For whatever reason, my dreams refuse to be helpful.
I know there are some authors who claim they get brilliant ideas from dreams. I don’t necessarily hate those people, but I haven’t met them in person either, so I’m not prepared to say we’d be friends.
I’ve also read at least one article that recommended sleeping as a way to work through your plotting problems. The idea was that you should think about your story, specifically focusing on those areas that were causing you trouble, as you were lying in bed at night. Presumably, you’d eventually fall asleep (after you finally got over the agony of being stuck on a scene that clearly just wanted to be an asshole), and your brain would continue to search for solutions while your body got the rest it needed.
Then, at some point, either by dream or some early morning/late night revelation, you’d experience a breakthrough. You would have the answers you so desperately needed, and you and your story would live happily ever after, or at least experience some mild feelings of contentment until the next time it decided to dig in its heels and act like a fuckhead.
That’d be nice, wouldn’t it? To be able to lay your head down on the pillow and then wake up in the morning with fresh ideas and a clear outline of your plot. It would be like some awesome version of the tooth fairy. One whose visit didn’t require a painful, bloody sacrifice followed by the inevitable letdown when you realize her cheap ass is on a one-quarter-per-tooth kind of budget.
I’d love to be wired that way. But I’m not. My dreams are lazy, free-loading bitches who contribute almost nothing to my fiction.
If there ever comes a time when I want to write a story about some guy whose going about his day only to suddenly realize he’s naked from the waist down, well, then I’ve got material to draw from. Likewise, if I want to have a character completely forgets he’s enrolled in a class until the day of the final exam, I have a pretty good handle on what that type of panic and despair feels like.
But until either of these scenarios presents itself in my fiction, I’ll have to do things the old-fashioned way, dragging each word through a swamp of self-loathing and insecurity until it finally lands on the page. Who needs dreams when you can have fun like that? Am I right?
Even though sleeping has done very little to advance my writing, I am a huge fan of day dreaming, or zoning out as we call it here at Casa de Jenkins. I used to have a job that required me to drive a lot. I’m talking long stretches of windshield time, like anywhere between 12 and 14 hours at a time. I worked out so many story lines while I was logging those miles, and every trip ended with a collection of napkins covered in nearly illegible scribbles.
It was a happy time, creatively speaking, and I sometimes miss the Zen of that highway hypnosis, even though I fully admit it probably wasn’t the safest way to operate a motor vehicle. Still, I think there’s something to be said for letting your body handle the heavy lifting of a task while your brain checks out for a little while.
I recommend letting your mind wander whenever you get the chance. The next time you have a chore that doesn’t require too much in the mental department, like the dishes or yard work or vacuuming, don’t fill your environment with a lot of extra sensory input. Don’t turn on the TV or queue up music or an audiobook on your iPod. Instead, listen to the sounds of the task at hand. Things like the high-pitched hum of the vacuum cleaner or the vibrating growl of the lawnmower engine.
Get lost in those sounds as they wash over you and then disappear altogether. Eventually, you will stop hearing them, at least on a conscious level, because at least part of your mind has gone out on a walkabout.
Let it go. Let it play. It might bring back something interesting.
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