The art of slow writing - Louise DeSalvo 2014

Dreaming and daydreaming
Writers at rest

Naomi Epel’s Writers Dreaming (1993) presents her interviews with twenty-six writers who spoke about the relationship between dreaming, daydreaming, and their creative lives. Each of these writers declared that they continually drew upon their dreams or daydreams as they composed.

Some writers, like Charles Johnson, author of the National Book Award—winning Middle Passage (1990), about the final voyage of an illegal slave ship, dreamed the solution to a challenge. Johnson sensed that a scene where slaves were about to be herded into the hold of a slave ship lacked an essential component. Before Johnson revised this section, he decided to take a nap: “As soon as my head hit the pillow, I started to drift off into that marginal place that you enter between wakefulness and dreams.” During that liminal state, Johnson imagined Yankee sailors hauling a crate out of the jungle. “What’s in this crate?” he wondered. A “kind of cryptic, encoded dream image” of a god came to him.

Johnson had been working on the novel for four and a half years when that god became a crucial element in the narrative. He’d sensed he needed a central symbol that would deepen its meaning. When he daydreamed that image, the solution came to him. But it took a month and a half of work for Johnson to discover how to use that god to initiate the freed slave, Rutherford Calhoun, into “enlightenment and illumination.”

Bharati Mukherjee, author of Wife (1975) and Jasmine (1989), dreams the endings of her novels. During her first drafts, she doesn’t know what will happen to her characters. While working on Wife, her novel about a young immigrant wife’s difficult adjustment to New York City, Mukherjee decided the narrative would conclude with the wife’s becoming depressed or killing herself, the only reasonable outcome for such a “pliant, good, obedient Indian wife.” But in a dream, Mukherjee witnessed her character deciding to kill her husband. Upon awakening, she told her husband, “The guy’s going to die!” This dream drastically altered the conclusion, and the meaning, of Wife. Mukherjee asserts, “Art really is quite often anticipated by or resolved by dreams.”

Gloria Naylor, author of The Women of Brewster Place (1983), Linden Hills (1985), and Mama Day (1988), uses daydreaming to resolve problems in her work. When she’s stuck, she “play[s] [the problem] out in my mind to get myself past that bump some way.” In writing Linden Hills, a retelling of Dante’s Inferno, Naylor couldn’t decide how to move two boys who didn’t belong there into a really posh neighborhood. “That’s when I lay down and invented the idea of a policeman com[ing] and stop[ping] them.” Then she imagined another character sending her husband on an errand, who then leads the boys down into that hellish place. “That’s an example of daydreaming a solution,” Naylor said.

Naylor’s novels often begin with her seeing images. “You know which images are important,” she observed, “because they hit you so powerfully.” The initial image inspiring Brewster Place, about the lives of a group of women in a rotting tenement, was “the rocking of women”—“Mattie rocking Ciel.” Naylor wrote that scene, but she put it away because she didn’t understand its meaning. But she continued writing because she wanted to understand who Mattie was.

The initial image for Naylor’s Mama Day was that of a “woman carrying a dead baby through the woods.” The image came to Naylor as she was sitting on a sofa in a studio apartment while she was living in Washington, D.C. She knew the woman was keening, and she heard the lines, “Go home, Bernice. Go home and bury your child.” Naylor says that after images come to her, she feels her “characters are waiting” for her to unravel the meaning of their story.

William Styron described how “the whole concept of Sophie’s Choice” (1979) was “the result … of a kind of waking vision which occurred when I woke up one spring morning in the mid-seventies” when he was working on another, difficult book. After he awakened, Styron had a “lingering vision,” a “merging from the dream to a conscious vision and memory of this girl named Sophie.”

Sophie Zawistowska was based upon a woman Styron knew, whom he first saw entering a boarding house in Flatbush, wearing a summer dress with “her arm bared and the tattoo visible.” The image of Sophie that returned to Styron was so powerful that he knew he’d have to abandon the novel he was working on and write about Sophie. He walked to his studio, and “wrote down the first words just as they are in the book.” From the beginning of the novel to its conclusion, Styron wrote Sophie’s Choice without hesitation. “You could say that the whole concept of the book was, if not the product of a dream itself, the product of some resonance that a dream had given me.” In time, he imagined the tragic choice she was forced to make at Auschwitz, her life in Brooklyn with her dangerous lover, Nathan Landau, and the novelist’s narrator, Stingo.

Styron believed that writing the novel was “an absolute necessity.” He realized that it had to end at Auschwitz “with [Sophie] sacrificing her children.” When Styron had that first apparition of Sophie, he realized he was “onto something that for me was absolutely essential to deliver myself of.” His job became rendering the narrative in a way that moved his audience as much as he himself had been moved by his initial image of Sophie.

Dreaming and daydreaming are essential features of the creative process. They’re not distractions from our work but necessary to it. Don’t many of our projects, like those of these writers, begin this way? While we’re engaged in a routine task, an idea for an essay, a book, a line, or a scene we need to write springs to consciousness. Or we’re in that liminal zone between sleeping and waking and a startling image comes to us about our work that changes its course. Or we awaken in the middle of the night knowing that what we’d planned to do won’t work. As the experiences of these writers suggest, we can help our work by paying careful attention to these thoughts and images.

But I’ve learned many beginning writers don’t capture these ideas by writing them down, and they don’t act on their dreams or daydreams. Unlike seasoned writers, they haven’t yet learned that dreams and daydreams provide inspiration and important information about our work. We might not know how this information will fit into a narrative in progress, as Johnson initially didn’t, but if we write it down, it won’t be lost; it will be there for us when we need it. But many writers treat these inspirational moments as ephemera rather than as rock solid knowledge of what we need. We can subvert our creative process by dismissing these thoughts and visions as meaningless, rather than taking them seriously. I like to look at them as presents that come unbidden that might not be given to us again.

The most productive writers and creative people I know realize that dreaming and daydreaming are important parts of how writers work. We might not know, now, what to do with the images our dreams or daydreams provide, but one day, if we continue to try to unravel their meaning, as Naylor’s process illustrates, we will.