Monthly Archives: June 2010

June 2, 2010

This one’s for Fletcher

If you are a young writer who is looking for feedback on your work, showing your parents and friends is all very well but, unless they are writers,  they won’t be able to give you the feedback you need to help you develop as a writer.

If you are serious about your writing craft, then join a local writing group. Look for one that specialises in your genre. If you’re writing speculative fiction (fantasy, SF and horror) then Visions Writers is great. They have an on-line group for everyone and meet in person in Brisbane city, so that’s handy if you live in South East Queensland. Grace Dugan joined the Vision group when she was 15 and went on to be published by Penguin.

The Queensland Writers Centre run a Young Adult Master Class series, specifically aimed at high school students who want to develop their writing skills.

It is also great to have goals and submitting to a competition is a good way to get motivated to finish the story. Who knows you might win or get noticed by the judges who are often editors. So there is the Somerset College novella competition. On the Ipswich Literary Festival site there is a list of writing competitions for people under 18. There is also the Voices on the Coast Literary Festival, which has competitions, although theirs is closed for this year.

And there are markets in Australia for spec Fic short stories. ASIM is a regular magazine which has a good turn around time for submissions. Here’s the guidelines. And here is the Specusphere web zine. And here is Inspillers which lists current markets, competitions, magazines

Here’s an Australian Spec Fic site with lots of news  and reviews. If you want to know what’s doing well in Australia by Australian authors in this genre, take a look at the Aurealis Awards page.

And if you are interested in the craft of writing the ROR site run a writing craft post every Sunday, just put in requests. The latest one was on agents.

Lastly, if you are keen to write, talk to your school or local library about bringing a published author in to run workshops. The Redlands libraries have had me run three workshops in the last month, How to write a Book Proposal, Writing Dark Urban Fantasy and Pitching your Book.

Writers are a friendly supportive bunch. We are all united by a passion for writing and our love of the genre.  Feel free to ask questions.

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Filed under Nourish the Writer, Publishing Industry, The Writing Fraternity, Workshop/s, Writing craft

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June 1, 2010

Do creative people have more vivid dreams?

When I went to an acupuncturist, he asked me about my dreams. I told him I have lots of vivid fascinating dreams, complete with backstory, in full colour. I didn’t tell him they were sometimes stylized (if I’d been reading graphic novels) or, on rare occasions, set to music with rhyming dialogue. ( I know, weird).

He said it wasn’t normal for people to dream vividly every night. I’d thought my dreams were normal.

And perhaps they were for me.

According to David Watson, a professor of psychology in the UI College of Liberal Arts and Sciences,  “There is a fundamental continuity between how people experience the world during the day and at night,” he said. “People who are prone to daydreaming and fantasy have less of a barrier between states of sleep and wakefulness and seem to more easily pass between them.” In other words, creative people tend to have vivid dreams. See the full article here.

Now, it seems,  video game players might be able to control their dreams up to a point. Jayne Gackenbach, at Grant McEwan University has been doing research into dreams and gamers. She found that lucid dreamers and gamers tended to have better spacial skills. Both groups had a high level of concentration.  According to a 2006 study, people who frequently played video games were more likely to have lucid dreams and to be aware that they were dreaming.

“A second study tried to narrow down the uncertainties by examining dreams that participants experienced from the night before, and focused more on gamers. It found that lucid dreams were common, but that the gamers never had dream control over anything beyond their dream selves.

The gamers also frequently flipped between a first person view from within the body and a third person view of themselves from outside, except never with the calm detachment of a distant witness.” See the full article here.

I’ve been reading a book on current knowledge about plasticity of the human brain. It looks like game players have been rewiring their brains specfically for this ability. The more you do something the more this sinks into your brain and becomes second nature.  So keep reading, keep day dreaming and keep dreaming. It is all tied into creativity, even if we don’t understand how or why, just yet.

I’ve used scenes from dreams as leaping off points for stories. Do you experience vivid dreams? Ever had a dream where everyone is talking in rhyme?

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Filed under creativity, Fun Stuff, Nourish the Writer, Writing craft

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