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.