In general, my dreams are pretty entertaining (excepting
that week where I dreamt I was doing really boring things like cooking and
shopping…no idea what that was about). They’ve certainly yielded a lot of potential
stories for me, and if I was ever a famous writer being interviewed on
television and they asked where I got my ideas, I could answer “From dreams”
and it would be true. Although perhaps not exactly the whole truth.
Dreams, or at least, my
dreams, are both hectic and scattered, so writing a good story from them wouldn’t
be translating exactly what happened because that would just be a big mess. And
also a bunch of stuff I’d be embarrassed for people to see.
Saying I get my ideas from dreams undersells the whole
process. While a dream inspired me to write COLLAPSE, exactly none of it made
it into the final product. Hell, none of it made it into the first draft.
The creative process isn’t just imagining something and
making it happen. It requires thought, it requires focus, it requires a bunch
of stuff that’s BOOOOORING to the casual observer (and about everyone else,
too). But “From dreams” is the easy answer, the one that doesn’t require me to
explain every detail about my thought process, some of which even I don’t fully
understand.
So now I’m opening the floor to other opinions: How do you
(or will you) answer the question “Where do you get your ideas?” Is it even
possible?
