The Fictional Dream

John Gardner said in The Art of Fiction: " 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. This and nothing

else is the desperately sought and tragically fragile writer's process:

in his imagination, he sees made-up people doing things--sees them clearly--and

in the act of wondering what they will do next he sees what they will do

next, and all this he writes down in the

best, most accurate words he can find, understanding even as he writes

that he may have to find better words later, and that a change in the words

may mean a sharpening or deepening of the vision, the fictive dream or

vision becoming more and more lucid, until reality, by comparison, seems

cold, tedious, and dead."

How many times have you become so engrossed with a story that you lost

the sensation of lumpy bed pillows behind your neck; you no longer smell

the gardenia candles at the bedside; you don't hear the screen door clattering

against the door jamb, and you are not conscious of the black

lines on the pages in front of you because you are in the middle of the

scene. You hear sisters shouting at each other and the hissing of a restaurant

grill. Plates and dishes clatter. Voices mingle and hum. You see the blueberry

colored booth cushions and polished chrome counter. Plates of meatloaf

and mashed potatoes pass on perfectly balanced trays. You smell the gravy

and the soup of the day—chicken noodle. The real world falls away, and

you don't realize your arm has

fallen asleep or the cat is kneading the blanket over your feet. You're

only worried about why the sisters are arguing, and wondering who is the

woman in the corner with the garish hat, and why is she stabbing at her

meatloaf and how is she related to the sisters?

You've been swept away in the fictional dream. It wasn't flowery language

that captured your attention. It was the well-placed original and sensory

details and characters with strong motivations that make us more than just

readers standing on the outside and observing. Instead,

we became part of the story.

Think about the books you’ve read recently. Were there any you couldn’t

finish, or you had to force yourself to plod through? What about those

books made the reading more like work rather than an escape? Was it too

much description? Not enough? Bad characterization? How did the author

fail to lull you into her fictional dream, make you a part of the story?

Think about the books you could not put down. What were the things that

kept you hooked? What was it that made you want to curl up in your favorite

chair for hours and let the laundry or cleaning or bill-paying pile up?

Jot these thoughts down in your notebook.

As writers we aim to lure our readers into our fictional dreams. As we

get lost in the scene we're creating, we can't hear the boys jumping off

their bunkbeds. We don't hear the phone ringing or the five messages on

the answering machine from our mothers or spouses asking, "Is everything

all right? Why won't you pick up the phone? I know you're there." We're

at our desks crying because our character has been abandoned by her mother.

We throw our pens across the room because another character is being

unreasonable,

and we hate him that moment.

Sometimes, exasperated, we pick up the phone or stop to scold the boys

because the ringing and pounding has awakened us from our dream. After

we've bandaged a scratch and assured our husband or mother that really,

I'm fine...no, I'm not angry with you...no, I'm not crying...we return

to our desks so we can conjure up the dream again and start over.

And if anyone knows a quick and dirty way of bringing back the fictional

dream as we write, please let me know!

Ó2000 Rita Marie Keller