The Incredibly Inspiring Bizarreness of Dreams

I know some people who say they never remember their dreams. Maybe it's because I'm a light sleeper, or maybe it's simply a function of the way my memory works, but I have never had that issue. I've had more than my share of nightmares in my life, but most of the time, my visits to the dreamscape are just really, really bizarre.

I had one a couple of nights back where I was a kid again, and my dad took me down to the dark, scary basement in some biology department's research building (he was a molecular biology professor, and this basement was rather like the one I very vaguely remember visiting when he was a grad student at MIT when I was really tiny). The weird thing was, he was taking me down there to use something called "the atomic toilet." Fortunately, I woke up before that aspect of the dream played out.

This so-called atomic toilet looked like a weird mixture of the space shuttle toilet, a solar toilet from the high country, and the atomic clock at NIST. Efforts to reconstruct where this dream came from yield the following insights:

1. I had to go to the bathroom,.

2. I'd been thinking about my dad (whom I still miss a great deal) before I went to bed.

3. My dad had once wanted to get a composting toilet for his property in Paso Robles.

4. There was a rerun of Big Bang Theory on a while back with a space toilet in it.

6. I'd read something about the atomic clock a few days before, because I was researching the way the definition of a second had changed throughout history.

7. I'm getting older, and while I'm mostly okay with this at a conscious level (it beats the alternative), I'm often a younger version of myself, even a kid again, in my dreams.

And strange as this dream was, I've had stranger. In fact, nearly all my dreams are strange and seem to be amalgamations of random memories, emotions and fears. I don't have an inordinate number of nightmares as an adult, but I can sure remember some doozies from when I was a kid, often involving falling, coming home to a strangely abandoned house, or being chased by something. As an adult, many of my nightmares entail things like teeth falling out or getting a horrific diagnosis at the doctor's.

Ugh. At least dreams about atomic toilets make me laugh when I wake up.

I've had dreams that felt intensely symbolic to me that have provided insights about relationships. I've also occasionally had dreams that have provided story ideas or that have given me insights about how to deal with something in one of my novels.

Scientists are still not completely sure why mammals (and possibly birds and reptiles as well) dream. But the emotional and bizarre nature of dreams means that they have played an important role in spirituality and art, and have inspired some important works of literature. For instance, Mary Shelly's Frankenstein and Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde were purportedly inspired by dreams the authors had.

But incorporating dreams (by a pov character) as actual plot elements in novels can be problematic at times. Dream sequences often end up on agent and editor rant lists. And whenever the subject comes up on writer's forums, the sentiment seems to be at least 3:1 against including scenes that describe a dream the character is having.

So what are the problems with using vividly described dreams in books?

1. If they're used in the wrong place, they can distract the reader from the plot and can interrupt the flow of the story.

2. They're sometimes used as info dumps re backstory or as "quick and easy" ways for the pov character to gain an insight about something without working for it. They can sometimes be seen as a deus ex machina type resolution to problems in the story.

3. They are sometimes used to introduce an element of tension. But since tension surrounding something that isn't really happening, many readers feel cheated by it, especially if the dream is introduced in such a way that it seems "real" at first--and then the character wakes up.

4. But if it's clear from the beginning that it's "just" a dream, then some readers wonder if it's important enough to read at all and will skim or skip it.

5. Real dreams are strange and don't always make a lot of sense. Yet in books, they're nearly always realistic or richly symbolic.

6. If the dream has relevance to another character in the story, and he or she then has to tell another character about the dream, the author may end up covering the same ground twice.

7. There are often other ways (i.e. flashbacks, dialog, expository lumps) to achieve the same end in a story.

Now in speculative fiction, there's a potential for a dream world to exist as a "real" spiritual realm (like in H.P. Lovecraft's works). It's also possible for dreams in speculative works to provide the characters with access to hidden knowledge or with a connection to another character. Sometimes the dreams are even an integral part of the plot, like in Ursula K. Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven. And of course, if the entire point of the story is a dream world becoming more real in some ways than the waking world (as in Alice in Wonderland) it's hard to think of a way to forego using them.

But even so, I think the author has to consider whether or not the ends could possibly be achieved in some other way. And as with any other plot device, a light touch is often the best approach. No one wants to read a long, jumbled piece of dream narrative that confuses, or worse yet, bores.

