A Few Cartoons

Writing Quotes II

Writing Quotes

Neil Gaiman: Quotes from The Commonplace Book

"All writers have this vague hope that the elves will come in the night and finish any stories."
- NEIL GAIMAN

Tom Gauld Cartoons: A Writer's Life For Me

From The Desk Of

Which is Almost a Post about Books and Dreaming, but Needs Editing

What Dreams May Come

All English Literature can be said to begin with a dream.

Caedmon, (flourished 658–680), first Old English Christian poet, whose fragmentary hymn to the creation remains a symbol of the adaptation of the aristocratic-heroic Anglo-Saxon verse tradition to the expression of Christian themes. His story is known from Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, which tells how Caedmon, an illiterate herdsman, retired from company one night in shame because he could not comply with the demand made of each guest to sing. Then in a dream a stranger appeared commanding him to sing of “the beginning of things,” and the herdsman found himself uttering “verses which he had never heard.”

Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley. Often cited as the world's first science fiction novel, Frankenstein was inspired by a vivid nightmare. At 18 years old, Shelley visited Lord Byron by Lake Geneva in Switzerland. Stuck indoors and huddled around a log fire, Byron suggested they each write a ghost story - but, night after night, Shelley was unable to think of anything suitable. Then one evening, when discussion turned to the nature of life, Shelley suggested "perhaps a corpse could be re-animated" backed by the thought that "galvanism had given token of such things". Later that night after turning in, her imagination took hold and she experienced what she described as a vivid waking dream: "I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world."

“Kubla Khan” from Christabel by Samuel Taylor Coleridge: One of the most famous examples of dream-inspired literature, the famous poem — printed in the book Christabel – wafted into Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s brain from a combination of sleep and opium. One of his most beloved works, he described it as a “fragment” rather than a whole, though most critics these days analyze it as the latter.

In 1886, Robert Louis Stevenson dreamed up three key sequences from The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. "For two days I went about racking my brains for a plot of any sort; and on the second night I dreamed the scene at the window, and a scene afterward split in two, in which Hyde, pursued for some crime, took the powder and underwent the change in the presence of his pursuers." While he was recovering in bed from a hemorrhage, Fanny Stevenson heard his screams resulting from an opium-induced nightmare. He promptly awoke and complained: "Why did you wake me? I was dreaming a fine bogey tale."

H. P. Lovecraft ... a number of his menacing characters and strange storylines first appeared in dreams. Lovecraft’s Dream Cycle tales are the most obvious example, set in dreamlike outer realms inhabited by strange creatures. One particular yarn from this series, the short story The Statement of Randolph Carter, was based on a dream Lovecraft transcribed, and to which he only added a preface for clarity. Similarly, his prose poem “Nyarlathotep” was inspired by a recurring nightmare Lovecraft had experienced since the age of ten.

Stuart Little, by E B White. E. B. White fell asleep on a train and “dreamed of a small character who had the features of a mouse, was nicely dressed, courageous, and questing.” White had eighteen nieces and nephews, who were always begging him to tell them a story, but he shied away from making one up off the top of his head. Instead, he set to writing, and stocked a desk drawer with tales about his “mouse-child . . . the only fictional figure ever to have honored and disturbed my sleep.” He named him Stuart. Inspiration for the talking rodent stemmed from a dream of E B White's in the 1920s, although it took him two decades to convert his notes into a novel.

J. R. R. Tolkien: Numenor "I say this about the 'heart' [of the Legendarium], for I have what some might call an Atlantis complex. Possibly inherited, though my parents died too young for me to know such things about them and too young to transfer such thing by words. Inherited from me (I suppose) by one only of my children, though I did not know that about my son [Michael] until recently, and he did not know it about me. I mean the terrible recurrent dream (beginning with memory) of the Great Wave, towering up, and coming in ineluctably over the trees and green fields. (I bequeathed it to Faramir.) I don't think I have had it since I wrote the 'Downfall of Nùmenor' as the last of the legends of the First and Second Age."--Letter to W. H. Auden , 7 June 1955

Book of Dreams by Jack Kerouac: Everything readers need to know about this novel comes straight from the title. Beat poster boy Jack Kerouac kept and published a book comprised entirely of his dreams, spanning from 1952 to 1960 and starring characters from many of his other works.

