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.