Tag Archives: creativity

Perchance to Dream: Tapping Your Infinite Creativity

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John R. Fultz is the author of the novels Seven Princes and the forthcoming Seven Kings, both from Orbit.  A native of Kentucky, he now lives in the North Bay Area, California. 

All human beings are also dream beings. Dreaming ties all mankind together. –Kerouac

It occurs to me that the act of writing, especially in the fantastic and speculative genres, is very much like the act of dreaming.

When we sleep, our subconscious mind constructs vignettes, narratives, adventures, terrors, and dramas for our dreaming mind to inhabit. The architectures of our deepest selves come bursting to life, and even though we sometimes feel at the mercy of our dreams, it’s worth recognizing that it is actually we, the Dreamers, who create our dreams.

In this respect, everyone is a writer. A writer of dreams, if nothing else. Scientists tell us that dreaming is an essential human function–those who cannot dream eventually go mad. Dreaming allows us to confront our deepest fears and desires, often without realizing that we are doing exactly that. It’s as if something essentially human inside us is writing stories that are crucial to our spiritual, mental, and emotional health.

We are born dreamers; in that same vein, we are born storytellers. What could be more human than telling stories? It’s one of our oldest and most primal skills…from fireside grunts to cave drawings to stone tablets and right on up to paperbacks and best-selling fiction.

The same deeply ingrained creativity that subconsciously creates dreams also creates the stories we write in our conscious hours. I know writers who have dreamed entire novels before (or while) writing them. Robert Silverberg’s SON OF MAN was written in this way. I’m sure the same has been done with short stories. How many of you reading this have turned the nugget of a dream into a full-fledged story–or a whole book?

I am accustomed to sleep and in my dreams to imagine the same things that lunatics imagine when awake. –Descartes

There is a definite, if mysterious, link between our ability to create convincing, immersive, powerful dreams and our ability to write fully realized fiction. In effect, when we write we are dreaming while awake. Our conscious mind shapes, hones, and transcribes these dreams, but it is the infinite font of creative consciousness that dwells deep inside all of us that serves as the soil in which these stories grow.

In other words, every story or book you write is a combined effort: the conscious and subconscious mind working in tandem to produce the desired results. Often, writers find themselves on a journey of discovery. Many of us know where we’re going, but are surprised at how we end up “getting there.” We tap into our subconcious–which taps into the great Idea Pool–the Universal Consciousness–Jung called it the Collective Unconscious–and we “fish” for ideas, scenes, plots, characters, entire WORLDS. We are the miners of dreams, turning raw stones into diamonds with our dedicated efforts.

When we write, we dream. When we dream, we write–if only for an audience of one.

Isaac Asimov once said “Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.” I submit that writing, for us all, is actually DREAMING through our fingers. Undistilled dreamstuff, flowing like lifeblood from the center of our being along the conduits of our arms, into our fingertips and so into the keyboard (or pen). That immortal flow continues, right onto the printed page (or screen), and directly into the heart-minds of our readers.

Therein lies the magic and majesty of the written word. It’s how we share our dream-visions across space and time. It can even provide us with a certain kind of immortality; the writer’s words often live far longer than the writer.

Dream no small dreams for they have no power to move the hearts of men. –Goethe

When I’m deep into the writing process on a novel (or even a story), my conscious mind is so involved with the story I’m weaving that when I go to sleep my dreaming mind often takes over. I write stories over and over in my dreams… often watching them play out before me in part or whole. Sometimes I emerge from this state of dream-writing and I’ve suddenly solved a problem in the narrative, or “caught” a great idea that seemingly came from nowhere. When your mind is in “high gear” crafting stories, it doesn’t want to stop–even when you sleep.

All of this culminates in some valuable advice for writers: Pay attention to your dreams.

Listen to that Sleeping Narrator because it is your direct line to the source of infinite creativity. If you’re having trouble with a story, try sleeping on it. Let your unconscious partner, your Sleeping Narrator step in and give you a hand. You can also try some transcendental meditation for tapping creativity…but that’s a subject for another day.

Dream On, Brave Dreamers…

Man is a genius when he is dreaming. –Kurosawa

Writing and Racial Identity Versus the Spinrave

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This is writer Nisi Shawl’s last post for Booklifenow, and I hope you’ll join me in thanking her for her great posts, this one included. Nisi is the co-author of Writing the Other, with Cynthia Ward, who will be contributing a last post later this week. I’m very grateful to both of them for such thoughtful and useful words. – Jeff

A subscriber to the Carl Brandon Society list serve asked for specific criticisms of the Spinrave recently published in Asimov’s SF Magazine. That is work. Just reading it is an effort, let alone trying to translate into something resembling sense. Hence my response below to the request for “specific criticism”:

“Okay, I would take the time to analyze the article if someone paid me for it. My rate is $50/hour.

“As a sort of free sample, I’ll say I agree essentially with (another poster to the list serve): consider the source. The source being Norman Spinrad, who not only doesn’t know anything about the subject upon which he bloviates for page upon page, but who seems to be inordinately proud of his ignorance. Norman is like this. My short response: tldr.

“I will also add that his positioning of Mike Resnick, a very good writer, as an African writer, is so insanely disorienting as to induce vomiting. And comparing him to Octavia E. Butler, who never, as far as I am aware, ever claimed to be an African writer, is an action on a par with opening a chest full of tokens and rummaging around blindfolded in it, and pulling one out at random to toss onto the hearth of rhetoric.”

