Science Fiction & Fantasy author
Think about a dream you had recently (if you remember your dreams). What about it carried the strongest emotional tug. Focus in on that and describe it with as much detail as you can. Try to recapture everything that carried emotion, evoked emotion or still creates a stir in your mind. If you are not a person who remembers your dreams, how about a day dream? The main point is to locate the strongest point of emotion and put that across.
Dig out an old photo of when you were a kid. Write about the moment it was taken. Imagine the image in black and white whether it is or not. Keep your descriptions of colors in the grey scale. Go for the shadows, the bright spots; enrich your description by looking at the sharpness of the lines, the feelings the picture evokes and the story it is ready to tell.
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| Red flowers to right. |
Open a fiction book to somewhere in the middle. Pick a page. The first image you find is the starting image in your writing. Take it from there.
If nothing inspires you, start with the red flowers to the right.
Go find a hat, either one you have not worn for a very long time or one that belongs to someone else. This is a magic hat. Put it on and sit until you feel the magic vibrate around and through you. Give it color, sensation, dimension; imagine that magic flowing into you, inspiring you. Sit until you can feel the flow. Then hold on to your bootstraps (figuratively, of course) and write.
Today you will write about discomfort. What does it feel like? Get real descriptive. Most importantly, get uncomfortable. Sit on your seat awkwardly, twist your body around and hold it in place until you are uncomfortable. Don’t eat if your hungry. Hold your arm straight up from your shoulder until it cramps, and then write about how it feels. Don’t imagine; use your own experience to get into the details. If you already have a cold, flu, arthritis, backache, then you are ahead of the game (for once it brings you benefits). Go for the sensation, the imagery of pain, stuffy headedness, tight muscles, stiffness, a sinus headache.
Write about a dream, but not just any dream. Pick one of those that kept sliding into odd, even unrelated scenes that as the dreamer you just accepted. Explore the strangeness of this dream following all its remembered impressions, actions and reactions.
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| Write the twisty dream. |
If you don’t recall all the details, let your mind slide around what you do remember and pull at it until you have seized everything you can from the dream.
If you are one of those who don’t remember your dreams, imagine an image and carry into some foggy focus, let it slip into another image and then another as you track each flight of fancy.
The one thing I ask that you do different with your dream is create a string of connections that holds each event to the next, smooth out the quirky, extra-stair-steps startle effect of the twisting dream. Let take on a sort of logic of its own that may not have been there when you actually dreamed it.