Progress on the epic fantasy short story
Posted on | February 7, 2012 | 3 Comments
Yesterday, I wrote about how I finally figured out the ending to the epic fantasy story I’m working on. It was a fairly loose ending, a direction to head in. But last night, I had a dream about the story. It was as if I was watching a movie. I saw something happen at the beginning of the story, and then I saw that thing come back at the end of the story and take on new meaning.
I have never had a dream that has turned into a story, but this dream that I had last night fit the story so perfectly that I am beginning to work it into the narrative and I think it makes the story so much better than it might otherwise have been. I wrote another 700 words last night and hoping to make more significant progress today, as well.
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February 7th, 2012 @ 10:08 am
That’s wild, Jamie! Good luck and Forward Progress.
February 7th, 2012 @ 10:14 am
That sounds cool, Jamie! Good luck getting it in there…
February 7th, 2012 @ 3:00 pm
Quoting from van Vogt’s essay, “My Life Was My Best Science Fiction Story” in FANTASTIC LIVES-
“When you’re writing, as I was, for one cent a word, and are a slow writer, and the story keeps stopping for hours or days, and your rent is due, you get anxious… I would wake up spontaneously at night, anxious. But I wasn’t aware of the anxiety. I thought about story problems— that was all I noticed then. And so back to sleep I went. In the morning, often, there would be an unusual solution. All my best plot twists came in this way.
“…it was not until July, 1943, that I suddenly realized what I was doing. That night I got out our alarm clock, and moved into the spare bedroom. I set the alarm to ring in one and one-half hours. When it awakened me, I reset the alarm for another one and one-half hours, thought about the problems in the story I was working on— and fell asleep. I did that altogether four times during the night. And in the morning, there was the unusual solution, the strange plot twist. Exactly as when I had awakened from anxiety. So I had my system for getting to my subconscious mind. During the next seven years I awakened myself about three hundred nights a year four times a night.”