Detail from The Knight's Dream (1655) by Antonio de Pereda (1611–1678)

Thesaurus Abuse Versus Dumbed Down Language -- Choosing the Right Word for the Job

Ah, words. They're the bricks and mortar with which a writer constructs his or her worlds, plots and characters. Choosing a word that's blatantly wrong can be, at worst, mortifying. The English language contains many homophones and near homophones (like accept and except), and a lot of people mix some of these up in their writing. Some of these words (affect and effect, for instance) overlap enough in meaning that even highly literate writers can get confused.

But these kinds of errors usually become less frequent with time and experience. Not all word errors are as blatant as these, and sometimes the "error" is in the eyes of the reader. One issue that comes up is the use of what some would call an "inflated" vocabulary and others would call " normally literate wording" in their writing.

I recently ran across a thread on a writer's forum where the original poster asked how to increase his or her vocabulary. An innocent enough question, and of course the "best" answer is to read voraciously and about a wide variety of topics. Research has shown that people (both native speakers and English learners) tend to gain a substantial amount of their functional English vocabulary by contextual exposure to words in reading.

This corroborates my own experiences. I actually have a very clear memory of learning what the words laconic and pedantic meant via encountering them in books I was reading back when I was a kid. Both of these are words that some might consider closer to fifty cents than nickel level, but they've served me well in my adult life.

Interestingly, though, a lot of people suggested that the person posting the question in the thread simply use a thesaurus. Other people suggested that fiction writers should always use the simplest vocabulary possible. One person even bragged that he/she "never" used "fancy" words, because he/she didn't want their readers to get the wrong idea about him or her.

I think both of these pieces of advice are bad if taken in the wrong way.

Picking up a thesaurus just because you want to find synonyms for relatively common words is generally not a great idea. Often the simple, everyday word for something is the best choice. For instance, a horse can also be a steed or an equine. But most of the time, horse is the best word for a horse. Then there are those more contextual synonyms. Words like gelding, mare, colt, filly, destrier, pony, charger, palfrey and so on all refer to specific types of horses that may or may not be appropriate in a given context. A typical thesaurus lists all the synonyms but does not hint at connotations or contexts. If you refer to a little girl's pony as a destrier or a charger, you'd better be shooting for an ironic tone.

But a thesaurus can be useful if used in an informed way. Sometimes I'll bring one out if I need to be "reminded" of synonyms I actually know the meaning of. But just randomly selecting words leads to the "smirk" phenomenon I encountered a while back. A character greeted another character with a friendly, open smirk.

Smirks are not, by definition, friendly or open, because of course, smirk is really not a synonym for smile. It's a particular type of smile, and one that is not at all nice. Calling an ordinary smile a smirk is like calling a girl's pony a charger.

Also, readers notice uncommon words more. Smirk is probably not a word I want to see more than a handful of times in an entire book, even when used correctly. My hand starts itching to slap somewhere around the third or fourth time a villain smirks. Aside from being very annoying, a "strong" word like this creates a pretty clear impression of a person. Once I know someone's a smirker, I don't need to be reminded of this every scene.

But going back to the other extreme piece of advice, which was to never use less common words. Aside from insulting the ability of readers to pick up on word meanings via context (which, after all, is how we all learned to talk), this piece of advice ignores the importance of using words to set voice and tone, whether authorial or character.

In short, if your character is a medical doctor, she'll probably use some "fancy" words to describe body parts and whatnot, even when she's not in a medical setting. And a character who is an auto mechanic may know and use a lot more words related to motors and engine parts than someone who isn't. And in general, a character who is educated, well-read, or even just of a whimsical bent, will use language differently than someone who is less so.

If your narrative is "in point of view," then it should reflect this to some extent.

But of course, an author has to exercise restraint, even when writing in point of view. A story with a medial doctor character needs to include believable language usage and terminology, but the writer needs to introduce these words carefully and use them in a way where their meaning is contextually clear, or defined. And it's probably not a good idea to dump a ton of these words out in a single paragraph, unless the intent is to illustrate confusion (for instance, the pov character is talking to a doctor over dinner and is being bombarded with a bewildering array of terms he doesn't understand).

But aside from the obvious issues of the role of word choice in characterization, mood and tone, the advice to categorically avoid "big words" is a bit troubling. Going back to the "creating the wrong impression about me" line. What would that impression be? That you're an educated and intelligent person who knows how to use appropriately chosen words with care and precision to evoke a nuanced meaning or mood? Why is coming across as being reasonably educated creating a bad impression?

