Thoughts for the "What if?" file:

[capri0mni]

Fiction writing starts with the single question "What if?" (and then, from there, you have to go on and answer the other five questions: Who? What? Where? When? and Why?).

So here are some "What if?" Questions that bob up from the murky depths of my subconscious, every now and then, that may, or may not, become the starting point for stories:

• In dreams, nothing you ever read remains the same for a second reading; the ideas may be related, but the phrasing will be different. What if there was a magical world / alternate reality, where this is what always happened when you read something--if that was just everyday normality for that world's inhabitants?



• There exist, in folklore, stories of men who have captured dryads, nymphs, selkies, and the like and forced them to be their wives by trapping them in human form. What if the grand-, or great grandchild of such a union, who had been raised as human, stumbled onto the truth about who (And what) they are?



• When I started this post, I had three What ifs in mind. But I can't remember what the third one is, now. [ETA: Okay, now I remember: One of my fictional pet peeves is the "It was all a dream!" trope, because that means that all the previous adventure, in which I, as a reader (or viewer) had invested so much emotional capital suddenly has no consequence, or importance. But what if the things we do in our dream world had real consequences for the people important to us in our waking world? Maybe not a literal, one-to-one correlation (if you die in your dream, you die for real, etc.), but some sort of meaningful consequence?]

Oh, and somewhat related, but not entirely:

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Comments

[drox.livejournal.com]

One of my fictional pet peeves is the "It was all a dream!" trope...

Hee! I had a creative writing instructor who said that one guaranteed way to fail his class was to conclude a story with "it was all a dream". I was afraid to let my characters fall asleep!

I love your take on it though. Dreams affecting reality! Shades of "Lathe of Heaven", which is one of my personal favorite novels.

[capriuni.livejournal.com]

Well, falling asleep is okay, I suppose. As long as they wake up and do something real and active to bring the conflict of the plot to some sort of conclusion.

When I was a senior in college, I made a one-credit course out of writing my first children's novel (Which never saw print outside of my printing each chapter in the computer labe each week), and I used dreams a lot -- well, a few times, as a way to show how my protagonist was coming to understand what she was experiencing during her journey (which is how dreams function in real life, after all). But I always made sure that the dream had some effect on her at least, if not on the people around her -- if she had a nightmare about getting eaten by a tree, for example, and then had to trek through the forest the next day, I could refer back to the nightmare to explain why she was so frightened by the shadows, when she wouldn't ordinarily have been, without the nightmare in her head. But in the idea I posted above, I was thinking something a little more tangible than that...

I remember reading Lathe of Heaven when I was in highschool. But the act of reading is pretty much all I remember.