The subscriber requesting explication declined my help. He thought my fee was too high—though another poster advised me to double it—and made do with the numerous other posts available on the subject.

Among them we find N.K. Jemisin, who deals with one specific point. It takes her 500 words, not counting her contributions to the post’s comment threads. Imagine if she had attempted to render the entire Spinrave comprehensible. How many short stories and/or novels of hers would we be doing without while she whacked her way through his thorny densenesses?

My offer stands.

Ante Spinrave, I expected to devote the whole of this final guest post for Booklife to analyzing a panel I recently pulled off at Radcon, an SF convention held in Eastern Washington. The panel was titled “Writing and Racial Identity.” Besides myself the participants were Eileen Gunn, Alma Alexander, and Bobbie Benton-Hull. Here’s the description I gave programming:

“What does your race have to do with what you write? Depending on your race, are certain topics forbidden to you? Obligatory? None of the above? If your race matters, how do you know what it is? By what people see when they look at you, or by what you know of your genetic background? By your cultural upbringing? By what you write?”

We had a grandly civil hour-long discussion about how our racial identities did and did not contribute to what we wrote, did and did not determine what we wrote, about how we dealt with others’ expectations of us as writers based on what they knew and/or assumed about our racial identities, how we constructed those identities for ourselves with our writing and in other ways. I loved that we spoke as equals, according each other and the subject all due and appropriate respect.

Because it is a complex subject, one that deserves careful thought.

One white panelist related a classroom encounter with Faulkner in which her instructor held up this famous white male’s avoidance of a black female character’s interior life as an ideal to emulate; to write some things she has written, the panelist has had to unlearn what she’d been taught. Another spoke movingly of the ethnic and religious distinctions that formed the core of her upbringing in Central Europe. I wondered aloud if my difficulty placing stories with white protagonists was due to editors wanting “more black for their buck;” that felt risky to me, since one of the field’s top editors sat in the audience’s front row, not five feet from my face.

Our fourth panelist had been raised as an American Indian and spent her life knowing absolutely that this was who and what she was. Then she discovered through genetic testing that her biological heritage is a mix European and Sub-Saharan African. No American Indian. She still struggled with integrating this knowledge at the time of the panel, framing her thoughts on her identity as a question, referencing a female character in the movie “Dances with Wolves.”

It was all most interesting to me. Way more interesting than the Spinrave. In my description and in my moderation I had aimed to show that race is an issue that affects writers of all backgrounds, all races, that racial identity is labile, is inflected by more than one sort of information, and in turn has complex and complicating effects on what we say, how we say it, who we say it to….We touched on each of these subjects with a sure touch, though in some instances only a brief one. There’s so much to talk about.

There are so many smart people to include in the discussion. I want to hold this panel again someday soon. Maybe at WisCon? The panel will give its participants and our audience much to think about. And they will think, and do research, and speak carefully. And it will make sense.

Writing the Other–Continuing This Week

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Later this week, Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward return with more guest blogging, in part based on their book Writing the Other.

In the meantime, check out this essay by Shawl on “Appropriate Cultural Appropriation.

For some of us, the attractions of another’s culture can hardly be overrated. Within the context of speculative fiction’s reputation as “escapist” literature, getting away from one’s own traditions and background may seem like a good idea. Surely to find that much-prized “sensawunda” sought by genre afficionados, we must leave behind what British fantasist Lord Dunsany called “the fields we know?”

But what if the realms beyond these fields are populated? One person’s terra incognita is another’s home. What are we to make of the denizens of these exotic lands? And what will they make of us, tramping through their yam patches in search of the ineffable, and frightening their flocks with our exclamations over their chimeric beauty?

To collapse the metaphor, readers looking for something “different” in fantastic fiction, and authors who attempt to supply them with it, often turn to mythologies, religions, and philosophies outside the dominant Western paradigm. Then, not too surprisingly, people who practice these religions or espouse these philosophies or descend from those who constructed these mythologies object. Their culture, they complain, is being misrepresented, defaced, devalued, messed with. Stolen. Often, said culture is the only resource remaining after colonialization has removed all precious metals from the ground, or the ground from under its former inhabitants feet, or, as in the case of the African slave trade, when it has assumed ownership of those feet themselves.

Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward on ROAARS and The Unmarked State

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Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward are guestblogging here on Booklifenow all this week. Their book Writing the Other is a remarkable exploration of character, situation, and perception. It’s a recommended text in Booklife – JeffV

Cynthia and I want to begin our joint stint as guest bloggers here by sharing an excerpt from Writing the Other: A Practical Approach, the book we wrote together based on the workshop we co-teach. The excerpt will help you get into the spirit of our upcoming posts, which are going to riff on related topics

First, we’ll define a couple of the terms we use:

The unmarked state—Possessing demographic characteristics considered “unremarkable” by the dominant culture.

ROAARS—This is an acronym we created to talk about a group of differences from the unmarked state that are, in this culture, considered to be deeply significant differences. These differences are: Race, (sexual) Orientation, Age, Ability, Religion, Sex.

Keep those concepts in mind as you read the book excerpt below. – Nisi Shawl

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