No, this is not a motivational essay on following your dream to write a novel so uber, Random House shows up at your door salivating at your Nike’s begging to give you a publishing contract… There’s enough of that fluff in the blogosphere already.

This first tip of the week is about the value of learning to track and remember your dreams… and getting enough sleep to have them! In order to retain everything a writer has learned the day before, eight hours of sleep is the magic number. This is also the amount necessary to fully milk the REM (Rapid Eye Movement) cycle of sleep for all its worth, for it’s in that curious Xanadu that dreams occur. Because writers usually have to be champions of that old adage, “Burning the candle at both ends”, we’re often notoriously bad at accomplishing this.

Throughout my life, I’ve had a particularly active dreamscape to keep track of. During the course of my nighttime excursions I have been chased by a Velociraptor, escaped from the Andersonville prison camp, dueled with Boba Fett, jumped out of an airplane (and hit the ground!), breathed underwater, fallen in love, gotten married to the wrong man, solved murders, been mauled by a tiger, seen my car drive off a cliff by itself, dueled an army of ninjas, and have outwitted a ravenous giant spider named “Krinklebumm”… and that’s the short, short, short list (I didn’t even include my swim in the waters of Gondor!). It cannot be described how much my imagination and my storytelling would have suffered had I not valued these otherworldly experiences. 

While I’m not as thorough as some who journal every single dream they can recall, I can safely say that some of my best story ideas have come about as a result of dreams. One entire epic project of mine started because of a very elaborate dream in which I was arrested and broke out of prison. A Hero Story absolutely has scenes that are dream inspired, and for the short-story challenged, dreams are great candy to feed smaller works. If you’re very heavily invested in a project, it’s also likely it will start seeping into your dreamlife.

The best way I have found to recall dreams is to wake up slowly enough to be able to contemplate them. I can remember plenty of times I’ve been at the tail end of an amazing dream only to have Dave show up ready to start the day, whack me with a pillow, and unceremoniously shove me back into real life. Almost every time I’m awakened like that, I forget what I dreamed no matter how vivid it might have been. This is usually followed by me putting him in the crippler crossface for ruining my fudge sundae of inspiration (or a tombstone piledriver if I have really bad PMS).

Once you recall a dream, write it down. Whether you keep a journal next to the bed or just hurry to your laptop to rapid fire it into a Word document, if a noteworthy dream comes along, put it on a page somewhere. I consider anything that had a plot, a particular image that struck a chord, or that I can remember in entirety to be noteworthy. Yes, I have looked back on these and in some cases, I have no idea what was going on, but other times they have lead to stories I could have never concieved of otherwise.

The long and short of it?:

1) Get enough sleep to not only refresh your mind, but also to dream in the first place.

2) Train yourself to remember and recall dreams, and wake up slowly if possible.

3) Using whichever medium you prefer, keep track of noteworthy dreams. 

In a world where imagination is too often shunned as a childhood indulgence, cultivate your dreamlife. It’s a key part of the writer’s toolbox.

Cheers!

As I said… Titles rejected one day make great section headers later! “A Fish for your Ear” is a new section of the blog designed to share great articles and advice that I’ve tripped across elsewhere on the web!

The first of these juicy morsels is a new post at FreelanceWritingGigs.com for writers still working on getting their first paying gig. It can be a difficult and foreboding task, and Deb from FWJ shares some excellent advice in her article, “Landing your First Freelance Job- Where to Begin?”. She covers everything from what to do about a blank resume to where to search for that golden nugget of a first gig. Do enjoy and thanks to the folks at FWJ for their contributions to the writing community!

        During the course of my time in film school, I’ve taken a number of writing classes and workshops, and one universal truth has become apparent to me during that time: students suck at titles. 

        I cannot count how many classes and script workshops I’ve sat in where a person has a great story, great dialogue, interesting characters, and the brilliant title of, “Untitled”, “Document1″, “Working Title”, or “Screenwriting Project”. Is it just laziness or is it a backdoor the great and terrible writer’s block has crept its filthy tentacles surreptitiously through?

        There are certain titles that just fall into your lap. Character names are sometimes like this, and when a character’s name ends up in the title you kill two wasps with one spray (Wasps are Satan’s confetti). Persephone worked out like that: I actually came up with the title and the character before I’d fully smoothed out what the story was. The Hobbit is a more famous example. It all started because J.R.R. Tolkien wrote down on a page, “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.”

