A Dream About Writing or Shoes

I had a dream about writing. I don't remember having such a dream before. I was going to put it in my journal, but I thought I might as well put it here and it might benefit someone. Who knows?

In my dream, I was a student again in my youth going to college. I was living in San Diego and working in lower fifth Avenue. In those days, it was not the tourist place it is now but a seedy district full of bars, Chinese and Mexican restaurants vying for the business of the large number of sailors that came off the ships in the harbor. There were also pawn shops, tattoo parlors and other such businesses.

It was a bright and sunny day and I had a job selling shoes in a large store that had another business in it. The shoes that I was selling were pretty good ones although I did not have a lot to sell but I felt good about the quality. My brother came by and said hello on his way to work. He was a policeman. While I was outside taking a rest and enjoying the sunny weather, I saw the police stop a vehicle and search it. Then the police came over to me and asked if I had seen a certain person in the neighborhood. I said I was there only part of the time. I was there to watch and observe as a writer would. This was a good place to do it. The police was looking for someone with stolen shoes. I mentioned that I saw a truck with a lot of cheap shoes on it about a week ago on the street. The policeman did not seem interested. I told him that my brother was a state policeman and he wasn't interested in that either. He went into the store where I was selling shoes and I noticed the people who ran the rest of the store had packed up their stuff and left. The policeman left.

The store seemed so empty. I knew that there was a connection between the police arresting the people in the car outside and those leaving the store. They were selling cheap merchandise. Then a woman came in and wanted information about her shoes that she bought from my corner. I said they were good ones and I started to help her although I did not know if I had others in her size to sell them.

The point with all of these shoes and there are a lot of shoes here is the story about not knowing about someone until you wanted a mile in their shoes or moccasins. Shoes for me here are stories about people. I was in the lower Fifth Avenue to gather stories and that part is true. I did not sell shoes but worked in a bar and went to school. I also was there in my dream to learn. I am learning about writing again here in Korea.

I have mentioned before that I am reading "The Summing Up" by W. Somerset Maugham. In the book that I am re-reading, he said he taught himself to read by reading the authors he thought were good and the way he wanted to write. I made up to look again at the authors that I wanted to learn on how to write because I think I took a wrong turn a long time ago. I learned to write stories I did not want to write but wrote stories I thought I was supposed to write. Big difference, at least to me.

When reading Ernest Hemingway, I could taste and feel his stories. I saw clearly what was going on. He learned to write as a journalist learns to write. I liked that. I just did not want to write the kind of stories he wrote although I enjoyed them and thought "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" was one of the finest short story I ever read. I wanted more. Then I remember who was the first writer that taught me that the short story was something I could read and enjoy. It was W. Somerset Maugham and read three of them and put them in my Book Journal Blog. What was it about his stories that first made me fall in love with them?

I brought a Sony Reader that stopped working and then many of the books that I had loaded up simply disappeared off the reader. I went back to Google Books and those books disappeared too. There is a new agreement between Google Books and authors and publishers. Many of the books that were there are not there anymore. I can't get them here at all. Then I was able to get the Sony Reader working and charged up with a upgrade. I did not lose the books after all and there it was, all 132 books that I had initially loaded up. Included in those books were more short stories of Maugham and they were from the collection of the South Seas.

Maugham wrote stories about people. When you read his stories it was impossible to ignore the fact that there were emotional, breathing and sometimes people in pain or in passion. I am reading a story now about a man who is angry with another. Sometimes his characters are in deep passion about a woman or about art but the characters are not neutral about anything. Then I remembered reading John Gardner who said that readers always want to care about a character in a story. The plot, Maugham wrote, moved the story along and let the reader know what was happening to the characters. In a word, you have to care about the shoes. You have to care about the story, the people who are walking in those shoes.

I remember reading wonderfully well-written books in which I did not care one way or the other what happened to any of the characters. In Maugham's stories I care what happens to them. That is what keeps me reading. I care because the author cares. You can't let the reader see the devices in the stories to manipulate the reader, but if the author cares about the character he or she has created then the reader will care too and get carried along the same as the writer. When I write, I am a reader too. I am reading what I am writing. Sometimes, I get bored by what I write. Not good.

In the dream, the policeman does not care what is happening on the street, who is my brother and what else is in the room with me. All he cares about is what I am saying. He does not care about how I did my research. What matters is the quality of shoes that I am selling or the stories that I am creating. The store is now open and the clutter of the cheap advice that I was given in the past is gone. My inner police removed them. Now, I can expand and put in my own store what I need to produce a quality product, my own brand of shoes or stories.

Yipes, they are alive!

As I wrote earlier, I am working on a book of short stories right now. It is my first attempt to do so since I normally write novels. A curious thing happened today as I was working on one story. I was at the coffee shop I go to and came to a place in my story that was a dead-end. I had no idea where to go from there. I went and got a sandwich and a cup of coffee and thought about it. No dice. I had no idea what I was going to do. I even considered throwing out the story except I liked it.

When I worked on novels, I always knew where the book was going. I didn't always know the middle but I knew where it would end up. With the short stories I was writing, I did not. I don't read this form of fiction often. I had just finished a small book of short stories by W. Somerset Maugham that I read the first time when I was a young teen. I was surprised how much I had changed since I first read them many years ago. I still enjoyed them, but I saw different things in them than I did not the first time. I thought, for instance, that many points of irony hinged on a female character more than male characters and that during the time in the mid-twentieth century many authors did more than use women characters in their plots to move things along. They blamed them for a whole variety of things. I think I did that as well in my own stories of that time. Things have changed, thank goodness. I have too.\

Today I looked at my plot and my female protagonist and I had no idea what she was going to do. In a way, she was up against some of the same issues many women were up against in Maugham's stories. She was up against the wall and had no place, no direction that I could think she could go. I was stymied. Well, I was writing in long hand as I do when I am not in my apartment with the laptop. I just put my pen on the paper and let it go where it may because the other choice was to start another story and give up on this one.

