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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?
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