Narrative 1: Learning from dreams what not to do
Ever found yourself bored, listening to someone breathlessly telling you of last night’s dream? My belief is that the same things that make stories of dreams boring help make nonfiction narrative prose boring. So you can use your own dreams to teach you what not to do.
I believe successful narratives share characteristics with successful fiction. I won’t justify this claim here. Someday, somewhere. Conversely, unsuccessful fiction can shed light on unsuccessful nonfiction. Dreams are fiction, and retelling them is the most consistently unsuccessful creative act.
I would suggest that you find someone and ask them to pay attention to their dreams tonight and tell you one tomorrow. However, the grave risk is that they’ll think you like listening to their dreams and so tell you more of them.
The safer alternative is to replay dreams after you wake up and attend to the parts that are annoying or boring or confusing, then ask what a nonfiction with the same problems would be like.
For example, my final dream last night involved a sudden shift of scene away from some sort of small-scale drilling site I was at. Suddenly, I was involved in drilling some sort of bodily fluid from a monstrous beast, a supine beast, a monstrously supine beast we were suddenly on top of.
A first thought was that this dream is a warning against abrupt transitions, but I don’t think that’s the right lesson. That’s because I think successful fiction involves surprises and subverted expectations – zigging when the reader is expecting a zag.
So, there are successful and unsuccessful surprises. A surprise is allowable if:
The person realizes, upon a little reflection that, actually, there’s a certain inevitability to the shift. (Thus the paired theater commonplaces of “through line" “Konstantin Stanislavski […] believed actors should not only understand what their character was doing, or trying to do (their objective), in any given unit, but should also strive to understand the through line that linked these objectives together and thus pushed the character forward through the narrative.” – Wikipedia and “Checkov’s Gun.“ “Chekhov’s gun is a narrative principle emphasizing that every element in a story be necessary, while irrelevant elements should be removed. For example, if a gun features in a story, there must be a reason for it, such as being fired at some later point.” – Wikipedia)
This doesn’t happen in dreams. The best explanation I have of the shift in mine is that I was reading Clifford Simak’s Destiny Doll at bedtime, stopping with our protagonists besieged by a five-mile-high tree that was shooting seeds at them, except the dream changed the tree into an animal of some sort because Dawn had recently explained the details of performing a caesarian section on a cow, and, honestly, extracting a 45 kilo calf sideways from a cow is more what I think of as excavation than surgery.
I wouldn’t describe that explanation as having “a certain inevitability.”
The reader trusts that the author will shortly justify the surprise. Perhaps explicitly, but perhaps by letting the reader see why the move made sense. (That is, the reader trusts she’ll be able to get the (1)-style feeling in the near future.)
Some of that trust comes “for free” – readers mostly assume that the writer doesn’t want to leave them unsatisfied about a glaring issue – but I expect one failure on the part of the writer immediately loses a lot of that trust. Or, at least, a writer would wise to assume the trust is that easy to lose.
Stories of dreams have not, let’s say, earned such trust. And I think nonfiction, especially technical narrative, is less trusted than fiction.
I could probably stand to do some reflection on how much – and how – I use surprise in my writing. I’m very averse to the “tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, tell them what you told them” kind of narrative, Another thing I won’t justify right here, right now. but do I carry it too far? Should I spend time trying to do it more deftly?
I’m immodest enough that I think you might want to reflect on what effect I was hoping to have by ending this post this way.If you’ve ever wondered what’s the point of dreams, now you know: to help you improve your waking-world writing.
xxx