Dream first, write second

{On My Process}

I was a dreamer, before I ever was a writer. Still am. In fact, I can rarely do the latter truly well, unless I’ve daydreamed enough first.

I spent much of my childhood writing, but more of it daydreaming. Countless hours walking around the house, farm, forest and garden — talking to myself. I probably talked out whole novels as a child, which never made it to any page. The voices of random characters were always in my head, and on the tip of my tongue. (Like my own private soap operas.)

Dreaming responds best to movement. I’ve always found it difficult to sit still and dream indoors. Much prefer to be running, or riding, or swimming, or climbing a mountain. When I was a girl, I mostly wandered around the farm & garden, muttering under breath. But my favourite place to dream as a teenager, was the trampoline. Hours suspended on my back, staring at the tropical sky; punctuated by bursts of frenetic jumping.

Now that I have some writing days back to myself again, I have enough — no, never enough! says the greedy writer — but more time for the requisite dreaming. My writing flows more easily for it. .

Last week, I took my novel’s working journal to one of my favourite dreaming places, right in my backyard, and I sat there and sighed and scribbled like I was twelve all over again…

This particular journal is nearly completely full, with extra notebook pages stuck in. It’s a complete schamozzle inside, but every scene can be traced back to it.

I have many such writing journals for my first novel, and most of them owe their thickness to dreaming places like this.

There’s another, less pretty form of journal I depend on too, and that’s the note app on my phone. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to stop mid-run to madly (and sweatily) tap out an idea/scene/dialogue because I was fit to burst with the brilliance of it. (It’s never quite so errr…brilliant when I read it back hours post-run. Must be something about the self-flattering endorphin high.)

If I’ve dreamed up a piece of writing well enough, then I can sit down here at my computer by this large window, open to my beloved rainforest; and begin the disciplined, hard work of turning the ephemeral into physical words on screen…

There’s an important distinction to be made, however, between dreaming up your next plot point, scene or chapter — and plain old procrastinating. It’s easy to avoid the writing by pretending you’re ‘waiting for inspiration to strike’. For me, daydreaming is an active process. More like playing than thinking. And yet, as with meditation (which I suck at) you have to keep gently bringing those wandering thoughts back when they go rogue. Especially when they run to negative thinking and spiralling self doubt.

When I try to force ideas or words onto the page before it’s been dreamed out well enough; I struggle mightily. I’ve given myself a right headache trying to produce something on the spot my subconscious mind wasn’t already working on behind that mysterious curtain.

There’s some kind of weird, inexplicable magic to it, you see.

You cut out the materials for your subconscious mind daily, walk away from the desk, and like the shoemaker’s boon: the ideas seem often to simply turn up, fully assembled, when you’re least expecting it. Dreaming is simply making space, regularly, where that might happen.

Those elves are capricious, too. The dreaming-out often yields nothing useful. That’s where the healthy balance comes in:

Dream before writing

and,

Butt in writing seat, every day, even when you haven’t finished dreaming.

I’m sure there are writers out there who can build their castles in the air entirely while butt-in-seat, without any body-moving-in-nature-while-daydreaming necessary, but this is how the process works most fluidly for me. Most writers I know will tell you their biggest problems or obstacles have been solved by simply going outside for a walk. (A shower can work wonders too.) Even when I’m not actively writing a manuscript, the dreaming goes on. And when I’m working on one story, the dreaming is already beginning for the next.

Dreamer first, writer second; then, hopefully: author at last.

xx Averil