This month’s chapter in Dreams and Inward Journeys is a juicy one — Journeys in Sexuality and Gender. I also had some trouble figuring it out.

My first thought is: there is absolutely a place (many places!) in children’s books for stories about gender and sexuality. Gender and sexuality are parts of life, and kids need books about life.

However (second thought): these are not the sorts of books I tend to write. What do I, someone who writes about a cow with a clipboard and a rock on an existential journey, have to say about gender and sexuality?

What occurred to me, after reading all the pieces in this chapter, was that stories about gender and sexuality are about the truth of a person (whether that person is you or a character) and about that person recognizing, owning, and embodying that truth, even if society has other ideas about how to be. So, maybe you have many stories in you about this truth through the lens of gender and sexuality, or maybe your character’s truth that they’re realizing is through a different lens. Essentially, this chapter is about letting your character live in their truth.

What’s clear from the readings in this chapter is that humans have been thinking about gender and sexuality forever. So it’s worth thinking about in terms of your book, generally (or maybe specifically) in an effort to make your characters as fully drawn as possible.

Subscribe now

Read more

Hello! Here I am with the Nightmares and Obsessions chapter of Dreams and Inward Journeys, squeaking in at the last week of the month, and is that because I am taking my time and giving myself space to get things done offline, or is it because I was avoiding a chapter called NIGHTMARES? Both, probably.

If you’re just joining us, we’re making our way through a college creative writing textbook called Dreams and Inward Journeys. The previous posts are here, and of course you can go through all of them, or you can start right now with Chapter 5.

We’re continuing the thread of looking at dreams and how they spark creativity, but this month is all about NIGHTMARES (I promise I won’t put it in all caps every time, but I do keep wanting to shout it). Specifically— nightmares: why? Why do we have nightmares? Why is something a nightmare for one person and not for someone else? We’re also talking about OBSESSIONS (I’m still shouting) which are indeed extremely nightmare-adjacent in a way I hadn’t contemplated before. Why do we get obsessed with something, and when does it turn unhealthy? And how can we use all this in our creative lives?

Obsession is difficult in real life, but it can be interesting (and voyeuristically relatable) in fiction. Often the stories of nightmares and obsessions are the ones that stick with me. I have a sense of “I wonder if that could happen to me?” The readings in this chapter got me thinking about how I can give my characters weird things to be obsessed with, and how that might affect the stories.

I have talked before about how I am not a fan of horror. I find I can’t get the residue of it off of me, and I lie awake thinking about everything. Two of my kids are horror fans, and, because of the way we have set up our Saturday movie night, I end up watching some horror movies. Sometimes they’re not as bad as I think they will be. Sometimes they’re much worse. 

What’s interesting to me is that everyone has a nightmare scenario, and they all might be so different. And it’s this fascinating thing to me, how someone else can calmly watch a scary movie without hiding behind a throw blanket like I do. But then, I love being on a stage and talking into a microphone, and I know that’s a nightmare for some people.

A scary story can be a way to process fears. Being aware of what we’re afraid of, and then moving through that fear, is a way to grow.

I think it’s ok if I don’t want to watch someone getting killed in a gory way on my TV screen. But if I’m afraid to write a story because I know it’s going to challenge me, then that’s a fear I should work through.

Dreams and Inward Journeys says this:

“Your thinking about the dreams and nightmares portrayed in the stories, poems, and essays in this chapter may diminish some of their power to frighten and may help you to see such experiences in perspective, as reflections of archetypical patterns of human development and as potential sources of creative inspiration, transformation, and psychological growth.”

Sounds good to me! As a scaredy-cat, I am willing to diminish the power of the scary things while also getting creative inspiration. Let’s go!

The readings:

• W. S. Merwin, “Foghorn”

• Franklin Galvin and Ernest Hartmann, “Nightmares: Terrors of the Night”

• Mary Shelley, Introduction to Frankenstein

• Cynthia Ozick, “On Excellence”

• Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Yellow Wallpaper”

• Yukio Mishima, “Swaddling Clothes”

• John Cheever, “The Enormous Radio”

• Sandra Gilbert, “Getting Fired, or, ‘Not Being Retained’” (on page 22 of the pdf linked)

The assignments:

Read more

This month in our DIY college creative writing study, we’re looking at fairy tales and myths.1 This month’s readings had me thinking more about creativity and how it fits into my life rather than about specific prompts for writing. 