        Other titles are happy accidents. A Hero Story (my current adventure-satire project) is a title that came about due to the normal laziness that usually couch-potatoes hand in hand with title creation… I knew my characters and the story I wanted to tell, but I couldn’t think of a good title so I named the file “HeroStory.doc”. It wasn’t until a year later when I realized I needed to pick out a proper title that I found my filename actually satisfied what I was looking for: the story is a simple tale of a hero, your standard knight in shining armor and damsel in distress affair (only my knight has no armor and is a filth-a-phobe and my damsel is a narcoleptic who speaks a dead language). Simplicity is what I wanted, and after considering my other options, I stuck with it.

        However, most titles are not happy accidents or falling flowerpots of inspiration. More often than not, the amount of work that an author has to put into finding the right title for their project can be mind-numbing. Fishing with Crossbows was such a case, and I’ll be using the example of how I found the right title for this writer’s blog to walk through my process for finding a title. If you finish this and are hungry for more, I’d suggest picking up this month’s edition of Writer’s Journal Magazine, there’s an excellent article on picking the right title. You can also subscribe to that publication using the Amazon.com link at the bottom of the post.

        When I first decided to do a writer’s blog, I thought my woes over that subject of titling would be sparse when I came up with the witty name, “The Writer’s Blogk”… Unfortunately, about fifty other writers on Google had thought the same thing. Overused titles, or previously-claimed titles are usually not so good, so I had to delve into the long painful process of name-fishing. It goes something like this:

1) Begin with the end in mind: If you don’t know what the soul/purpose/’story’ of your piece is, don’t bother with the title yet. “Where there is no vision, the people perish,” is how the Bible puts it and that definitely applies to writing. Toni Morrison once said, “I always know the ending; that’s where I start.” While this applies to the actual craft of writing, it definitely speaks to choosing a title because your title should capture the heart of your entire piece.

For Fishing with Crossbows, I knew I wanted to do a blog for writers, and I needed a title that said something about writing that could relate to my perspective on the form.

In short? Identify the cojones of your project first, then work on a title.

2) Start B.S.ing: That’s right… Brainstorming! Like the noble chimpanzee, start flinging crap onto the page. Look wherever you have to for inspiration and when an idea hits, write it down no matter how silly or cheesetastic it sounds. You may find that many rejected titles now will make titles or metaphors elsewhere!

When I had to pick a title for what-would-become-Fishing with Crossbows, my bookshelf was a major source of brainstorming. Being the blog would have a literary element to it, I considered referencing one of the well-known books that had inspired me. From this category of the brainstorm came:

-”All that is Gold does not Glitter” (a quote from The Lord of the Rings)

-”Taming the Dragon” (a reference to Les Miserables)

-”Silver Candlesticks” (another Les Mis reference)

-”The Raven is Hoarse” (a famous Lady Macbeth quote)

-”Little but Fierce” (A Midsummer Night’s Dream)

-”Shards of *something rhyming with Narcil*” (an obscure Lord of the Rings reference)

-”Fahrenheit 1984″ (A duel reference to Fahrenheit 451 and 1984)

-”See it, Smell it, Touch it, Kiss it” (A film reference to The Producers)

-”Nowhere and Back Again (Another Lord of the Rings one)

-”Where and Back Again?” (The runt cousin of the previous entry)

        When I prodded Dave (who was trying to level up his new and ruggedly-hot hunter in Lord of the Rings Online), he challenged me to consider whether or not serious or satire was what I was going for. When I concluded silliness would be carrying a lot of weight, I turned to my favorite satire of all time, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. From that chunk of B.S. came:

-”Towels and Peanuts”

-”Don’t Panic”

-”Mostly Harmless”

-”May I Stick this Fish in your Ear?”

        While these were all great (though ‘all’ is a rather strong word), I needed to look deeper. I searched through old stories, extra hard drives, famous quotes, video games, and abandoned journals, coming up with these specimens for my title pitre-dish:

-”Heroes and ______” (the blank was filled with everything from “Visigoths” to “meatbags”)

-”Unlikely Heroes”

-”Musing of an Evil Hand Puppet”

-”Trudgery”

-”Circus of Personality”

-”I’m Revan” (one must have played Knights of the Old Republic to understand this one)

-”Geese and Hand-Puppets”

And my personal favorite:

“The Hitchhiker’s Guide to being Miserables’ while defeating The Lord of the Rings at Fahrenheit 1984 with the Phantom of Monte Cristo.”

