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In Die By the Pen, Jared Gniewek discusses what feeds his fires as an author of comics, screenplays and radio dramas.

I wrote a short story last week. Short stories were my first passion towards writing. I used to read and re-read the great pieces by O. Henry, Jack London, John Steinbeck, and Ray Bradbury. I still prefer collections of short stories to novels. I guess I have a short attention span. I also like the way they come at you fast and leave a quiet lingering feeling in their wake.

What makes this new short story one of note is that it was conceived in a dream. Ann, my lovely girlfriend, woke me from a dead slumber a couple of weeks ago and it was just as the dream was “ending”.

I wouldn’t get up until I had resolved what was going to happen to the characters. I laid there with my eyes fused shut and a “wait for it” finger held high. When I imagined the end, it was a pull back shot of a family eating a picnic in autumn New England. They were framed by ox-blood colored maple leaves and as the shot pulled away I could hear their laughter and smell their food.

I bring this up because if this happens to you, it is imperative that you do as I and either “finish it” or write down what you can remember of the dream into a dream diary. When you are spending so much time brainstorming plot devices and dramatic structures, you can lose sight of what really make s a story resonate: characters—preferably the type that folks empathize with. Your brain, if it’s been fed a steady diet of drama, can and will come up with stories while you’re asleep. I find that the stories which come from dreams are usually rooted in unusual connections that seem unnatural.

One of my first comic scripts came from a dream. I was taking Danny Fingeroth’s scripting class a couple of years ago and one of the assignments was to bring in our pitches. The first two, I spent hours and hours trying to come up with clever ways of using Superman to illustrate my concerns about our modern culture. He’s good for that. I love Superman stories that reflect the current cultural climate. The third pitch I came up with was one straight out of a dream.

I woke up crying because a woman felt as though she needed to constantly change the outfits and makeup on her doll collection to hold onto an apathetic boyfriend. It was so dismally futile, I felt terrible.

The class didn’t really feel strongly about the Superman pitches, they were pretty heavy handed and weren’t exactly fun. They really didn’t feel strongly about the story of this poor woman who was struggling to be heard. They didn’t understand how it was a story and it didn’t make any sense to them. I knew that had to be my script for the next week.

I wrote it and brought it in the next week. We read it out loud in class. They couldn’t believe that it was after all a story. They confessed that they had felt something when they read it and at the end, they understood her.

Trying to get others to understand your dreams is a challenge worth undertaking. From these seeds of nonsense erupt the stories you can’t forget—the characters you can’t keep down. The voices that live forever both in your imagination and on paper.

Keep a dream diary or commit yourself to lucid dreaming when you get the chance. This doesn’t mean that you have to keep all the transformations and non-sequiters that a true dream narrative will inevitably have. It means that you hold onto the drama of these moments that crystallize the human experience in unexpected ways. Use what your brain already gives you. You won’t be disappointed.

Jared Gniewek has worked in the music industry as a back line technician, performer, and promoter. He has also been a freelance writer whose work can be seen in the recent re-launch of Tales from the Crypt and heard on The Dark Sense, an audio anthology of the macabre for which he is also the story editor —http://www.earstage.com/darksense.htm.

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