Dream Versus Time, Life, the World, And All The Really Important Things
The holidays are coming. We’re arriving at an intersection of worlds – the real and the imagined, outer and inner, concrete and symbolic, the past and the now.
What must be done, what needs to be done.
Kids dressed up as monsters expect candy offerings. Blood-bonded friends and enemies gather for the ritual slaughter and consumption of a flightless bird. Parents plot the delivery of gifts under the guise of a night-time visit by a big man in a red suit.
Rev up the planner. Break out the color markers. There are responsibilities and commitments to be met. Shopping to be done, money spent, joy and love packaged and mailed or hidden away from loved ones until the fateful day of deliverance.
Who’s going where, what’s for dinner, which metallic red foil wrapped box is for who, again?
There is fun in playing dress-up, celebrating friends and family, offering gifts, re-connecting with ongoing traditions.
There is also pain in the feeling once more the loss of what once was, empty chairs around the dinner table, phone calls that will never be made, again, doors that can never open to the same smiling faces.
Blood seeps from old wounds. Empty spaces push out from within. Darkness closes in.
These days, broken finances haunt the empty windows of mall stores, office buildings and condos. Work, if you’re lucky enough to have any, is probably insane. The house, well, let’s hope you still have one, never mind the money to keep it up. Writers are living the freelancer’s nightmare of changing and diminishing markets, cranky editors who are themselves crumbling under corporate pressures, vanishing secondary jobs to get through the time between contracts and checks.
Writers belong to the class or workers who don’t get paid personal or sick days, holidays, or vacations. There is very little in the way of a safety net or escape route for writers who don’t have a partner with a job, benefits, and the capacity to step in to take a little pressure off.
Even without the holiday pressure, responsibilities accumulate, along with scars, routines, stuff, and things to do. We’re busy folk, for the most part, with big open pipes full of more things to do flowing fast at us. Health. The job. The kids. The parents.
Change happens, faster and more violently. Even the damn weather is kicking butt. Hang on as the rollercoaster dips and flips. What happened to the safety belts?
The real world is happening, baby.
And if somehow the big stressors have passed you by, and the usual ones are not so tough, there are still the people close by who are hurting, and that still hurts. Distracts.
How do you get anything done? More to the point of SU, how do you keep the imagination alive and kicking when the real world is bearing down from every direction? Can you really afford to trip and fall, in these times, lost in your own private dream world as you try to survive in the real one?
I’m always impressed by the multi-taskers. Envious, really. Efficient, compartmentalized, energetic, eating and exercising right while handling home and business. Great packagers of reality. But so often, there are holes in the product line of that kind of life. Some go missing as priorities take them elsewhere/elsewhen. Things get done in order of importance, in the order of the choices one makes based on the value assigned to them. Their importance, all too often, in the real world.
Sometimes the multitaskers forget you. Or someone/thing else. There’s always a price. Always damage. Maybe to the dreaming.
I may be envious, but I’m not entirely sold on the multi-tasking product pitch.
I suppose I’m nostalgic for the summer days when I could lay down in parents’ backyard and lose myself in some Jack Vance or Ray Bradbury. Or, more recently, just spend a Sunday morning with the Times on the front porch.
I find it harder every day to escape the real world. Forgetting about it too often hurts more than keeping a very close eye on it. Life is not quite what it was when I first started taking on the dream quests.
Sometimes there’s no fun in waking up to an inner or outer Katrina after slipping into that same childhood state of mind that made the world in your head the world’s reality, even if only in the privacy of room or basement or lonely stretches of country road.
That real world pounds on walls of discipline, drains the strength to keep the dream alive day to day so you have something to go back to when the time comes to sit before the keyboard.
If you can dream, no matter what, and deliver that dream to the world every day, then more power to you. If you can handle the price life collects for that focus, go for it.
But if its the dreaming that’s a struggle, and the dream is more than just about being a “writer,” whatever that may mean, but about the heart in the work of stories and characters, then what do you do when the world’s closing in?
Finding space in the day to dream can be part of the problem. Life’s dead zones, like waiting rooms, commuting trips, lunch hours, are vital. Bev Vincent and others create their space by getting up early. Stay-at-home parents mine nap times and school hours. Of course, the lists of other things to be done have to be put away. That’s why being trapped, with no other options for real world engagement, are so valuable.