        The absolute last name added to the list was “Fishing with Crossbows”, and it had only come about because as I was searching my brain’s personal Tivo, I recalled a hilarious episode of Man vs. Wild where Bear Grylls was in the Amazon rainforest. He had been having a rather miserable time due to having been, for the first time ever, unable to start a fire, and having built an elaborate bamboo ladder to cross the river that was shattered before use. He was getting hungry and had found a small pool that had become home to a few piranhas. He fashioned himself a bow and some arrows, climbed into the pool (apparently piranhas are chickens when they aren’t in massive schools) and just started firing away into the pond. Supposedly the natives fished that way, but it just seemed rather silly to me and Dave who were watching with keen interest. Much to our surprise, he caught a piranha! What made it even more hilarious is how instinctively vicious the little guy was even impaled on the tip of an arrow. Bear actually fed an entire reed to the sharp-toothed little terd…

        The image stuck and the metaphor made sense: when you’re fishing, you can use a pole and catch fish the same ol’ dull indirect way by fooling them with bait or shiny things… or you can enter the happy land of overkill, cut straight to the point, and shoot your fish right out of the pond (and what cooler way is there to shoot something than with a crossbow?). Is the latter harder? Absolutely, since it requires more skill… but how much more unique is it? And how many more fish can you catch when you’ve mastered it? In writing, you can write the same standard way you’ve always been taught… or you can master the difficult skill of cutting straight to the chase and writing something unique that could only come from you: something that is quality and sticks with the reader after they walk away. It’s harder, but in the end it pays off.

        However, despite how much I liked the title, I still wasn’t in love yet. With my B.S. pile down on the page, I moved onto the next step…

        3) Cut the Fat: While the fruits of brainstorming can be a glorious (or horrifying) site to gaze upon once they’re on the page, the prize is not yet reached. The next step for me was cutting all the excess and narrowing the list down to the juicy bits of tenderloin I could actually chew. The first run of this was done by “grading” each of the names. For most people this would probably be a 1-5 type system. For me it was done with W, M, J, B, Um, and X: Woot, Maybe, Joke, Blech, Um-weird, and NO. The lackluster names and overly-used literary references had to go (Mostly Harmless has been done to death), as did the ones that had nothing to do with writing (”I’m Darth Revan! Me!”). Through repeated runs of the MUmBJXW system (I should trademark that…), the list was narrowed down to these succulent morsels:

-”Heroes and Hijackings” (a reference to the many times obscure characters have hijacked my stories… unfortunately, with my small amount of Middle-Eastern heritage this could get me on the FBI watch list)

-”May I stick this Fish in your Ear?” (recognizable to satire fans, off-beat… but too darn long for a blog title)

-”Nowhere and Back Again” (I’m a Tolkien junkie and I play too much LotRO)

-”A Fish for your Ear” (my rather sad attempt to salvage the previous Hitchhiker’s reference)

-”Fahrenheit 1984″ (catchy, but a bit macabre…)

-”Fishing with Crossbows”

        Then came the hardest part… picking the winner!

        4) Choose your Weapon! : Actually, it wasn’t that hard. If you use process of elimination, often the title will choose itself. Fishing with Crossbows did exactly that: it made the most sense, was unique, tied into the theme of the blog, and was short enough not to knock itself off potential blogrolls.

        Is there more that goes into choosing a title? Yes. Are there other methods? Absolutely, this is just an example of a method that has worked for me on multiple occasions. Some final title-choosing advice:

-Don’t be too ‘cute’. It’s a title, not a Pomeranian.

-Don’t use clichés or be cliché, except with extreme caution… There, dar be dragons.

-Make sure your title ties in with the genre of what you’re doing. Don’t have an absurdist title if you’re writing a serious non-fiction piece.

-Don’t pull a “Temple of Doom”… What I mean is don’t cut the heart of your piece out and put it on fiery display. My screenwriting teacher has nailed me multiple times for this… an example was a short script I did about a prostitute who is given a rose to remind her of her worth. I thought I’d done well by calling it, “Battered Roses” but I got busted for my title… I had torn out the heart of my piece and put it on display, giving away too much and actually taking away from the film itself. Another example is using your key line as a title… If “Gladiator” had been called, “What we do in Life Echoes in Eternity”, it would have lost something. This is shaky ground, so if you suspect this might be going on with your title, ask around and get some outside opinions. This is a hard error to identify sometimes.

-Make it interesting… Something that makes me want to click your link or pick up your book. A great example is a fellow-funny writer’s blog “Screw you!“. It definitely catches the eye.

-Watch Bowfinger. If you ever give your film a title like “Chubby Rain” and it’s not a parody, I will hunt you down and beat you with a flyswatter.

        For more info, I’d definitely suggest looking through the article in this month’s, “Writer’s Journal”. As for chime-ins, what methods do you go through to pick a title when it at first eludes you? Got any stories about title mishaps or successes? Share ‘em in the comments section… Cheers!

