• Home
  • About Me
  • My Essays
  • Contact
  • For What It’s Worth: Random Writing Advice
  • Haiku and Senryu
  • Home
  • About Me
  • My Essays
  • Contact
  • For What It’s Worth: Random Writing Advice
  • Haiku and Senryu
 

19. Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream*

4/18/2019

1 Comment

 
Writing about dreams is tricky.

If you’re a reader who in real life likes hearing about friends’ nighttime rambles or of parsing your own, then they’ll work for you as a storytelling device—at least you’ll be open to them. If, however, your eyelids descend at the mention of dreams or you find the recaps near impossible to follow, the same thing can happen when encountering them on the page.

In both nonfiction and fiction, they tend to come off either as conveniences—tidy maps between points A and B (or G or V)—or as a deliberately indirect means of adding psychological complexity to a story or character. I can think of few tropes that are more a matter of personal taste (on the part of readers). Waking life is plenty interesting on its own, so just be sure the dream is worth it.

*I posted this, then had second thoughts and deleted it, and now am posting it again. The last thing I want to do is stifle creativity—just offering a perspective to think about.

1 Comment
Julian Briggs link
7/19/2023 07:27:47 am

Thankss for writing

Reply



Leave a Reply.

    Categories

    All
    Action
    Asking Questions
    Attributions
    Authority
    Beginnings
    Catching Errors
    Chronology
    Cliches
    Community
    Constructive Criticism
    Contractions
    Creativity
    Crying
    Daily Writing
    Discovery
    Drafts
    Dreams
    Easy Solutions
    Editing
    Editors
    Endings
    Epigraphs
    Essays
    Every Day
    Every Week
    Expletives
    Feedback
    Followup
    Grammar
    Honesty
    Image
    Italics
    Memoir
    Names
    Originality
    Paragraphs
    Perspective
    Prompts
    Query Letters
    Quotes
    Reading Aloud
    Recreating
    Reflection
    Reimagining
    Repetition
    Self-editing
    Sensitive Subjects
    Sentences
    Sentimentality
    Shortform
    Specifics
    Submitting
    Support
    Tears
    Tightening
    Time References
    Titles
    Universality
    Vocabulary
    Voice
    Word Count
    Word Variety
    Writing Goals
    Writing Life
    Writing Practice
    Writing Space
    Writing Topics

    Archives

    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018

Proudly powered by Weebly