Stephen King: Salem's Lot. One eerie dream in particular during his childhood proved so haunting and Stephen King-esque that it would be used as an outline for Salem's Lot decades later. “It was a dream where I came up a hill and there was a gallows on top of this hill with birds all flying around it. There was a hang man there. He had died, not by having his neck broken, but by strangulation. I could tell because his face was all puffy and purple. And as I came close to him he opened his eyes, reached his hands out and grabbed me. Years later I began to work on Salem’s Lot... as I was looking around for a spooky house, a guy who works in the creative department of my brain said, ‘Well what about this nightmare you had when you were eight or nine years old? Will that work?’ And I remembered the nightmare, and I thought, yes, it’s perfect.”- Stephen King, Writers Dreaming. Also Misery by Stephen King, a most memorable horror story that began as King drifted off to sleep on a flight to London. He dreamed of a chilling tale about an insane woman who mutilates and kills her favorite writer, binding a book in his skin.

My Education: A Book of Dreams (1995) is the final novel by William S. Burroughs to be published before his death in 1997. It is a collection of dreams, taken from various decades, along with a few comments about the War on Drugs and paragraphs created with the cut-up technique. The title is explained in the very first dream, dated 1959: Burroughs is trying to board an airplane, but a woman at the ticket counter "with the cold waxen face of an intergalactic bureaucrat" refuses him passage, informing him, "You haven't had your education yet."

Other books and authors : William Styron, Sophie's Choice; Stephanie Myers,The Twilight Series; H. G. Wells, Twelve Stories and a Dream (no original citation for the dream). There is a whole genre of "dream literature" that is a form of telling a story by simply saying it was a dream, with, perhaps, no original dream that inspires it: The Vision of Piers Plowman by William Langland, The Book of the Duchess by Geoffrey Chaucer, A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare, The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan, Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, and The Great Divorce by C. S. Lewis all fit in this category.

Sources, but so scrambled it's hard to tell sometimes what's from where. All original credit to them; I just stitched them together:

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Caedmon
http://www.bachelorsdegreeonline.com/blog/2010/15-famous-books-inspired-by-dreams/
http://www.world-of-lucid-dreaming.com/10-famous-novels-inspired-by-dreams.html
http://flavorwire.com/390898/a-selection-of-writers-inspired-by-dreams
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Education:_A_Book_of_Dreams

The Write Stuff

Ongoing Projects

What happened was this. In the middle of treatment of an ulcerated toe, I had a mini-stroke. Then I had to have the toe amputated. Then I had to get new, prescription shoes. I could not work at my job, and still am not up to returning to what I did, and so must find a new way to make a living. In the meantime I have vast deserts of free time on my hands, and no money to spend. I decided (at last) to fill this hideously "free" time with typing all my writings of the past thirty-five years into active computer files.

Of course I was already painfully crawling along transcribing my completed juvenile novel "Elf and Bear." But now I would include ancient incomplete efforts and see what I had. First I collected my dreams. Then I gathered my verses. Diaries, memoirs, and letters made up my half-assed autobiography. And now I am working on short stories, an incomplete fantasy novel, and story notes.

The experience is personally fascinating. I'm watching how my mind worked then, reconstructing my influences and interests, almost as if I were an archaeologist reconstructing a past era. What did I know, and when did I know it? It's like reading the work of a completely different person, albeit one with whom you have a very similar sympathy of emotion and experience. At the same time, I can almost feel it opening up old neural pathways that have been unused for ages.

Most of these tales reached a certain point, and then I was unsure how to proceed. I dropped them, to mull over things a bit, and then never got back to it, distracted by a new idea or simply life, happening. Now that I have a new, rather concrete idea about my mortality, I somehow feel I owe it to the past me and anybody else's possible future interest to get these scribbly pages into a more readable form.

A somewhat pointless exercise, but I find it amusing. And it has already borne some fruit, as it inspired me to write a new short story, and to refurbish an old one and send it off for potential publication.

