# Key points in *From Where You Dream* - Intuitive nature of fiction writing - Behind the chaos of the world, there's a deep order. - The artist understands the world in terms of senses and the emotions that cause them - The primary impulse is.... expressing thhe things in your dreamspace - You have to seek out sensual experiences, because we are sensualists. we create sensual objects. - good stories come from the white-hot center of you. - The reader experiences a story though their senses. - if you think while writing, it will show - the unconscious is where all true art comes from. its also scary as hell. you need to face it despite that. and you need to every day. - you have to build a ritual for your process. total attention must be on the work. this is called the artists trance. - your past experiences are full of stories. only when they decompose can you recompose them into new art - every detail in art resonates with everything else - everything in art must be malleable and unconscious. perhaps one can work in the game system - write every day - functional fixedness - Find something - either a space or an app - you only utilize while writing. - make time to write. don't let your current knowledge be an excute. - find a way to clear your mind. - buffer the hours between your analytical, creative, and social writing. Or at the very least, tune out distractions. - music can be very helpful, if you don't pay too mucha ttention to the lrics. - Do not will the work. don't write till it comes from the unconscious - if you have the itch to write, spend a moment mediatating in your unoconscious. - the most common writer's block with anyone who has talent is simply anxiety over not writing. why? because you lay there thinking about things. - the best way to put unconcious writing is between falling asleep at your desk, and brainstorming. - Instead, you are dreamstroming. inviting images of moment-to-moment experience through your unconsious. - it's like a daydream you aren't controlling. - you let it go, but it's coming through language so theres' some mechanism on your part. - and yet the essense of it are nothing you go after consciously - the state of communion with your unconscious is *absolutely essential* to writing well - Voice is how your unconscious is depicted in prose. This encoompasses narrative voice, your character's voice. - sometimes a story will peter out soon, since it wants to be a short story. other times a short story will just take off since it wasnts to be a novel - ==if you are to write, nothing must be preconceived.== - Spicy take. - if you see bad stuff coming up on screen, you know where it's coming from. just don't edit while writing. - do not consider others' work when you're in your trance. - fiction is first about human beings. second, it's about human emotion. - fiction is the art of human yearning. desire is the driving force of plot. every manuscript needs the phenomenon of desire. - there are two epiphanies in fiction. The first is climax, while the second is the "point of attack", when the character's deepest yearnings shine forth. - the point of attack is when you realize something is at stake. - related to the latter s the inciting incident, which can occur before the story begins. - until a character emerges from your unconscious intuitively, it's not encouraged to write. instead of intellectual understanding, its' sna intuiition of her desire you need. - one way to develop a character is to run scenes with them. but this isn't the story you' really wanna write. more like a line-to-line rumination. - if you can name an emotion precisely, it's often intellectualiszing and abstraction. - self-insert fiction allows you to insert yourself into the abstractions of poor words. - instead, good fiction should prompt you to leave yourself. you enter into the character and the chararacters sensibility, psychology, and spirit in your world. - An artist doesn't know everything about their world, paradoxically. writing is as much exploration as it is expression. - one clever way to engage the senses is to have *characters* use abstraction to create open questions. - many literary voices use abstraction to good effect, but this is never used for surface information. they benefit from the sensual presence of voice. - literary analysis is a secondary, aritificial way of interacting with literature. ## Predreaming - dreamstorming is when you sit in your trance, free -float, free-associate, watch your character, talk with your character, and dream around in your world. - do this for 6-12 weeks every day. dreamstorm potential scenes, anywhere in your story. - when you have these dreams, write them on a scrap of paper. 