Random Writing Tips – A dream writing challenge

Many, many years ago, I started keeping a journal.  At the time I worked the midnight shift at a gas station and I would take some time to write up ideas for stories, weird things I noticed about customers, and other odds and ends.  One of the ideas I had behind this journal was that to get good at writing, you need to write.  (Who knew?)  So I was always looking for new things to try to stretch my writing muscles.  One of the things I came up with was trying to write out my dreams.  I write mostly science fiction but also some fantasy.  This means I write about strange worlds where strange things happen.  I figured if I could coherently write out this scene of you having these pants that let you fly – not like Superman, more like with a jetpack – then writing about the planet Klothar populated by sentient bats should be less of a challenge.

After a couple of years, I moved all my story ideas into a writing journal, which I haven’t done much with in the last few years because I do practically all my writing on my laptop now.  And I stopped doing the original journal when it just became a serious of entries of me complaining about things.  I think four or five years ago I started a series of posts – demonstrating this tip – of writing out my dreams on a site that is no longer around.  So it has been a few years since I’ve had a place, and the time, to actually practice this tip.