Meanwhile, I continue turning over the heap, tutting over spelling errors, wincing over terrible accents, wondering how the ubiquity of cellphones and the advancement of computers would affect some of the more "contemporary" stories, but mostly marveling over the ease of writing and even publishing we have now-a-days. If I had had the resources then...! Well, I probably would have had a couple of terribly written books to my name. What I could really use is some of the energy I had in those days.

I'm older, a very little wiser, and much sadder than the boy who wrote these things. And I'm a little envious, and kind of angry with him, too. I wish I could tell him that he should not be so distracted by what he deems his troubles that he can't see the enormous, the irreplaceable, resources and joys at his command. And I'm afraid that is exactly what the me just a little further down the time-line is trying to shout at me, right now. And that I should be listening to him more often.

Chapter One: Starts and Beginnings

“The single biggest problem with openings is that writers have a tendency to want to begin at the beginning. They want to start where it all happens first so they don’t leave anything out. But the truth is nothing starts at the beginning, at least not since the time of Adam and Eve. Everything starts in the middle of something else, and that’s where it ends, as well. So you might as well jump in somewhere interesting as somewhere boring, and bring the pieces of the story and its characters together as you go along. Choosing the important components of your story ahead of time – and discarding the unimportant ones - will help you do that.” — Terry Brooks

“One of the easiest ways to spot an inexperienced author is what former Wizards of the Coast editor Mark Sehestedt described as “weather report, fashion report, travel report.” This is when a book begins with a lengthy description of the roiling gray clouds traced with ominous flashes of lightning then slowly but surely moves on to what the character is wearing—exactly—and how long and what color his hair is, before finally resting into several pages of the history and customs of the realm and the difference between a flugle tree and a tizzleberry bush, so that you’re most of the way through chapter one before anyone says or does anything." --Philip Athans

I Only Take Advice I Want To Hear

"If you are a writer, and you have a novel idea that you are excited about writing, write it. Don’t go on message boards and ask random Internet denizens whether or not something is allowed. … Who is the writer here? YOU ARE. Whose book is it? YOUR BOOK. There are no writing police. No one is going to arrest you if you write a teen vampire novel post Twilight. No one is going to send you off to a desert island to live a wretched life of worm eating and regret because your book includes things that could be seen as cliché.

If you have a book that you want to write, just write the damn thing. Don’t worry about selling it; that comes later. Instead, worry about making your book good. Worry about the best way to order your scenes to create maximum tension, worry about if your character’s actions are actually in character; worry about your grammar. DON’T worry about which of your stylistic choices some potential future editor will use to reject you, and for the love of My Little Ponies don’t worry about trends. Trying to catching a trend is like trying to catch a falling knife — dangerous, foolhardy, and often ending in tears, usually yours.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t pay attention to what’s getting published; keeping an eye on what’s going on in your market is part of being a smart and savvy writer. But remember that every book you see hitting the shelves today was sold over a year ago, maybe two. Even if you do hit a trend, there’s no guarantee the world won’t be totally different by the time that book comes out. The only certainty you have is your own enthusiasm and love for your work. …

If your YA urban fantasy features fairies, vampires, and selkies and you decide halfway through that the vampires are over-complicating the plot, that is an appropriate time to ax the bloodsuckers. If you decide to cut them because you’re worried there are too many vampire books out right now, then you are betraying yourself, your dreams, and your art.

If you’re like pretty much every other author in the world, you became a writer because you had stories you wanted to tell. Those are your stories, and no one can tell them better than you can. So write your stories, and then edit your stories until you have something you can be proud of. Write the stories that excite you, stories you can’t wait to share with the world because they’re just so amazing. If you want to write Murder She Wrote in space with anime-style mecha driven by cats, go for it. Nothing is off limits unless you do it badly.

And if you must obsess over something, obsess over stuff like tension and pacing and creating believable characters. You know, the shit that matters. There are no writing police. This is your story, no one else’s. Tell it like you want to."

- RACHEL AARON

I have no idea who this lady is or what her credentials are, but I like what I'm hearing.

Benjamin Franklin: Quotation

"Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing." --Benjamin Franklin.