Why write while she sleeps?
So why the title of the blog? Several reasons.
1. ‘Write by night’ was taken. As was ‘Write way’, ‘Write is right’ and ‘Author in training’.
2. I have a two month old daughter, so it literally is ‘write while she sleeps’.
3. Many of my stories start while I’m asleep. I don’t think you’d be hard pushed to find other authors who draw inspiration from their dreams. Dreams are amazing. In them you can be quite literally anyone, regardless of sex, ethnicity, even species. You can be anywhere: places you’ve been before, places you haven’t, places that you are fairly sure don’t exist. I remember dreaming of a world made entirely of sweets when I was a kid (you can imagine my excitement when I watched ‘Wreck it Ralph’ for the first time). Anything goes.
When I started writing at twelve years of age, everything I wrote was based on my dreams. As a nerdy, awkward adolescent, I tended to lose myself in young adult fantasy books by day, and dream about whichever poor boy I happened to be crushing on at the time at night. Usually these dreams were cheesy and romantic: walks on the beach or through the woods, eyes meeting across a dancefloor, hands brushing while passing books in class. Generally my dreams were fairly lucid, and I usually managed to direct them to a kiss before the dream ended. Pretty standard nauseating stuff.
But it got me thinking. What if I was having these dreams, but information was missing? I won’t go into details here, but this gave me the idea for my first book.
Thirteen years later, that book is still unfinished. I’ve looked back at it several times and it’s painfully obvious that the thing needs to be started again, as it bears all the hallmarks of an overexcited twelve year-old who doesn’t really know what she’s doing (don’t get me wrong; I know children have written and released books before and they’ve been impressive but trust me, this wasn’t one of those). But as plot-holey and nonsensical as it is, it was my first idea and my first attempt at novel writing, so I’m proud of it. And I have my overactive imagination and dreams to thank.
Since then I have begun no less than eighteen new novels. Some of them have fizzled out into nothing (including a superhero story written from the point-of-view of the love interest character. It didn’t work. Turns out she had a pretty boring life and I couldn’t make her have more contact with the superhero without turning her into Lois Lane), and most of the rest have potential but lie unfinished somewhere in my computer.
But the dreams continue (although they have evolved slightly from the romantic clich��s of my youth) and they still inspire me. Dreams are when the imagination runs wild, without limits of physics, culture or conscious thought. If we can’t get any inspiration from that, then where can we?
Whatever inspires you, cling to it. New ideas make life so much more interesting. Be inspired. Make that invention. Bake that gourmet meal. Film that movie.
As for me, I’m going to write that book. If my daughter will let me.
