Dreams in the ... Which House?

"I have written one story inspired by a dream of mine, "The Constant Encroaching of a Tumultuous Sea". This story recounts by and large an entire dream of mine, from start to finish, although it must be said that I realized the end of the dream was not a proper end to the story, and thus added a final act which tied things together and made sense — as much sense as could be made — of what preceded it. Now, it's not up to me if the story is a success story — I'm quite aware of people who consider this tale, and its stylistic mate "The Autumnal City" both stumbling blocks in the currently available collection of my fiction — but I assure readers that I attempted to take a dream that appeared close to fully formed and mould the "good" parts of it into a coherent story — or as coherent as possible and still retain its "dreaminess". (As an aside, one friend who knew the dream and read the final tale felt I lost something by not retaining the completely arbitrary nature of a dream.) That said, I don't mind writing some tales that don't adhere to strict narrative logic. There is a history in fiction of stories that attempt to work on a subconscious level. My favourite practitioner was of course Robert Aickman, whose stories often had events occur that seemed inexplicable and often irrational, and yet the reader comes away from them without a feeling of the contract being cheated. Rather, that either the ending, as bizarre as it is, logically follows from the text before, or that the story is well-formed and it's only the readers understanding that is flawed. The two stories of mine I mention attempt to work in this same way, laying out imagery that the reader is not necessarily expected to understand logically, but rather instinctually.

"This idea is actually, funnily enough, foreign to me in my normal day to day activities (too grounded in what I perceive to be "scientific reality") and yet in my fiction I strive to tap into the dream logic of my subconsciousness. I've no doubt said it here many times and also on my own blog, but I consider both the act of reading and of writing to be different from most other artforms in that it inspires both the creator and the consumer to enter a semi-lucid dream. When we read, we slip into a daydream that is dictated by the words before us, but make no mistake: we are dreaming. The same happens to the author, who in his dream-state is transcribing words as though a medium, literally dreaming onto the page. How apt is it that the dream we have while writing become the dream another has while reading. To transfer a dream from one to another seems impossible to my "scientific reality" self, and yet it's done every day. Where am I going with this? Only that I see all writing as a form of "writing based on dreams", the only difference is how much control — or rather willingness to give up that control — the author has."

The above were my comments on an entry Richard Gavin made over at his blog, AT FEAR'S ALTAR. They are posted there for all to see, but I thought them interesting enough to bring over here, not only for those that might have missed them, but to ensure they're saved for posterity.

I'm in the midst of three or four different projects right now that I expect will carry me until June, 2009. Each requires more time of me than I have, and unlike the big-shots I don't get paid enough for any of it. Which reminds me abstractly of an interview I read with Neil Gaiman this morning that provided a quote that no doubt my friend Ian Rogers will want to add to his "writer's quote" rotation. In a nutshell (and forgive me if you've heard this before) the best genre in which to write is the "bestseller genre". It sounds glib, but it's true when one things about it. If one is a bestselling author, he or she almost has carte blache to write what he or she likes: it's all fair game, regardless of the plot, style, or theme, because as long as one is a bestseller, nobody asks questions.