No, seriously, I’m not kidding. I believe it was January of 2005 that I got a most interesting email from my mother. A woman of many talents, she completed a B.A. in history when I was growing up, owns almost every book on the Civil War printed in the late 90’s, and is now pursuing a Ph.D. in a very specific and complicated branch of neuropsychology that I cannot pronounce… or spell. She’s also a fellow online-gaming aficionado. Seriously, can anyone else here say their mother uses the word “ganked”?

Anyways, one of her more interesting hobbies throughout the years has been the study of our family’s genealogies (no we’re not Mormons and I don’t know anything about Utah except there’s skiing and a lot of salt). Over the course of her studies, she had found a number of curious individuals in our ancestry: James Marion Jordan, a famous officer of the Civil War… The Montegues, who from my understanding of Shakespeare were rather like the Hatfields and McCoys of Elizabethan times… and Simon De Montfort, the man who some consider the father of democracy and was slain at the manipulations of Edward the Longshanks (a very nasty fellow who did, in fact, have quite long shanks and shank many people).

This pursuit of hers was, in truth, only of cursory interest to me until I got this particular email…

To fully understand the impact of the knowledge I was about to receive, it must be known my dad’s side of the family has always been proud of its Irish descent. After all, we share a surname with the most brash Irishman in Hollywood! Despite this, I’d always had a soft spot for Scotland. When we visited that fine and favorite country of mine, I mastered the accent, climbed the Wallace monument, and got intrusively pulled out of line and searched with my mother at the Edinburgh tattoo (we apparently looked like terrorists compared to the ginger-haired, pasty hoard…).

Thus it was to my everlasting glee that my mother informed me a mistake had been made in Grandma’s genealogy. Apparently, the proud Irish Donnell family were not descendants of any O’Donnells… They were descendants of McDonnells.

With this newfound information, mom traced this line back as far as she could, through McDonnells, McDonalds, Stewarts and…

Bruces.

She discovered my dad and I are direct descendants of the first king of Scotland: Robert the Bruce.

I stared at the screen… Not only had my dream of being transformed into a semi-Scot been realized, but… Queen? Duchess? Estates in Stirling? I could finally make Dave wear a kilt?!

Unfortunately, as is the bane of all Scots, the Bloody English struck again… Thanks to wars, betrayals, overturnings, and the occasional prince being chucked out a castle window, the only crown I would inherit was the ability to point out in the middle of Braveheart, “I’m that guy’s great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-etc.-etc.-etc. granddaughter!”… At which point popcorn is usually flicked at me and I’m told to shut it and watch the film.

So, I’m not Scottish royalty… I’m a struggling writer and full-time student who has been in college too long and, like many of my storytelling kin, often finds life to be a cruel mistress who dishes out stern slaps to the skull whenever I try to refuse her insistencies for my craft… Not that I would have a mistress because that would affirm the rude commentary of many of my long-forgotten high school classmates who thought my love of Star Wars and desire to emulate Jackie Chan indicated confusion about my sexual orientation…

What’s my point? There are a great many disappointments, pitfalls, and “woulda/coulda’s” that can dishearten and demoralize even the most passionate writers. These hurdles are the puppy-kibble that writer’s block thrives upon, and many times have I been that nasty behemoth’s helpless chew toy.

I did not make this blog just as a means of publishing something on my own, or as a means of entertaining my friends and colleagues with musings from my friend, “The Evil Hand Puppet” (a spawn of writer’s block, boredom, and a very dull lunch break my senior year of high school).

I decided to make “Fishing with Crossbows” because writing is hard. There are writers who are blessed with the talents to launch into the freelancing or fiction industry, and there are some who have struggled across the years just trying to build up the stamina to finish the works we’ve poured our souls into– to give writer’s block a stout punch to the schnozz. This blog helps me as a writer by helping other writers: sharing the knowledge I’ve learned along my career (never let anyone tell you it’s otherwise, even if the only thing you’ve ever published is a book report that got you a sticker of a turtle saying, “You’re a Trooper!”) and by giving my fellow struggling storytellers something to laugh and smile about by sharing my own discoveries and disasters. It’s a means to give some inspiration, fun, and hope to my comrades in this amazing field. As J.R.R. Tolkein believed, I see storytellers as created in the image of a Creator, a group that adds beauty, introspection, and depth to this often unpleasant world.

So do enjoy this blog as it grows, progresses, and turns into a tale of its own. Expect a fair deal of silliness but not so much fluff as to cause cottonmouth… There be no chicken soup for the soul here, no watery broth to sooth the sickened belly of your muse. Expect meat and Tabasco sauce for your inner writer from this blog, a Texas BBQ buffet’s worth… Cheers.