J.A. Said
One Typo
I was writing several days ago, working on the novel in progress, April Showers 1921. I’d dream the novel, seeing the cover and knowing the main characters and a lot of story. Yet I was struggling to find and fulfill the potential the dream had shown the novel to have.
I plugged on, though, searching, testing, writing, and then tossing some of it away, trying to find the right path. Completing a scene, I went back over it, making minor changes. I uncovered a typo, an ess attached to a word, changing the noun from singular to plural. While laughing at the images that plural conjured, I deleted the letter, but then reconsidered what the plural could mean to the story. Within a few seconds, that extra letter and the shift from singular to plural opened up a new range of ideas. I went with it.
Results surprised me. That typo bloomed like algae, taking over that scene, but also illuminating masses of the underlying concept. The typo changed the main character’s interactions with others and shifted the entire story by several degrees. The typo opened unexpected mind streams. I surfed into new directions again and again, reacting with surprise, but also with satisfaction that this novel was becoming something different than how it’d been going. All of this is what causes fiction writing to be so engaging and entertaining for me.
Got my coffee. Time to write like crazy, at least one more time.
The Letters Dream
I laughed in the dream at this dream because I felt an immediate understanding and it was funny to me.
The setting was very vague. Others were there and I engaged with them, but all of them were outside of the dream cam’s view. Sometimes I was outside on a green hill; other times, I was indoors. The indoors settings varied from being a restaurant, coffee shop, and office.
I was doing two primary things in the dream. One, words would come up, and I was putting them into order. I thought at first that they should be alphabetized, but then I thought that they should be ordered by association. In parallel to this, I was playing a computer game called “Word Whomp”. Seven letters are provided and you make words out of them while the clock is ticking. So I was making words on the computer game and ordering words off to the other side. Then I began taking the words that I was supposed to be ordering and started putting them into the game. The words were accepted, even though they weren’t made of the letters provided. Throughout this, I was talking with people off-stage.
It was at this point in the dream that I paused to wonder about what was going on. My first thought was, why am I organizing words like this? Hasn’t this already been done in items like dictionaries? Then I pondered why the game was letting me put in words that didn’t have the letters.
That’s when I laughed in the dream. I thought it was about the writing process and angst. And though I laughed and knew I was playing the game right and doing things the way they’re not supposed to be done, I kept going and had myself a fun time.
Three words remained in my memory from the dream: lacing, facing, and gracing.
