Fictive Dreamin’

Abstract

Fictive Dreamin’ Jake Maynard (bio) How often do writers dream about writing? I’m thinking about the physical act: ass + chair, furrowed squint, eyelid quaking, temple tap and chewed lips. The keyboard chatters. Writing. I’ve been wondering because it finally happened to me. I’ve been writing hard for maybe six years and finally some pages appeared in my dreams. Maybe it took so long because the act of writing, at least as I [End Page 91] practice it, is pretty bleh. It’s mostly sitting and thinking and walking to the window and drawing dicks in the fogged glass. Sometimes the good words come, and sometimes they don’t. Despite writers’ thirst for narrative, the act itself doesn’t have a particularly compelling one. Writers’ angst, at best, is melodrama—a little like the tangles of bodies and naked TED talks that haunt me while I sleep. I texted some writer friends about it: Meredith: Maybe once every other month? I feel like I get good ideas in my dreams but never remember them when I wake up. Or my dreams are like ‘make characters go mini-golfing.’ Me: So are you actively writing in these dreams? Meredith: Sometimes. They usually start with me getting feedback and feeling like I need to change something so I’m never straight up writing in my dreams. Randi: I used to dream about getting awesome story ideas and either I could not remember them when I woke up or they turned out to be trash in reality. Sometimes I dreamed about my books selling. Mostly I dream about solving mysteries or running from murderers and terrorists or junk like that. Noelle: No, but I did practice Chinese in a dream the other day. Whit: I don’t think I do. I’ll dream about work emails sometime, but most of the dreams are fast-paced, moving screenplays. Plot twist. Revelation. Very movie-like. Me jumping out of bed like a lunatic about once a month, turning the light on, thinking there’s a dead snake—or something like that—in my sheets. Me panting, confused but coming to, slowly realizing it’s all a dream. [End Page 92] _______ Hardly a reliable sample size, but research suggests writing as a physical act rarely makes the dreamscape. This makes me wonder what John Gardner would say about it. If writing prose is itself a kind of dream-state—he called it the fictive dream— dreaming about it becomes outright lasagnal. In The Art of Fiction, Gardner writes: In the writing state—the state of inspiration—the fictive dream springs up fully alive: the writer forgets the words he has written on the page and sees, instead, his characters moving around their rooms, hunting through cupboards, glancing irritably through their mail, setting mousetraps, loading pistols. The dream is as alive and compelling as one’s dreams at night, and when the writer writes down on paper what he has imagined, the words, however inadequate, do not distract his mind from the fictive dream but provide him with a fix on it, so that when the dream flags he can reread what he’s written and find the dream starting up again. Here, Gardner’s talking specifically about the fictive dream as the writer experiences it, but the term has grown to refer to the continuous state of immersion that you feel inside of good fiction. In a workshop, God Forbid, you might hear, “that part on page three with the bullet points breaks the dream.” Gruff, smug, and intimidating in an academic white-guy sort of way, Gardner’s the type of writer most folks read once as they start out, then not again. He died in a motorcycle accident in 1984 at age forty-nine, three days before his third wedding—tragedy stalked his family; a farm accident had [End Page 93] horrifically killed his brother, leaving Gardner with lifelong nightmares—but his short life was prolific to the tune of twenty-five books. His Beowulf retelling, Grendel, got the most contemporary attention, but The Art of Fiction might be the more important work. That quote pops up on every...