Depth Lesson From Where You Dream

And the WWT Tool Kit Craft Cards

Feb 14, 2024

In this issue:

Lessons From Where You Dream
Weekly Writing Prompt
The WWT Tool Kit Craft Cards
Short Story Challenge Stats . . .
. . . and what’s holding up my submissions

Lessons From Where You Dream

Part of the theory (practice?) of writing into the dark—and why it’s more effective than you might at first think—is staying in the moment of the scene. Staying in the character’s experience, in their head and in their body. Dean Wesley Smith calls this depth: “Depth is caused by having a character be firmly in a setting with opinions and all five senses and emotions about the setting.”2

As someone who is used to drafting fast and revising later, this kind of stuff—the details, the setting and sensory details that come when you’re in the moment with the character—is something I always ended up adding later. And not as well, I’m noticing. Not as effectively, not as entertainingly for the reader as when it’s done in the moment, on the first draft while writing into the dark.

So I wondered: what is the craft involved with this?

As usually happens, I got an answer, or the source of an answer, while doing something else, and I ultimately ended up reading From Where You Dream by Robert Olen Butler. He’s a literary author who turns his nose up at best sellers, so I was surprised to find that he, too, adamantly recommends what amounts to writing into the dark.3

Relating to depth, to writing with all five senses and emotions, Butler says,

emotions are experienced in the senses and therefore are best expressed in fiction through the senses.
Emotions are also basically experienced, and therefore expressed in fiction, in five ways. First, we have a sensual reaction inside our body—temperature, heartbeat, muscle reaction, neural change.
Second, there is a sensual response that sends signals outside of our body—posture, gesture, facial expression, tone of voice, and so forth.
Third, we have, as an experience of emotion, flashes of the past. Moments of reference in our past come back to us in our consciousness, not as ideas or analyses about the past, but as little vivid bursts of waking dream; they come back as images, sense impressions.
The fourth way we experience emotion and can therefore express it in fiction is that there are flashes of the future, similar to flashes of the past, but of something that has not yet happened or that may happen, something we desire or fear or otherwise anticipate. Those also come to us as images, like bursts of waking dreams.
And finally—this is important for the fiction writer—we experience what I would call sensual selectivity. At any given moment we, and therefore our characters, are surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of sensual cues. But in that moment only a very small number of those sensual cues will impinge on our consciousness. Now, what makes that selection for us? Well, our emotions do. . . . We look at the landscape and what we see out there is our deepest emotional inner selves.4

The first and second ways Butler lists to get to emotions through the senses remind me of Dwight Swain’s motivational-reaction units . . . which I see I haven’t gotten to yet over at WWT. Bummer. I’ll see what I can do about that. (Meanwhile, I guess that points me to which card to make first for the tool kit craft cards discussed below, so check that out for the gist of MRUs and where “sensual reaction” and “sensual response” fit in.)

The third and fourth ways listed remind me of something I so far have only encountered in Karen S. Wiesner’s book Bring Your Fiction to Life, and which I touched on a bit here, at WWT, although probably not well enough for this context. But the gist here is that setting triggers memories and/or hopes and fears. It’s usually some object in the setting; the first time Characters sees the object, it reminds them of something. For an example of how this works, check out Wild by Cheryl Strayed. She’s basically walking the PCT, but things she encounters on the trail remind her of things from her past that she’s trying to work through. (I don’t recall if there’s a lot of future-triggering, but the principle is the same.)

And the fifth way brings nothing craft I’ve read before to mind. But it does bring the whole the world is a mirror; everyone’s creating their own experience thing to mind. In other words, we notice what we’re preoccupied with. And we notice what we believe relates to what we’re preoccupied with. So too with characters.

Sensual vs. Analytical

When you write in the moment from subcionscious/creative mind, you’re right there with the character, in scene, experiencing specifics and reacting to them in the moment: being triggered by some of them, being encouraged by others, being reminded about why you (the character) are pursuing this goal, getting ideas from the scene for how to proceed in the scene and for what Character hopes to achieve by doing whatever he decides to do next.

(But will he achieve it? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ You, the writer, won’t know until it unfolds in real time. Just like a reader. How cool is that?)

So when you write in the moment from subconscious/creative mind, you don’t know what’s going to happen next, so you’re not anticipating it, and because you’re not anticipating it, you’re not analyzing what comes next or how you’re going to get there, which can further cause you to slip into generalities or abstractions or accidentally explain things because you’re anxious to get where you already know you’re going and so you’re glossing over the stuff in between in order to get there. Which probably doesn’t delight the reader as much as taking him on the journey would.

Who knew pantsing had so many perks?

Want to practice?

