin Story

Unfortunately, I am not a superhero. This tale will be short and without radioactive spiders or kryptonite. But it belongs to me, and for some reason that makes the dearth of superpowers alright.

It began on a rainy day in fourth grade. My teacher, Mrs. Applebaum, made us all write short stories for our school's annual writing contest. Mine was about a cat who could talk, who whisks her owner off into a magical land inhabited by talking cats. It was awful. I was nine. Mrs. Applebaum told me that my story definitely had a shot at winning, with what I recognize now as a kind but patronizing smile. I did not win the writing contest, nor the medal they handed out to the winner.

And on that day, I decided: I will prove them wrong. I will become a writer.

Fourth grade redemption, here I come. Young Cass will be shaking her fist in triumph inside of me the day that my debut novel gets published.

No, but for real, guys: I like to write. I like to get lost inside of the words, to spiral, spiral, spiral down until me and the story are one and the same. I am currently hard at work on my debut novel, an as-of-yet-titled fantasy novel. I tweet (twitter.com/ihartcass) and I blog and I bang out that word count.