Dreams
We’ve all had someone say, “Hey! I had the weirdest dream…” Then, after a moment of excitement, they provide a few frustratingly vague details and end with something along the lines of “but I can’t really remember much else.”
And to whatever degree you remember dreams, you’ve probably felt the same annoying forgetfulness regarding their content, no matter how unbound the creative insanity of your nighttime adventure might have been.
As someone writing fiction, I see a strong overlap between dreams, stories, and creativity. (By stories I mean the kind that live first in one’s mind, not the kind that have been captured and concretized into the written word).
Dreams and stories both feel as though they come to being of their own volition, and they come from no discernible source. There are many ways this has been described before: from nothing, out of the aether, a gift of the muse, etc. My dad, who wrote three successful novels, likes to say, “I don’t come up with the story—it’s already there. I just write down what I see in my mind’s eye.”
Steven King once said,
Let's get one thing clear right now, shall we? There is no Idea Dump, no Story Central, no Island of the Buried Bestsellers; good story ideas seem to come quite literally from nowhere, sailing at you right out of the empty sky: two previously unrelated ideas come together and make something new under the sun. Your job isn't to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up.1
Frogs
I have my own theory (which I definitely didn’t come up with just now while writing this). It starts with dreams… and frogs.
Dreams are annoyingly slippery. Try holding onto a dream and it will most likely slip through the fingers of your mind like a wet frog to hop back into the thicket it came from, gone forever in a flash. These are dream-frogs.
The stories that live in my mind are slower, less slippery frogs. These story-frogs are a wild breed, like dream-frogs, coming and going at random. But most importantly, story frogs come in a variety of types.
Some are skittish, and you’ve only got one chance to make a grab at them. They’re hard to pin down, and they wriggle something fierce, but they are not so quick to jump off once you’ve got ‘em. Many writers are known for carrying notepads with them at all times (or a phone note nowadays), to catch any stray idea lest it escape back into the mist of forgetting.
Other story-frogs are fat and lazy, moping around and uncaring about being picked up (albeit sometimes after a few lethargic hops in the opposite direction). These are the ideas that for whatever reason don’t go away.
Some are even the spawn of dreams, though they’re usually a few vague images at most. A story-tadpole if you will. These can be caught and raised, and sometimes grow into a fully fledged tale. For example, I based a short story on just one image I remembered from a dream—getting swept up by a five hundred foot tidal wave. That was a story-tadpole.
“You catch more flies with honey than vinegar … but you can catch a whole lot of flies with a trained frog.” - Plato, from The Definitely Not-made-up Writings
The Cave of Creativity
And all these frogs are born in a cave. A dark, murky, misty cave (next door to Plato’s cave, which in reality was actually a frog hatchery). Some frogs are born near the mouth of the cave, where the light still reaches, and can easily make their way out and into our lives. These are the soap-opera, sit-com, cop-show-episodical frogs. They’re fairly common, will do in a pinch, and decent fun if you’re lucky. Pretty much anyone with some decent writing technique could raise one of these.
Side note: there is another breed I didn’t mention before—GMO frogs. These are grown in corporate labs for profit, and they lack true creative DNA. These end up as unwatchable network television, weird SEO articles online, and government funded children’s books.
But the best frogs are born deep in the bowels of the cave, shrouded in mist, in pools of liquid creative drippings of unknown origin. They do not come along as often as the others, and it takes a true writer to coax them from the darkness and transform them into an enrapturing tale. One must know the ways of the cave, and have all the equipment, skills, and talent to make the journey. These frogs become the magna opera, the works of master storytellers. (I had to look up the plural of magnum opus for this.)
Writers are Frog Farmers
The real challenge is not catching these story-frogs—though some are feisty—the true difficulty is in raising one. Bringing it home, keeping it warm, feeding it grubs and worms. Spending time with it every day, teaching it tricks and whatnot, until one day you’ve got a fully domesticated publishable-book-frog, which you can then set free and hope it catches a whole lot of flies.
So, good hunting to all you fellow frog farmers out there.
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Steven King, On Writing: A Memoir of Craft