Dreaming in Fiction
My to-do list sits next to my keyboard today with some checked off items, some that still need doing, and some that may get done next week. I'm learning that sometimes all of these "adulty" things that I have to do are draining. I very much dislike speaking to strangers on the phone anyways, so it brings an extra layer of fatigue to my task lists when I have to speak to customer service representatives for an extended period of time.
In between the tasks of my to-do lists lately, I find myself dreaming wildly in fiction. I have the brain of a creative, of a writer, meaning that I take in the world around me and at the same time, am forming thoughts and phrases that I want to capture on paper about it all. This used to mean that I wanted to write about the real world around me, how I experienced it, what I thought about it, what I liked and didn't like about it. But lately I have this imagination that is running wildly and inserting stories in the midst of my experienced world. I find that I have a curiosity about the world around me in a way that I haven't found myself to possess before, or maybe it's that I haven't allowed myself to be curious before.
As a writer who focuses primarily on memoir-style prose, I was always envious of people who had this knack for fiction, this ability to dream up entire worlds and universes where extravagant adventures unfolded. Now, I'm feeling like I am gaining this ability. I am not even sure how, and I wonder if this is why some writers do not become more successful or wide-read until later in life. Maybe their 9-5 jobs, or their families, or their need to impress people with their clean houses and manicured lawns, maybe these things have kept their imaginations suppressed so that they can't dream in fiction until later in life when their brains have space for it.
For the first time in a long time, my brain has some extra space. There are fewer demands on it than there once were, and so I find that when I am out on a walk with my dog along our nature trail, I dream up stories about people and things that might have some grounding in reality, but mostly seem to take place in some alternate version of reality that I've not allowed myself to experience before. It's an unfamiliar world, and things happen there that could happen in my reality but don't. So I imagine them into a great story with plot twists and interesting characters and vibrant colors.
I'm riding on a Vespa in Italy, crashing it on the gravel road and sending the entire tour group racing around the corner to see if I fell off the cliff (OK, this one did actually happen, but I dream up stories about this event often), or I'm dreaming about the four mothers I saw on my walk earlier. I'm thinking up the story of how they all came to be friends, how they live in one another's company as they navigate this similar season of life that they are in, though one has a busy career, another is caring for her mom with cancer, the third is a full-time stay at home mother, and the last feels lost in her children and doesn't know who she is anymore. While sitting at the pool and hearing the self-proclaimed "pool police" yell obscenities at my mom for moving a side table at the pool (also a real life event that happens regularly in communities dominated by older people), in my head I'm hearing it all but writing the story of the retirement community drama, thinking up the "mean girls" plot, but for 95 year olds.
I have never experienced this type of imagination before. Sure, I have always had that creative mind that wanders and dreams up possibilities, that speaks in flowery language and embellishes the simplest of phrases with adjectives. But to have an imagination like this must be how writers author novels. I don't think I'll ever write the great American novel, but how fun would it be to try? Or what if I dabbled in short stories?
My dream for many years was to become a children's book author. I wanted specifically to have my works published by Penguin Random House; I also thought when my career as a pediatrician took off, my children's books would be what kids read while they were playing in my waiting room before their appointment.
It's funny how some dreams circle back to you later in life and how some change entirely; some are even born into new dreams. I didn't become a pediatrician. In fact, I now mostly care for older adults in their 80s-90s. I also don't have any books published by Penguin Random House (yet?), but I do have some children's book ideas that I'd like to play around with, to try my hand at drawing things and to see if I could ever self-publish something, even if just for my niece and nephew or our someday, dreamed about kids.
I think when we give ourselves space to dream, our creativity takes hold and the stories, the paintings, the music just start pouring out of us. I think God delights in our creativity in this way; if we are made in His image and He is the ultimate Creator, I think He just simply delights in our pursuits of creativity and making much of His created world.
Do you dream? Or do you write stories or songs in your head? Do you see things in the world around you that you want to capture in a photo, or in a painting, or in a doodle in your sketchbook?
I love the quote that I started all of this with by Elizabeth Gilbert, from her book that I consider a must-read for all creatives, Big Magic. "A creative life is an amplified life. It's a bigger life, a happier life, an expanded life."
Yes, more of that. I hope we will always choose the bigger life, the happier life, the expanded life. I bet we won't regret that we did.
xo,
C
Comments
Post a Comment