This month, we’re prompted to think about what myths and fairy tales we heard and loved as children. What is your foundational mythology? Mine is some combination of Alice in Wonderland, Gnomes, and D’Aulaire’s Greek Myths. Is Sesame Street a mythology? Is Melissa Gilbert as Laura Ingalls? Is The Love Boat a fairy tale? Any of those might fit into my foundational mythology as well. 

Dreams and Inward Journeys says this:

“Myths are highly patterned stories that present the reader with ideal heroes and heroines as well as dreamlike plots and settings that represent the fundamental values of a society. Fairy tales satisfy the need of younger people for dangerous adventures in that happiness and justice ultimately prevail. Both forms provide ethical lessons, helping readers to discriminate between creative and destructive, good and evil behavior.”

Ok, wait, by that definition, then yes, Love Boat definitely counts.

This month in the readings, we have some heavy hitters in the world of myths and dreams, we have a selection of creation myths, and three Cinderella versions.

I’ve never actually read Joseph Campbell until now (I did not find him an easy read, but truthfully maybe he’s just not much of a beach read, and I should try again in the winter). I’m certainly aware of Campbell. So many writing craft texts are about The Hero’s Journey (I also got The Heroine with 1,001 Faces recently, and have been dipping into that). I keep thinking I should watch the Bill Moyers interviews with Campbell, but then I never quite feel like it’s the right time to watch six hours of two dudes talking (but I have heard people say it is life-changing to watch – have you watched it?).

This month is also the first chapter where all of the readings are available online! Yay!

This month’s readings: 

• Nikki Giovanni, ego-tripping (there may be a reason why)

• Joseph Campbell, The Four Functions of Mythology (the selection in Dreams and Inward Journeys is part I, to the middle of page 144)

• Carl Jung, The Importance of Dreams, which is an excerpt from Man and His Symbols – the excerpt is from the beginning of the book, page 3, through page 17.

• Bruno Bettelheim, Fairy Tales and the Existential Predicament (scroll down in the link, to the second part)

Some creation myths:

• Genesis 2:4-23 (Old Testament of the Hebrew Bible)

• The Sacrifice of Primal Man (Rig Veda, Hindu)

• Creation out of Chaos (Taoist, China) – I can’t find the exact retelling shared in the text, but it’s similar to this one.

• Dreaming People (Malayan Pygmies) (scroll down a bit in the link until you get to “Dreaming People”)

• The Chameleon Finds (Yao, African)

• Spider Woman Creates the Humans (Hopi) (page 5-6 in the link, the “Creation of Mankind” section)

Three Cinderellas:

• The Brothers Grimm, Aschenputtel

• The Algonquin Cinderella

• Olga Broumas, Cinderella

Read more

This month, we’re diving into Chapter 3 of Dreams and Inward Journeys: Memories from Childhood. If you’re just joining us as we make our way through this college creative writing textbook, you can find chapters 1 and 2 here (or just start with chapter 3 — they’re not particularly cumulative). 

The major thing I’m working on now is a draft of a middle gra…

Read more

WELCOME to part two of this series where we go through a college creative writing textbook (Dreams and Inward Journeys by Marjorie Ford and Jon Ford), read the readings, and do the assignments.1

Part one / chapter one is here:

Chapter One was called “Discovering Ourselves in Writing,” and this month’s chapter is “Discovering Ourselves in Reading.” I will admit I was initially a little bummed out. I mean, I love reading, but I’m trying to get writing done here. We started this textbook with writing. Would this month be all reading? I thought this was a creative writing book, not a creative reading book. Silly me: they are the same. I’m excited to tell you that the exercises in this month’s chapter were even more enlightening and words-generating than last month’s.

Why read but to figure out who we are? There might be other reasons, but that’s a good one. Dreams and Inward Journeys says:

“Readers are able to experience new and different realities vicariously through their reading of both fiction and nonfiction writings, and these vicarious encounters contribute to personal growth, bringing new intellectual and emotional experiences that help readers to find new resources within themselves.”

