Several weeks ago I had this convoluted dream. I was yanked from sleep by Bob’s alarm so I don’t know where it ended and when I gained some semblance of coherence I thought to myself, “I seriously need to quit smoking crack before bed.” As I drifted in and out of sleep as Bob got ready for work that day, I mulled over the details of that dream, most of which escape me now, and the thought crossed my mind—“I wonder if I could turn that into a story?”
It wouldn’t be the first time I tried something ridiculous like that. There have been quite a few story ideas in the past that have stemmed from something that happened in a dream. Most of which end up having little to nothing to do with the actual dream in the end, it just takes a spark of inspiration to get the snowball rolling.
I pushed the notion aside, however, as it seemed a little too…cracked…even for me…and went about my scatter-brained business. But seeing as how I’ve been dwelling on the business of writing so much as of late, that cracked idea kept coming back to poke me in the side of the brain, quite frequently. And the more I thought about it, the less cracked it seemed. If I changed this, if I adjusted that, and with just the right character here I just might have something. If I could figure out just that right character maybe I’ll work on that story.
I figured out that character.
I wrote twelve pages of dialogue in one day.
I don’t know exactly how much of it is really usable dialogue. But I wrote it. And I wrote it in one day. That right there is an accomplishment. Now I’m faced with the dilemma of lining up the right grouping of characters and putting this all into proper story form. I have a general outline of a story in my head. I’m just really struggling on where to start it at this point. I guess I’ll have to resort to what I do best and lay out an unnecessarily, painfully detailed timeline to get it figured out. It wouldn’t be one of my projects without a myriad of side-story, timelines, floor plans, back-story, and other useless detail that only I will ever know about the characters.
Because that’s how I roll.
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