Of course picking words willy nilly from a thesaurus is a terrible idea, as is using the most obscure and complex words available "just because." It's something students sometimes do in their essay writing because they mistakenly think that doing so will make them look clever. But there's a big difference between doing this and picking that perfect word for what you're really trying to say.

Those awkward, dangly sentence bits--misplaced modifiers.

Spring fever is in full swing, and I haven't been feeling terribly inspired to blog lately. I've been rewriting and revising my novel (I really hope for the last time) and wrapping up another semester of biology labs. But one thing I've been thinking about as I comb my manuscript for awkward turns of phrase and repetitive sentence structures are dangling (or misplaced) modifiers.

Modifiers are words, phrases or clauses that add description to a noun or pronoun without changing the core meaning of a sentence. In logically constructed sentences, the modifier is most often adjacent to (either before or immediately following) the noun it modifies.

The dog, a Dalmatian, growled at me.

Bored with tonight's episode, Susan changed the channel.

Hungry, Fred made a sandwich.

Modifiers have the potential to create confusion, as this example from my own manuscript illustrates:

Danior sat at the table, the man from Jarrod's nightmares.

Okay, I know what I meant when I wrote it. But as the sentence is constructed, it means that the table is the man from Jarrod's nightmares. This really doesn't make sense, as my world's magic system does not incorporate transmutations between animate beings and inanimate objects.

Fortunately, it's not hard to reword this sentence to read:

Danior, the man from Jarrod's nightmares, sat at the table.

By moving the descriptive clause (the man from Jarrod's nightmare) closer to the subject (Danior), we eliminate the issue.

Sometimes dangling modifiers can produce pretty hilarious results.

Here's another:

Freshly painted, Tom left the walls to dry.

Hmmm, is Tom freshly painted?

Flying over the plains in a helicopter, The herd of bison was vast.

That's one talented herd of Bison...

Or here's one that really could engender some misunderstanding:

I wrote a report on sexual harassment in my office.

The following sentence (though still awkward in my opinion) would be far less likely to get me in trouble:

In my office, I wrote a report on sexual harassment.

The frustrating thing about dangling and misplaced modifiers is that writers tend to be pretty close to their own work. We all know what we mean, and so illogical sentence constructs can sneak past our proofing. When the results are completely illogical or amusing, the reader will likely pick up on the sentence's true meaning (though he or she will likely be jolted from your story, and have a good chuckle at your expense). But there are times when the meaning of the sentence is changed into something logical but unintended.

The woman was walking the dog wearing a miniskirt.

This sentence suggests that the dog was wearing the miniskirt. Now, this may seem absurd to some, but in fact, a quick trip to Petsmart will show that some people do like to dress their dogs.  If it is actually the woman who is wearing the miniskirt, a better construct might be:

The woman wearing a miniskirt walked the dog, or The woman, wearing a miniskirt, walked the dog.

Also notice how the first example (sans commas) makes the woman's miniskirt an integral part of her description. She is the woman wearing the miniskirt. That's who she is. The second one makes the miniskirt seem like sort of an "extra" thing about her. She is a woman who just so happens to be wearing a miniskirt in this instance. It's something she's doing in addition to walking the dog.

Although this is not the main point of my little piece here, it does illustrate the role of even those "optional" commas in clarifying the meaning of a sentence.

Another way of writing the sentence: The woman walked the dog while wearing a miniskirt. This really shifts the emphasis to the act of wearing a miniskirt, to the point where it becomes the focus of the sentence (as if, perhaps, walking a dog while wearing a miniskirt is unusual in this particular setting or situation).

Misplaced modifiers are an example of why it is important to put your story or chapter down for a while and come back to it to read with "fresh eyes."

Unless you enjoy giving your beta readers an unintended chuckle.

Amazon.com and thoughts on internet dependency.

My internet abruptly went down a couple of weeks ago. I was able to call my ISP and talk to an actual human being (!) at 1:00 in the morning and they sent someone out the very next day to replace our dead modem. Even so, not having access to the web from anything but my excruciatingly slow (and tiny screened) "smart phone" for even a few hours was disruptive as hell. Funny how accustomed we've all gotten to instant internet access over the past ten years or so.

