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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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!)
