Only in my Dreams

I'm not the type to sit and brainstorm story ideas. If I force it, I'm not going to like the finished product. My brother Tony comes up with a lot of his ideas when he's out walking in the morning. Doing routine, monotonous tasks always helps me come up with stuff. There are so many stories that are born in my morning shower. 

I'm one of those people who believes that the stories come from somewhere. I don't mean there's a cosmic reservoir of short story ideas but often they come from dreams. Literally.


This past week I awoke with a name on my mind. It was a strange name that I don't believe I've ever heard before. All day long I thought of this name and wondered what it meant. The next night I had a dream that fleshed it out for me. Gave me a whole backstory on the name. The dream showed me that this was a black teenaged boy living in Fulton County, Georgia in 1920 with his mother and siblings. (Having dreams that pick up night after night isn't unusual for me. Ask me about my lucid dreaming sometime.) There were snippets and flashes of what happened to this boy in the dream. I was a mere observer.


I awoke and knew that this was a story and I had to write it down. Now the creative part of the storytelling is all part of my conscious effort but the story itself sprang from within. And I feel compelled to write it. To birth it. It's a story that definitely fits with the stories in my two books and it will probably end up in the third volume.

Last week I had another dream about a complex story idea. The dream was difficult to put into words and I've been thinking about how I'm going to be able to write this story. It's an entirely different concept for me, bordering on science fiction. I'm excited by it because if I can figure out how to tell the story that I saw in my dream, I think it will blow people away. 

That's my process.

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