Sleepworking

One day I hope to be asked "Where do you get your ideas from?" as it will mean that I have written a work of fiction that has impressed someone and is original enough for them to wonder how I managed to think it up. At the moment the only person likely to ask me that is myself and unfortunately I don't yet have an answer.

Any regular readers may recall that I previously wrote about different types of writers, the architects and archaelogists, and identified myself as a member of the latter camp. I discover the story as I go along; in many ways I don't "get" the ideas from anywhere, the ideas come to me. As I mentioned before it can be difficult to write short stories as an archaeologist; it can be even more difficult to write a synopsis.

This is a problem, because I need to write a synopsis, a summary for a piece of short fiction I am planning to write. At the moment it's not important what this actually is, suffice to say there's a deadline and a word count to be taken into consideration. This means that, unless I actually write the whole thing and then summarise it, I need to know what's happening in advance. I can't wait for the ideas to come to me during the process of writing itself, I need to seek them out and tag them ready for later use.

I need a new process. What's more I need to find a way of describing the whole story before it exists without becoming bored with it.

Yesterday I came up with a vague idea and a clever sounding title, but that was all I had. It wasn't even enough to hang a ten word description on, let alone a fully fledged synopsis. It was bothering me and I fell asleep last night fretting about it.

I then dreamed I was writing it. The dream was a curious mixture of me coming up with the ideas and transcribing them with the scenes being played out in front of me, fully dramatised. Of course there was also a lot of nonsense involved, but even during the dream I was able to dismiss this. At one point I even turned to someone and told them I had to get on with getting this down before I forgot it.

As I started to wake up I began to worry that I'd forget it once I came to full wakefulness; as it was some of the details were already becoming blurred and falling apart. Luckily I had my new toy by the bedside; I grabbed it and begun typing what I could remember into the Notes app.

The danger now is that when I come back to it, it will be laughable gibberish. As a child I once woke up in the middle of the night with a highly significant and portentous phrase echoing through my head, I scrabbled for a pen and paper to note it down before I fell asleep and forgot it. In the morning I found a piece of paper with "To Kings Vast" scrawled on it. Gobbledygook.

Let's hope the same isn't true today, lets have a look... Yes, it still seems to make sense.

Now to beat it into some kind of coherent shape.