One of the advantages of the daily writing practice is the arrival of the unexpected.
In The Art of Fiction, John Gardner insisted that fiction comprised a “vivid and continuous dream.” Of course. When I write, I am trying to pick the most vivid language to bring a scene or character to life in the mind of the reader. I also try to build a plot that the reader can follow—with enough twists and turns to make the experience satisfactory. But that is continuity—I can’t have a cell phone ring in 17th century France, and if my characters start spouting Nietzsche—two centuries before he was born—well, maybe I need to change the setting.
And this is part of the challenge of writing. One doesn’t just sit down and spew whatever comes to mind. Do that and the reader is more than likely to throw your book—if, somehow you got your story into book form—across the room. But getting it right is a worthy challenge, and a challenge answered in so many different ways to free the writer to explore a thousand different solutions to any given problem.
But solving those problems often relies on an act of will. I want my character to walk across a plaza and into a garden, and so I put her feet on the ground and send her across the stone tiles, to find what? Pick your flowers, keep going. Does the choice of flower matter? Of course it does. Some reader, somewhere, will see those flowers, and, if I’ve done my job, and might even stop to smell them. If it matters. Otherwise, don’t dawdle, keep going. If someone important is waiting in the garden and I spend a paragraph—even a sentence—too long and delay the meeting, I have interrupted the continuous dream.
All that said, there are writers whose talent for encyclopedic detail delights—please show me the long-tongued bee pollinating purple gladiolus under the summer sun. None of that happens by accident.
And yet, I can’t imagine anything as accidental as a dream. They come unbidden in the night and are so full of details and characters as to render most fiction and cinema boring in compare. If dreams are incomprehensible, especially when compared to an episode of Friends—or even better a 60 second TikTok of a scene from an episode of Friends—such is the nature of dreams. Dreams defy the will; even lucid dreamers count on their randomness to produce a landscape that is always a surprise.
When I write only once or twice a week, the writing tends to be more focused on getting from point A to point B (or R). This is also true when I write every day. However, settling in for 3 to 5 hours, and knowing that I will have that 3 to 5 hours the next day and the next (some days getting to 6, some days, leaving after 2 while in the middle of a sentence) creates a space that is more conducive to dreaminess—and the beneficial surprises of dreams.
When Gardner wrote about the “vivid and continuous dream,” he wasn’t writing about hack fiction that simply tells us what we already believe—the well trod road of confirmation. Dreams—and good fiction—surprise us. What is true for the reader must also be true for the writer. Writing a decent piece of fiction should make the familiar strange, should surprise the writer with things previously—and genuinely—unknown.
“Vivid and continuous,” yes, but also a dream.
continuoussearch 