In From Where You Dream, (New York, Grove Press, 2005), novelist and writing teacher Robert Olen Butler talks about how to get into the dream space from which great stories arise.
Writers have their methods; Butler's is fascinating. From the dream space, receive your scenes one by one and just note them down in brief. Each scene must be grounded in sensory impressions.
The process of dreaming the scenes is the magic, he says. Mining your subconscious brings up the motifs that will appear in the work. When you run out of ideas for scenes, (after maybe a couple of hundred), write them out briefly on 3 X 5 cards.
Then comes the fun part. You lay out the few cards that you know represent scenes early in the book, and then you arrange them in order on a large flat surface. You can now start writing your draft.
Problem is, I was using another method. Write every day, get through the first draft. Only then go back and edit.
That was how I got to Chapter 22, the furthest I've been able to get into my story so far. But I got bogged down again.
Though I like Butler's ideas, I know I have to develop a method that works for me. Now I'm going to try writing scenes rather than chapters. Later I can figure out how to knit them together.
Thanks to Nancy Lee for recommending Butler's fascinating book.
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