Butler offers an exercise to help you practice writing his five sensuals:

at the end of the day or beginning of the next day, return to some event of the day that evoked an emotion in you. Record that event in the journal. But do this only—only—moment to moment through the senses. Absolutely never name an emotion; never start explaining or analyzing or interpreting an emotion. Record only through those five ways I mentioned that we feel emotions—signals inside the body, signals outside the body, flashes of the past, flashes of the future, sensual selectivity—which are therefore the best ways to express emotions. Such a journal entry will read like a passage in a novel, like the most intense moment-to-moment scene in a novel. And that’s all that will be there. Fully developed in the moment.5

Weekly Writing Prompt

Character: Today I pulled GOSSIP.
- Light Attributes: Awakens consideration for the feelings of others. Honoring trust.
- Shadow Attributes: Thrives on the power of passing on private or secret information. Betraying confidences.
Setting: My finger landed on THE COVERED BAZAAR AND CAGALOGLU HAMAM, in Istanbul, Turkey. The market is most famous for rugs, but you can also find “everything else imaginable.” “It sprawls across sixty-five streets and 50 acres and includes some 4,000 shops, tiny cafes, and restaurants—all surrounded by a wall, and entered through any of eleven gates.”
Object: Gemini says a telescope, a sign post, or a playing card.
Emotion: I pulled TRUSTING. (Ooh, that’s nice and contradictory with Gossip.) Reliant, dependent, believing.
Technique: Practice writing from the sensual while limiting anything analytical.

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The WWT Tool Kit Craft Cards

So a few posts ago I mentioned how I might babystep toward writing into the dark by running my un-outlined scenes/stories through a checklist before I sign off for the day. As it turns out, I long ago made a set of just such checklists that I use when I’m revising.

But they’re just as helpful when used while writing fresh.

I always thought it would be cool to have a nice deck of craft cards made with a write-on-able finish and lots of write-on-able white space so that, with every project, I could quickly remind myself of techniques while also having a fresh and convenient place to keep track of elements like character, conflict, and theme specific to each story, so… I’m gonna make one.

And Paid Subscribers—THANK YOU!—you get to see the cards first.

The First Card

MRUs

Remember, this card is a short-hand, not the whole concept. But basically, something happens outside the character—usually something in the setting or something someone does or says—that’s crafted to trigger a response in the character, and so we then see the character react/respond to that thing. And he does so in a particular order: first with visceral reaction, then with thought, and then with action followed by dialogue. Not every element has to be included in the response, but if it is included there’s a very good chance that it will flow best if it’s included in this order. One reason you might mess with the order is because you also typically want to finish the response with whichever element you want the next external stimulus to respond to. Dwight Swain, mentioned above, is probably the father of pointing out this craft technique, but his student Jack Bickham does a better job of explaining it, I think.

Short Story Challenge Stats . . .

Week 2

Wed: 1 hr/174 words (plus some light research)
Thurs: 1 hr/317 words, cycled
Fri: 1.5 hr/695 words, cycled (plus some light research);
35 min/485 words
Sat: 2 hrs/918 words, cycled (plus some light research)
Sun: NA
Mon: 75 mins/846 words, plus 25 mins cycling;
2.5 hr/2081 words;
20 min/109 words
30 min/193 words, cycled
Tues: NA

Total Words: 5818 words

Challenge Totals

Words: 9766
Stories: 2
Submissions: 0

. . . and what’s holding up my submissions

Yes, I agree, I need to get on it with the submissions. I know exactly who I want to send both stories to, but I haven’t followed through . . . because I don’t feel the stories are done. 😬

Ha! She wants to revise!

But it’s not that. It’s not that I want to revise them—believe me, I don’t—but one of my favorite parts of storytelling is theme, and I can feel that thematic elements are present in each story but that they’re not as . . . optimized as they could be.

Is this creative mind or critical mind? I’m not sure. It feels like creative mind, because I want to do this. I’m not doing it because I feel like I should. I want to. But I don’t know. It could be critical mind telling me that I can’t trust creative mind. The only way to find out for sure, as far as I can tell, is to just run the stories through the process and see what’s what. Maybe everything’s already accounted for, or maybe it becomes even more clear that it was a good idea to run the stories through the process.

So I’m going to do a little more with the stories. It might (will) take time from writing short stories . . . which is already taking time from revising my transitional project . . . but I think it will be good, in the end, for all projects. And for me. Because I’ll have a better feel both for the series craft technique and for whether this nudge (and future nudges like it) is creative or critical mind at work. I’ll keep you posted.

And if you’re wondering what exactly I’m going to do, I really love the process in Blueprint Your Best Seller. The title is terrible, doesn’t say what it really is, but the process the book talks about is wonderful. It just makes so much sense to me. So maybe we’ll talk about that next week.

See you then!

Thank you for reading!

I hope your writing goes well this week.

Keep at it,
Megan

WritesWithTools
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