I was astonished when the characters just took off and did their own thing. I just followed them recording what was said and what they did and in a very competent manner they finished the story in a way that I liked. In a sense, I also trusted them.

Maybe I had been trying to push the characters around and not allowing them to be who they were. That sounds a bit odd, but I have heard other writers say their fictional characters take a life of their own. I had done my job by giving them their characteristics and the setting for the story. I don't even like pit bulls but one came onto the scene and I dutifully recorded him as he walked outside through the doggie door looking for biscuits and occasionally lying in the sun.

Of course, the story was being done in my head. Who else is up there? Still, all this ability to plan, plot and create did not happen in a vacuum. It was being done effortlessly. I have been writing stories in my head since I was a little girl. Many writers have. I would watch a movie and "improve" it by rearrange the film or read a novel and change it to make it better or just write stories from scratch in my head.

My mother would call it daydreaming. It was fun to do especially on those long walks to and from school, the library, bus stops and so forth. I was a solitary person who lived in a very dysfunctional family. Walking was the only way I could get out of the house and way from the fighting that went on especially when my father had too much to drink. I thought all of that daydreaming was wasted. Not so.

Now it seems, my characters may have lives of their own. I am anxious to let them "loose" again in my next story.

More About Journals

I am living in Korea right now and getting ready to leave in December 2010. I wrote in my other blog about getting healthier that I have found that in Korea several things that I have benefited from. Here is a copy:

In a few months, December, I will be returning to the United States. In my mind I have been assessing what has happened to me since coming here in March of this year. One of the things that I have noticed is that I have been forced to deal more with myself than I would have normally. Most people around me speak a language that I don't understand. It is hard to get books in English although I have a reader and this computer and the Internet. I am for the most part isolated.

I have been going to a church on Sundays only because they speak English during the service which is getting me down as I don't believe in their doctrines and have major disagreements with many of their interpretations of the Bible. I am not a Christian but am interested enough in the Bible as an avid reader to overcome that, but not in overcoming their interpretation of who is in compliance of God's law and who is not. For example, they are not open and affirming to all groups of people. That is, they will accept gay and lesbian people into their meetings but it is clear they condemn their so-called life style. They are very nice people,though, and I would hate to give up going there.

The one person that I have been getting to know better is myself. This is a surprise. I thought I had been pretty good in writing in my journal, meditation every morning and so on. I haven't even scratched the surface if I can use slang here. There has been a lot of things that I have learned about myself that I did not know before because I had no other choice but to explore myself a bit more since there are no other people to talk to but myself for the most part.

I am writing full time now and established a routine so I won't end up doing nothing; and that means working more in my journal since that task sharpens my writing skills and directs my writing projects a bit more. That also means delving deeper into my self and that has brought up some surprises. It always astounds me that no one really knows the person they live with as a spouse or partner and even less the self.

For instance, I am far more spiritual than I ever thought I was. I used to hide this from friends when I was growing up. There are options that are open for men who have strong spiritual interests as becoming priests, ministers, monks and others but not too many for women. The only ones are nuns and they have little power over their own lives and cannot explore spiritual matters on their own. I tended to keep my spiritual interests hidden to some extent and when I was with people who were strong believers in their own faith it was hard not to question their beliefs especially when it contradicted what I thought was the spirit of what the Eternal stood for. Now, that I discovered this I have no intention of inflicting my beliefs on those who just want to be Christians on Sundays and good people on the rest of the week. I have to accept people's limitations.

Sometimes, each of us believe we have been disliked because of some unknown reason but I find being a loner and a reader I may have hurt my friends feelings when I took off to the library or other places to do my own thing while they did things such as socialize that I did not care to do as much. There was really nothing wrong with neither my friends or myself but a misunderstanding. I know my parents did not always understand me either since I did things they did not understand either such I was the first to complete school and get advanced degrees. They thought I should just get married like my sister.

Being a Buddhist, I know I needed to examine past attachments and disengage so that I won't hold past anger. I used these excursions into the past to do that. The more I did it, the more I realized that everyone was just trying to survive the best they could. No one was against me and that those episodes that I was holding grudges were episodes in which people were mad at me, probably, at the time. I did not have to say "I forgive you" and so on. There was nothing to forgive anyone for.

I have a few extra pounds and sometimes I think those pounds are like a wall of flesh that I use to protect myself. I explored that too. I think that is why I have been able to start losing the weight that I have not been able to for years. I find that I don't need to have this wall of fat anymore. I can protect myself without it. There are bullies out there. I can effectively protect without putting anything between myself and people. I can tell people that it is not ok to talk to me like that or just remove myself from the situation. I also explored why I was so easily bullied in the first place.

I have been afraid of going back home in a sense. I don't want a return to the old world, so I have been exploring that as well. There are no guarantees in life and there certainly are no guarantees in this either. Still, I will have the exact same tools in the States as I have now. I can do this. It has been good being in Korea.


I have always thought that the most important thing that I do is journal and I do it every single day. If I don't, I feel as if I am a long distance runner that is not running or a concert violin player who does not practice. However, as you can tell there is so much more about writing in a journal. It is the communication of the self that I find is absolutely necessary to good health. I found without it, I would not have been as successful as I have in Korea.