I got another taste of this tonight when I realized (to my horror) that it was a family member's birthday, and I had less than two hours to get a present sent off to her. Thankfully, there's the handy, dandy standby for idiots like me (who are terrible at remembering important dates and hate going shopping)--the Amazon gift card.

But no. Not tonight. For some mysterious reason, the Amazon site is not accessible. It was coming up, but every attempt to click on any link (including the one for gift cards) on the site caused a page loading error to come up. Oh the outrage!

Not so many years ago, it just wouldn't have occurred to me that I could have 24-7 access to retail awesomeness (though there was a brief flirtation with 24 hour grocery stores in the 80s, as I recall. Those went away after a while. Guess they weren't profitable). Now, being denied it makes me decidedly peevish. The Amazon gift card can be e-mailed to the recipient, and so it pulls the fat out of the fire for last minute "oh crap!" gift purchasers like me.

My mother is probably laughing at me, or will be when she reads this. She tried to teach me to be better at planning ahead.

No idea what's wrong with the Amazon site. Googling the issue gives me a lot of information about another outage that occurred on Jan 31, but not much about what's going on right now. There's one site where people are making facebook posts about it, and that's it.

Maybe it should be comforting that the world's not quite as instantaneous as it sometimes seems.

Two Blogs Related to Writing Cliches

A writer friend, Nyki Blatchley, recently brought these to my attention. They are interesting because they each represent common approaches to writing rules that budding writers can encounter on the web. The first:

http://litreactor.com/columns/top-10-storytelling-cliches-that-need-to-disappear-forever

Is an amusing piece that lists some of those cringeworthy plot devices that have made most of us roll our eyes at one time or another. As a person with training in physiology, the "bopped over the head and knocked out" thing is a particular peeve of mine as well, for the reasons given. But as this second blog illustrates

http://www.jeffekennedy.com/why-writers-shouldnt-pay-attention-to-pet-peeves-and-cranky-lists/

every piece of advice about rules can be taken to an extreme.

As an aspiring writer, I've been paralyzed by well meaning advice at times. There's that cold clutch of panic and that sick, sinking despair when I realize my novel is employing something that at least some agents and editors allegedly hate enough to put on a pet peeve list. Then I remember that it's pretty much impossible to write without dipping into at least a few stereotypes. It's how they're handled that really matters.

And success is in the eyes of the reader.

Medicine in Fantasy

Today, I'm discussing medicine and healers in Fantasy over on Nyki Blatchley's site.

http://nyki-blatchley.blogspot.com/2013/04/medicine-in-fantasy-guest-post-by-el.html

What Dog Agility Taught Me About Writing

                                          Wiley: Photo by Dave Mills Photography.

Wiley and I achieved an agility milestone this weekend: our first NATCH. The term NATCH stands for NADAC agility trial champion, and it is conferred upon a dog who has earned a certain number of qualifying runs over an assortment of classes. Handlers whose dogs earn this title are awarded with a special jump bar, a ribbon, and a plaque from the North American Dog Agility Council.

The specialness of this title has been somewhat diluted over the years, because there are far more agility trials than there once were (you can compete in one practically every weekend in our area if you wish), and people have just gotten really, really good at selecting and training dogs to excel in the sport. Plus, most of the people competing in agility now have been doing so for many years and are pretty darned good dog handlers.

So what this means is that many of the dogs who have been competing in NADAC for as long as Wiley has have gotten multiple NATCHs by now, not to mention equivalent championship titles in other agility venues. But I'm still happy to achieve this milestone. Agility in the US is a nice sport, because it allows you to participate at the level that works for you and to set personal goals without comparing yourself directly to others.

I wasn't always so sanguine, though. Roxy, my now-retired border collie/chow mix started out like a house 'o fire in the sport, breezing through the novice and intermediate levels of competition with very high "Q" percentages. Things looked promising during our first year in the most advanced level in the two venues we competed regularly in (NADAC and CPE). I was confident we'd be getting our first NATCH and CATCH (CPE's championship title) within a couple of years.

It didn't happen that way. Roxy started to slow down on the course. NADAC is a venue that favors speed, and we were competing at a time when the move  in the sport was towards tighter ways of estimating course yardage, and tighter course times ... and changing the nature of some of its classes. We began to miss qualifying runs in jumpers class because of time faults (sometimes being over course time by fractions of a second). I had her x-rayed and took her to jumping specialists, and they couldn't find anything wrong physically, but there was no denying she just wasn't running as fast as she used to, and she was struggling more with the 20" jumps she had to clear.