6-10 words, representing a potential scene. - it has to be faint, fragmentary, but with a sensual hook. a little sense of something. - NOTE! - when a compelling scene comes to you, you might be tempted to write it out. hold on. let it simmer. float on. - sometimes you get into runs of scenes. if it peters out, don't force it. - by time you have a buncha scenes, write them on cards, and arrange them on a timeline. - flip through your cards, look for the point of attack. set that as your first scene. - if you put a buncha scenes together, that can form an arc. this can be useful for creating episodic stories, where you string together 8-12 scenes into a single arc. - if you realize thre'a a gap between scenes, go back in your trance and dream some more. - during brainstorming, disregard continuity. randomness is good. - it's possible you can create sense cards. they append to other cards, providing sensory details, or a reference to another work. - if you use this method, you're often rewriting. not on the scale of paragraphs, but in general structure. thesese changes are often instinctive. - your novel has to stay flexible. otherwise, it will fall to pieces. you can even throw this system out if necessary. - ultimately though, this system lets you avoid forks in the road. - reincorporating - remember the context of your built environment. we use this in mythic, and here in dreamwriting. you move forward in writing by reincorporating. only in harmony to its built environment, can the work thrum. ## The Theatre of the Mind - Literature is an incredible medium. like film, it provides sensations. But beyond sound and vision, literature can provide taste, smell, feel, and anything else. this is an omnisensual cinema. - you can use film techniques to shape your writing. they can provide you rhythm for writing. - terms - shot - basic block of the film. uninterrupted flow of imagery. - cut - a transitional device between places - sequence - a group of scenes comprising a deramatic segment of a film - scenes - unified actions in a time and place, either one or more shots. - montage - placing two juxtaposing things together - establishing shot - an overview of the surroundings, their affect, at the beginning of a chapter. gradual camerawork can set the tone. This is an excellent place for montage. - extreme slow-motion - When one places a passage of description in an action scene, the world is rendered in extreme slow-motion. a minute passes, for seconds in the narrative. - imagine your car skidding on the freeway. That is extreme slow motion. - in the dickens example, there's not a single indepenedent verb. because time has stopped. - Dissolve - this can be accomplished in 3rd person limited by suddenly incorporating someone else's thoughts. perhaps in an intimate moment. - the rub - an expectation develops in every song, when the musician cuts against the grain. set that up in your writing. - your narrative voice is always adjusting the view of the physical world it creates - voice can let you both zoom out, view things at a far distance, or zoom in and share intimate details. - your voice can speed time, or slow it down. - a work of art is laden with affect. everything you write counts. - there are close shots, and long shots in fiction. as well, cuts can be rendered easily. transitions enable us to zoom, to pan... even let an offscreen character speak. - dialogue tags can be used for attention. Mentioning a character introduces them as an element. - note: read Hemingway - fast-action, slow motion can be accomplished by adding detail. - fiction is normally written in real time. adding detail slow that. but can avoiding detail quicken it? ## Quotes - She is a product of your own deepest white-hot center, but she is an other. When she presents herself, there will probably be a place involved, or an external circumstance, perhaps even a moment in our history—a crash, a war, the death of a mother —not your mother, understand, but the death of this character's mother. There will probably be an event that comes to you somehow, which summons her up. This character is summoned into your unconscious. You recognize her there, those luminous events and places surround her; but however vivid she seems to you, you may not yet be ready to write her story if the yearning is not there. For me, the thing that triggers the moment in my unconscious when a character is ready to speak or be spoken of, ready to be a story, is a flash of intuition about that character's yearning. What is it at her deepest level that she yearns for? - # Criticisms - it's possible to write about human emotion, while still writing from the head. - Your character can have it all - problems, attitudes, opinions, sensibility, voice, personality—all of those things, and often a wonderfully evoked milieu to boot. It doesn't matter if you don't have yearning. - Simple yearnings are enough for lesser writes. so he says, at least. ## Five ways of expressing emotion - The sensual reaction - temperature, heartbeat, muscle reaction, neural change - sensual **response** - sends signals to others - posture, gesture, expression, tone of voice, and so on - the experiecne of emotion - **flashes of the past**. moments of reference come back to our consciouness. they come as images, sense impressions. - prescient emotion - emotional flashes of fear or anticipation of a future moment - sensual selectivity - the focus on one of the hundreds of sensations we encounter every moment # Writing advice - don't write from the head - don't desire to be a great writer - ideas do not equate to good stories. - language is not inherently sensual - you can still conceptualize, just don't think while writing. - literal memory is your enemy. - journal a moment of your day exclusively by describing your senses. this should be rendered as a scene. - if you'd like, try writing these, putting them away for two weeks, then coming back to strike off stuff. - sometimes, a novel can come from the wedding of two concepts. - you shouldn't be afraid of having multiple story concepts running through your head. proud even. - Fiction uniquely captures the external and internal worlds - it probably doesn't work to "write around" in a novel