The way I dream is mostly in story. I usually am the hero of my story (yup, guess it’s just the way I see myself…? Ha ha), but I’m also many characters and people.
Not only that, but I can be in “first-person” point of view as well as “third-person” at the same time, knowing and seeing what I’m seeing and then seeing it from above.
And I’m usually not “myself” in my dreams. I’m always just this random person that never looks or acts anything like me. But my mind usually creates entire worlds with their own societies, laws, and physics.
And then I have the plot, or something that I’m working towards, whether it’s saving an entire oppressed group of aliens from slavery, running away from wild talking animals that have taken over a city, or rescuing a girl from an orphanage she was never supposed to be in.
About ten years ago, I had one of these dreams, right before we were taking a trip to Utah to visit our family. On the way back, I described my dream in detail to my husband and told him I wanted to turn it into a book.
I’d always wanted to write a book, but never got past a few pages. I think the longest one I’d written was in high school, and it was around 10 pages.
But this particular dream kept coming back. I write down all my dreams when I remember them, so I have notes and notebooks of the dreams that I’ve had, but I couldn’t shake this one.
When I was in school (and I guess even more so from having long conversations with my husband), I became fascinated by psychology.
I loved learning about the way people thought and worked, based on their experiences and how they viewed the world. Learning about all of that went directly along with the story that I wanted to write.
So I decided to do it.
I started by writing down the basics of what I wanted the book to be about: the plot, what would happen, that it would be a trilogy, and then got into planning how all of the books would work together.
I wasn’t just planning one book… I was trying to plan all three of them and how they would all connect.
I then wanted to plan out exactly who the characters were, their backstories, how they felt, what they saw, and even how they acted. I drew connections among them and how they interacted not only with each other but also with the world around them.
I found it really fun to learn about these characters and to figure out and create the world they would be part of. I spent over a year creating all of this, piecing it all together and planning how it would all work out. But after that time, I didn’t feel fulfilled. I lost interest a little, and I stopped it for a few months.
I didn’t know it at the time, but stepping away was the right choice and direction that I didn’t know I needed.
After pausing for a few months, I started doing my podcast and noticed things in my life I wanted to learn and change, and my thinking immediately turned to psychology and understanding what was going on inside myself and around me.
With that, my thoughts once again went to my book and the concepts and ideas I had in there. So I decided to just start writing scenes. I started on a day when my emotions were high and wrote an emotional scene.
Honestly, the scene wasn’t great, but I was so happy to just write. I had read somewhere that you should just start writing random scenes, and you’ll see them pieced together, so I decided to do that. For the first 4-5 scenes I wrote, I knew I would never put them in the book because they didn’t match my story, but it was fun to write them, and it felt really good.
So I started writing more random scenes, but then I started analyzing and trying to get each scene perfect, critiquing my prose, going back to the planning stage to see how these random scenes would fit together and how they fit into the story. It wasn’t working.
I was getting frustrated again, and tried prompts, but didn’t want to just write random thoughts and things; I wanted to just write my book.
Then I heard of a concept called the “shitty first draft” by Anne Lamott.
Basically, you just get the rough draft out by writing a messy, unpolished, and unfiltered rough draft. It’s meant to silence the inner critic (which mine is LOUD!). So I decided to do that. I wanted to write my book without worrying about perfect prose or stumbling over things, so I started at the beginning. And now I’m 44 pages and 15,419 words in!
There are a lot of [show don’t tell] and [I think this entire thing needs to change, or that I need to figure this out first] kind of brackets covering my entire rough draft, ha ha, but the important thing is that I’m writing forward. I’m not letting the planning and unknown stop me from writing.
And my rough draft isn’t great; the prose is terrible, but I’m okay with that, because I’m getting the story down and figuring it out as I go. And that’s what’s important to me right now 🙂