Oh, right! That! That’s one of the things I love about reading!

When you read, you absorb the work of others. You take it in and mix it inside you until you conjure something new. Reading is a textual conversation between you and the author, but, as a writer, you can take that conversation one step further, and have it inspire your own work. 

Reading makes us better writers. In his book Show Your Work! Austin Kleon says, “A lot of the writers I know see the act of reading and the act of writing as existing on opposite ends of the same spectrum: The reading feeds the writing, which feeds the reading.” We can experience forms, structures, realities, and stories, that are new and inspirational to us. We can experience stories that are baffling or maddening, and think about why we don’t like them and what we should do with our own writing as a result. George Saunders had a great post about this recently, where he wisely said, “The only sin is falsifying your reaction.” So, yes, let’s think about that going forward, here — our reactions to what we read are true, for us, and by digging into them we can uncover some truths about ourselves, as writers.

I will remind you, once again, that all of this is optional. The beauty of learning things as adults is that you don’t have to do any of this. Read what interests you! Do only the assignments you want to!

Subscribe now

Read more

This newsletter is likely too long for your email program; you may want to click through to Substack to read it in full.

I never took a creative writing class in college.

I was an English major, and if I’d stopped to think about it for two minutes, I would have known that I wanted to be a writer. But also I knew that writing was hard, and I had no idea how to do it, and it was more fun writing long letters to make my friends laugh and reading for class and not thinking about what I was meant to do. 

I regret it, but here I am now, so I figured it out eventually.

Last month I was in Green Hand, my favorite used bookstore, and came across a book called Dreams and Inward Journeys: A Reader for Writers by Marjorie Ford and Jon Ford (2nd ed., 1994). I couldn’t quite figure out what it was, but I bought it on impulse.

Dreams and Inward Journeys turns out to be a college creative writing textbook, and it talks about dreams from several angles. There are the dreams you have when you’re sleeping – what your subconscious is telling you. There is the dream state which is creative flow, that trance you fall into when you’re deep in your work. And there’s the dream you have, the aspiration for what you could be, what your work could be. Ford and Ford say they designed the text to be a “common meeting ground” for all of those different definitions of dream. 

I am someone who tends to shut down creatively if presented with a writing prompt, but that’s because so often what is labeled a writing prompt is too specific and seems designed for a story that doesn’t line up with whatever I’m writing. Maybe I don’t want to think about what sort of umbrella my character has, or what the worst day of her life was. 

I don’t mind assignments, though, these things that are more open-ended.1 And optional! Once you leave school and are in the DIY School of Life, all of these assignments are pick and choose. The assignments in Dreams and Inward Journeys are all about looking to your own dreams and memories to figure out where your story will go, and as someone who thinks most (all?) good stories are essentially autobiographies, this makes sense to me. 

I am in the stage of the novel I’m writing where I am still figuring out what it is. I need to experiment and play. I need to write chapters from points of view of different characters to see who wants to talk. I need to look at what they’re saying to see what story is there. But this book is so big and complicated and hard that I found myself procrastinating, because I had trouble figuring my way in. I knew I couldn’t just write the next chapter as “what happens next in the story” (although those chapters will come eventually). It’s like knowing the treasure is somewhere under the dirt but only having a golf pencil and a magnifying glass to dig with.

The assignments in Dreams are another tool to dig with, though, and so far, they’re really working. I’ve written a lot that I know I wouldn’t have figured out otherwise. 

I’d love to share them with you.

Here is my plan. Each month, for you, the paying subscribers to Do the Work, I’ll write up the assignments as I see them from Dreams and Inward Journeys, a chapter at a time. Many of the assignments are specific to the readings, so I pulled the idea of the assignments out so you can do them without doing the readings. That said, I’ll include titles to all of the readings from the chapters and links to them, when available. You may decide you want to read them for a little more insight. 

There are nine chapters in the book, so, if all goes according to plan, for the next nine months, I’ll give us all these assignments, one post each month. These assignments work for any kind of writing. Non-fiction, memoir, picture book, novel – you can adapt them to work for whatever you’re working on. COME WITH ME ON THIS DREAM JOURNEY, WILL YOU?

Read more