Here’s a result to read and weep over:
400 words at 8Am and 5PM on the F train, between Manhattan and Brooklyn. On a smartphone. With his thumbs. For two years.
Elizabeth Massie’s entry a while back about doing the things you need to do to be published struck me, because everything she listed required spending time on the quest.
And people don’t want to spend time.
They don’t have enough, or they’d rather do other things. That’s the way it is. But if you’ve managed so far and produced work even with life’s everyday distractions, the message is, there’s still always time. Somewhere. Even the storm. Not necessarily long periods of it. Maybe not for the kind of writing you’re used to doing, or prefer. Perhaps the material needs to change (more on that later). But there’s time to tap the art. To perform. To create.
I personally appreciate early morning writing, especially coming after some sleepy, sloppy late night work. Letting sleep handle some of the work of making connections and opening up the imagination makes slipping back into the writing “dream” easier.
As for popping into a “dream state” in those dead zones, I find the task frankly challenging. Noise, distractions, frustrations over real world issues do seep into the rhythm of coming up with lines, situations, conflict. However, in talking to other writers, it seems a bit of preparation goes a long way – I understand it as making writing one of the “problems” you have to handle during the course of the day. So there’s an outline for a scene, or revision work to be done – in short, a bit of preparatory dreaming has already occurred.
Another strategy is to pour that real world right into the work. If the real world has overwhelmed your dreaming, don’t work so hard at making stuff up. If you’re one of those people who can use writing to escape the real world, or transform the real world into a fantasy world on the fly, then, as with the multi-taskers, more power to you.
For the rest of us, writing often balances personal obsessions, themes, fantasies, types of stories we want or need to tell, with a healthy draw from personal experience. If you’re stuck, if the creative juices just aren’t flowing and the dreaming side of you is walled up, make the wall, the problems, people, issues you’re dealing with more of the story.
There are risks of exposure, of course, mostly to people “in the know” about your life. Normally, you’d have to edit, mix and match personalities, switch up settings, play with atmosphere. Camouflage. But if the world gives you nails and broken glass, and that’s all that fills your imagination, use that raw material. Let it rip. There’s plenty of time later for editing. Censoring. Digging deeper into the personal hell of the life you’re going through and reining in the pain. Building bridges of empathy and compassion to a wider audience than yourself.
Later is the time for making sure you’ve displayed the strength of those who helped you get through tough times and giving them their proper due, and for lingering over the sweet vengeance of using carefully chosen characteristics from the people who made your miserable in your villains or victims.
What I’m trying to say is if the usual routines and tricks don’t seem to work, try to be in the moment.
Being “in the moment” and free associating to whatever is happening around you may not be highly productive to a specific project. But concentrating on the present may help to filter the burden of real world problems. Putting down the experience, letting it roll out of the mind, playing with whatever is happening at the moment may feel almost like dreaming. No past, no future, no lists and shedules, just the problem happening right now. You might come up with some interesting character sketches, dialogue (love overheard conversations), or descriptions to use later.
If you can get a little more focused, rely on whatever strengths you have as a writer (dialogue, atmosphere, etc) and your “dead zone” environment to sketch scenes or notes for a scene. Basically, it’s about trying to stay balanced between real world pressures and skill strengths to be productive on a project.
Or, if you can hold on to an overall vision of a longer work in the middle of the madness, get specific by maneuvering a character from a to b, filling out a description, doing whatever’s needed in a small piece of a story. Like paying a bill, or picking something up from the grocery store, setting up a task for a piece while in one of your stolen moments helps get the imagination focused, even if the task is editing what’s already down.
But if the chaos is just too all-consuming, changing the the kind of writing you’re used to doing may help keep you in the writing game. Pulling back from a novel to work short stories or even flash fiction, poetry, flat out character or setting sketches, journal writing, non-fiction, blogging, tweets, or other outlets can be productive from a marketing perspective, or even produce usable material for later projects.
Finally, if you’re able, a burst of physical activity, from a brisk walk to cleaning the bathroom to dusting those bookshelves, can temporarily clear the mind and leave room for dreaming.
The world is tough on dreaming. Responsibilities bear down hard on our creative lives. These are just some of my thoughts as I struggle my own choices and commitments. I hope some of you out there have your own ideas, techniques, routines to keep working you can offer to the rest of us – I’m sure everyone from working writers to single mothers have a lot of experience in managing stress, crises, and creativity and might have some tips. I know I’m eager to hear them.
