Writing tips is a new category of posts here at Writerly Life that will be appearing every Tuesday. It’s a series of concrete tips for improving or kickstarting your writing. The tips that fall into this category are the sorts that you can do today or even right now, and they’re chosen to immediately re-vitalize your writing in some small (but meaningful!) way.
This week’s tip is:
Cut it out with the dreams already!
Henry James famously said, “Tell a dream, lose a reader.” When our siblings insist on telling us their dreams at the breakfast table, is there anything more boring? We all love telling our own dreams, because they mean something to us; the weird aspect of a dream is how everything feels imbued with meaning and significance, even if none of it makes sense. At the same time, this feeling of meaning and significance is rarely transferrable to others. It’s just nonsense to your readers or listeners; and it’s boring.
It’s not only old-fashioned writers who say this. Michael Chabon recently bemoaned the use of dreams in a New York Review of Books post. Dreams are puzzling, and they can inspire good, polished art, but they need more discipline. When a dream appears in a story, it’s often just a re-hashing of what has already been established in the light of day. Why do you need a dream to repeat that the main character feels smothered by his parents? If you’ve shown it to satisfaction in the real action, then you’ve done your job.
So when in doubt — cut out that dream! Your story will suddenly feel less gauzy and unsure of what it wants to be. It will just be instead of trying so hard to be.
A good question — but we can use dreams to reveal things that haven’t happened, or that happened before the action of the novel. In my soon-to-appear science fiction novel, the main character experiences “spirit dreams,” visions of the future sent by the spirits. The dreams are fuzzy, and show two possible futures. In another novel of mine, the main character dreams of a fire that occurred before the action of the novel. It’s used to allow the main character to think about what happened in the fire — as a kind of flashback.
Boy. Chabon has just lost it. I hit the link to his article & I don’t think I’ve read anything so lame since the last Chabon short-story I waded through in the New Yorker.
Now, BLH, you have approached the topic of dreams as a ‘tool’ one should use only judiciously–if at all–in a story. That is good advice. Chabon simply attacks dreams themselves–as though we have any control over them! And he let’s us know that he, a father of fairly young children, tells them to cram it should they be so uncouth as to bring up their dreams at the breakfast table.
Nice guy. Why do I imagine therapy bills in their future?
Frankly, I find other people’s dreams fascinating. The reason is this: they are SO different from my own! Each person who has ever told me about his or her dream has let me see, just slightly, a dreamscape profoundly different from my own.
My boyfriend tells me about dreams in which he is chasing villains or doing some action/adventure thing. Others have told me they fly! No matter what, my dreams are nothing like anyone else’s. We share a waking reality, but our dreams are truly just our own.
I wish I could train myself to do conscious dreaming–you focus as you drift into sleep on, say, your watch. You tell yourself: “When I see my watch on my wrist in my dream, I’ll realize it IS a dream & continue with it.” If you can do this, you can, supposedly, ‘direct’ the dream to some extent.
HOW can anyone say dreams aren’t interesting after that movie, ‘Inception’ (?) with Leonardo di Caprio? I’ve watched that movie over & over, just fascinated by the concept & by the movie’s execution of it.
As with everything in writing, it’s HOW you use the dream in the story. If it repeats the waking world, toss it. If it provides a means of moving the story forward, use it.
L&K, MaryB
Agree with MaryB about the HOW. Of course if an author uses a dream to simply rehash the goings-on of her character’s day, THAT is going to lose the reader. But the truth of the matter is that most writers can be a heck of a lot more creative than that.
To give an example that most people will get, in the Harry Potter books, Harry connects to Voldemort’s consciousness through his dreams. It’s a major part of the plot.
In my work-in-progress novel, the main character has dreams about real events that she was never a part of. She doesn’t know it yet, but they’re due to her powerful control over time. That’s dreaming, but it isn’t terribly cliche.