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Digital Commonplace Book
May. 17th, 2019 03:06 amIt’s disappointing how you can have epic, cinematic dreams with fascinating characters and complicated stories, but then you wake up and all you remember is “I was being chased.”
Last night I had a really cool dream. I woke up in the middle of the night because I had to use the bathroom, and I thought, “There are parts of that dream that didn’t make sense.” I then went back to bed and had the entire dream again, this time with all of the plot holes fixed.
I just woke up and turned on my laptop to get everything down, but all I have is: “There was a small town in the woods of upstate New York that no one could enter or leave without making a blood sacrifice.”
Goddamn it.
I also sometimes have dreams about video games in which I will actually be playing a fully realized game (usually a Zelda clone) with gorgeous system-specific graphics and creative play mechanics, but then when I wake up I won’t remember anything except “you had to solve a puzzle involving differently colored mushrooms in the Lost Woods” or “the first dungeon was just someone’s house, which they had contrived to look like a dungeon for a special holiday.”
When I was a kid – like maybe eight or nine years old – I decided that I wanted to do research on horror fiction, but the only nonfiction book I could find was Stephen King’s Danse Macabre. I didn’t understand probably 80% of what King was going on about (specifically pulp fiction from the 1950s and 1960s), but I did enjoy his extended discussion of H.P. Lovecraft, whom I admired at the time. According to King (and later according to S.T. Joshi, a well-respected biographer and editor of Lovecraft), Lovecraft based a number of his more famous stories and conceits off of his correspondence with Clark Ashton Smith, an American fantasy author who, like Lovecraft, was born in the early 1890s.
I was interested in reading Smith’s work; but, as a kid with almost no access to library resources, the only thing I could get my hands on was The Black Book of Clark Ashton Smith, which is, according to Wikipedia, “a transcription of a notebook that was kept by the author” and published in 1979 (about a decade after his death) by Arkham House, the same small American press that used to put out paperback collections of Lovecraft’s fiction. The Black Book is essentially a commonplace book filled with scraps of ideas, which were mostly no more than a paragraph long. I have no idea how something so niche and rare found its way into my possession, but I loved it. I wanted to keep a commonplace book of my own, but I had somehow managed to convince myself that I was too stupid to ever be a writer, so I didn’t.
I’m probably still too stupid to be a writer, but I wonder if it might not be a good time to start keeping track of my story ideas, whether they come from random dreams or alcohol-fueled dinner conversations or the dopamine high I get from jogging or something I saw or heard somewhere and thought I could do better.
As for the video game ideas, it might be a good idea to keep track of them as well. I’ll make a separate post about that soon.
Last night I had a really cool dream. I woke up in the middle of the night because I had to use the bathroom, and I thought, “There are parts of that dream that didn’t make sense.” I then went back to bed and had the entire dream again, this time with all of the plot holes fixed.
I just woke up and turned on my laptop to get everything down, but all I have is: “There was a small town in the woods of upstate New York that no one could enter or leave without making a blood sacrifice.”
Goddamn it.
I also sometimes have dreams about video games in which I will actually be playing a fully realized game (usually a Zelda clone) with gorgeous system-specific graphics and creative play mechanics, but then when I wake up I won’t remember anything except “you had to solve a puzzle involving differently colored mushrooms in the Lost Woods” or “the first dungeon was just someone’s house, which they had contrived to look like a dungeon for a special holiday.”
When I was a kid – like maybe eight or nine years old – I decided that I wanted to do research on horror fiction, but the only nonfiction book I could find was Stephen King’s Danse Macabre. I didn’t understand probably 80% of what King was going on about (specifically pulp fiction from the 1950s and 1960s), but I did enjoy his extended discussion of H.P. Lovecraft, whom I admired at the time. According to King (and later according to S.T. Joshi, a well-respected biographer and editor of Lovecraft), Lovecraft based a number of his more famous stories and conceits off of his correspondence with Clark Ashton Smith, an American fantasy author who, like Lovecraft, was born in the early 1890s.
I was interested in reading Smith’s work; but, as a kid with almost no access to library resources, the only thing I could get my hands on was The Black Book of Clark Ashton Smith, which is, according to Wikipedia, “a transcription of a notebook that was kept by the author” and published in 1979 (about a decade after his death) by Arkham House, the same small American press that used to put out paperback collections of Lovecraft’s fiction. The Black Book is essentially a commonplace book filled with scraps of ideas, which were mostly no more than a paragraph long. I have no idea how something so niche and rare found its way into my possession, but I loved it. I wanted to keep a commonplace book of my own, but I had somehow managed to convince myself that I was too stupid to ever be a writer, so I didn’t.
I’m probably still too stupid to be a writer, but I wonder if it might not be a good time to start keeping track of my story ideas, whether they come from random dreams or alcohol-fueled dinner conversations or the dopamine high I get from jogging or something I saw or heard somewhere and thought I could do better.
As for the video game ideas, it might be a good idea to keep track of them as well. I’ll make a separate post about that soon.
