Whatever!

 

On this blog you will read about the things that interest me. Those things include living for God, hunting, writing, archery, fishing, and laughter. I woke up this morning thinking of writing but with no direction in mind, just writing. I began to have the desire to write, about fifteen years ago when I was in my mid-forties. In the beginning my internal critic said, “Get real, you can’t write.” Well I ignored him and started writing. I had an idea in mind that sparked my first attempts at writing. But after that I had a hard time starting my next project.  I eventually realized that anything you write is good, because no matter how bad it is, it is something, and something can be made better, but nothing cannot be made better. I have begun most of my projects by using Stephen King’s approach of asking “What if?”  For instance, what if a man dressed in a purple suit walked into a mini mart and handed out one hundred dollar bills but required everyone who took one to sign a contract.  That was just off the top of my head but you get the idea.

 Let me ask you a question, have you ever wanted to write a story, but the critic in you says, “Ha, you? You can’t write a grocery list!” tell the critic to hush, it is not true, you can write a grocery list, and much more. Deep within you lies an imagination so extensive, so creative, that you have the ability to create worlds that have never existed, people you have never met, creatures and terrible things that would frighten a priest. If you doubt what I say, I challenge you to think about the last dream you had.  Ah, now you see where I am going, dreams are fiction in its truest form. They are stories that our subconscious tells us in order to reason with fears and doubts, or things that have created cognitive dissonance with in us. I do not claim to know anything about dreams or why we dream, but I do know that it is a wonderful source of ideas for fiction.

Sometimes our dreams come in sketchy, broken segments that we have to piece together, other times they are stories that have a beginning, middle but no end, sometimes there is just and ending and you are left to try and figure out what the beginning and middle was. I don’t claim to know anything about why we dream or the meaning of dreams, I just know that if you can get past all of the physiological stuff and use the scenes that your subconscious hands you, it is possible to come up with some very creative stories. I have a book I am working on that started as a dream. My dream began with a young man (who looked a lot like Charlie Sheen) siding into a canal in the early morning in search of something. He eventually found an underground city. I saw waterfalls, turbines that gave light to the dwelling, different inventions that made living underground wonderful. I turned the pictures into words and I have about one hundred and forty pages of story.

My first inclination was to say don’t worry about what dreams mean just take the scenes and turn them into words, but I think I need to add that there are dreams that have supernatural origins. In the bible we read about how God spoke many times to people in dreams. Sometimes it was to tell of wonderful things to come, and other times it was to warn of things in their lives that need to change. So if you do not have a right relationship with the Living God of the bible and you are having dreams that seem to be warning you of something, The first thing you need to do is to get your heart right with God, and you do that by believing in the Lord Jesus Christ as your savior. On this page in the upper right hand corner there is a link that will take you to a page that fully explains what it means to make Jesus your savior. If you are reading this and you decide to follow Jesus, and invite him to be Lord of your life, you have the beginning of a wonderful story at your fingertips. Write about it and share it with me, I want to hear how God changed your life.

Ideas for stories are all around you, so write! I love reading books by writers on writing, and one of themes that has been in all of the books that I have read on writing is that if you want to be a writer, you have to write. So open up your word processer and start writing. Thanks for reading my blog and if you are not a follower of this blog you are welcome to join. May God richly bless you!

Cliff