I don't know how much of her change in attitude about the sport was due to her structure being less than ideal for jumping, and how much was her becoming inhibited by my anxiety. I suspect the latter played a large role. She always was sensitive dog, and there's no denying that I was getting more and more upset by all our near misses and by the fact that Roxy's age peers were earning NATCH after NATCH.

We finally did get our NATCH (and our CPE CATCH), but it wasn't too long after that Roxy made it pretty clear to me that agility wasn't fun for her anymore. She'd probably been making it clear to me before that, actually, if I'd had the eyes and heart to see. Fortunately, by then, I had adopted Wiley, and he was much more intense and interested in the sport for its own sake (and not just the cookies it brought). Still, I've really, really tried to avoid putting the kind of pressure on him that I did on Roxy.

And I learned something important from all this: it is a terrible mistake to pit too much of your happiness and self esteem on the achievement of goals that are not completely within your control. I got increasingly stressed during the years I ran Roxy, because the agility venues I competed in kept changing their rules and tightening up their performance criteria, and because my agility partner (Roxy) was slowing down. These were two things I couldn't control. Another piece of stupidity is that I got so caught up in the goal that I almost forgot to enjoy the time I spent with Roxy (and with the incredible people who make up our local agility community).

Roxy's been retired from the sport for several years now (she's 13), and is still my special princess. Wiley is 8, and I hope he will continue to enjoy it for several more years. I'm looking forward to  competing soon with Flick (my nearly 3 year old border collie/Belgian shepherd(?) mix. But I'm really trying to be less goal oriented, or at least to have goals that I have some control over (like improving my handling, keeping things fun for my canine partners etc). I don't do as many trials as I used to, partially because my writing is keeping me busy into the wee hours (and agility trials start at the crack of dawn), but also because I want to keep the sport special for me and my canine companions and not burn ourselves out.

And to never, ever forget that our success in the sport has no bearing on the love I feel for them or the regard in which I hold myself.

This lesson I learned from agility is also informing my approach to writing to some extent. Humans are naturally goal oriented and competitive, and I'm no exception. I want very much to be a published writer, and at some level, it's hard to feel knowledgeable and successful as a writer without some external validation (very much like awards and titles are external validation to a dog sports competitor). I have a hell of a time not berating myself when a writer friend announces their latest sale. I've invested a lot of myself in my novel and stories over this past year or so, and I'm so afraid of failure, I'm sitting on several stories that are in need of revision and resubmission, because the form rejections I've received so far hurt my tender ego.

I met a very helpful writer (Ken Scholes) at the Cascade Writer's Workshop last summer who not only said some nice things about my writing (that I hope were not just kindness), but told us that no writer has ever completely "made it." As an unpublished writer, I tend to think getting an agent or a book contract is the brass ring, but there are always new goals that come with every level of success. And they are goals that the writer doesn't have a great deal of control over, because they involve the highly subjective judgments of other people and the vagaries of a market that changes more rapidly than the rules of any agility venue.

And Ken pointed out that one's career as even a successfully published writer can tank at any time, because no author can force people to buy his or her books. That's a darn scary thing for a writer who has achieved what most only dream of--a chance to give up his/her day job and make a living at the craft. And having something that's got so much of you in it out there in the world for people to be snide about has got to be hard on the ego too. No matter how critically acclaimed a writer may be, there are going to be people who don't like him or her.

I can feel some of the old Roxy NATCH/CATCH stress bubbling in my chest whenever I read a forum post where someone opines that agents or editors rarely touch second world fantasy (what I enjoy writing) anymore, or how the publication industry is on the verge of collapse, or how no one will be reading at all in a few years, once [insert new entertainment phenomenon] is invented. It makes my dream of seeing something I've written sitting on a shelf next to my favorite authors seem impossibly naive and far away. It also reminds me of how futile it is to worry about or invest exclusively in things I can't control.

So the path to maintaining one's sanity in writing seems to draw upon the lessons I learned from my dogs: don't compare yourself to others, have at least some meaningful goals you can control, and don't forget to enjoy the process of what you're doing. These are tall orders, and probably impossible to do 100%. But keeping them in mind may help to prevent bitterness and burn out.

                          

Roxy: Photo by Dave Mills Photography.