In my infinite wisdom I have decided to start my writer’s blog by talking about a dream I had a few nights ago. As aware as I am that this is incredibly lame, I’m doing it because I have had problems in converting the dream into a story.
The reason I’m having such difficulty isn’t because the dream changed dramatically halfway through like my dreams generally do (because I’ve gone into a different REM cycle), but because the dream had a plot.
My friend, Doug, listened for ten minutes with a perplexed look on his face as I went into intense detail of the dream that I had had the night before. Well, I say intense detail, I actually left a decent chunk of the detail out of what happened in the dream because I either couldn’t remember it, or I didn’t think it was relevant.
When I was done, I asked him what was with the look he was giving me.
“I wasn’t expecting it to be so... intricate,” he replied.
This was more than fair enough, after all, when I went to sleep that night I had not expected to wake up at a cliff hanger chapter ending in a long and intricate storyline.
The idea to turn this into a story was born entirely from the desire to find out what was going to happen next.
Why does some indistinct powerful godlike entity want the prince of the underwater kingdom to marry a curly haired girl from the kingdom on land’s middle class?
How does the prince already know the curly haired girl and why does he appear to be in love with her?
What on earth is a ‘soul bonding’ and how can it help someone who has nearly drowned?
Will the hearts of the prince’s fiancée and the curly haired girl’s soldier boyfriend have their hearts broken in the pursuit of love?
And, most importantly of all, why is the soldier boyfriend wearing shorts in the underwater kingdom? He lives in a Georgian/Victorian like society!
I want to know the answers to these questions, and because my subconscious either didn’t continue the story the next night or just didn’t let me remember it, I have to come up with the answers. As vexing as this is, it is my only choice.
I mean, I think I’d love it if I were watching a TV programme, but when the responsibility to sort this all out into a decent plotline with a satisfying conclusion is on my shoulders I feel a touch faint. This is likely to be a long, long story with a lot of characters. Keeping it all clear and not just abandoning characters and subplots because it would make my life easier will be difficult to do so.
I mean, it’s a pretty good idea; with some work I could make it a lot better.
The first step would be naming the prince, the curly haired girl, the soldier and the prince’s fiancée. Otherwise they’ll have incredibly daft working names for a good chunk of the project.
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