Writing Wednesdays

My Resistance Dream Diary

By Steven Pressfield | Published: April 13, 2016

I’m gonna take a break this week from our series on Theme (we’ll be back) to address an issue that’s happening with me right now.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Dream #2 was just like one of his books.

Dreams.

I’m just starting a new fiction project that’s overwhelming me with Resistance, and my dreams have been really interesting. I’d like to share a few of them—and the whole interactive process between waking, working life and nocturnal who-knows-what—over the next couple of weeks.

Maybe this will ring a bell with your own psychic adventures.

Here’s the backstory:

About two months ago I had an idea for a story. Immediately I was swamped with Resistance.

Was the idea any good? Could I pull it off? Did I want to? Would anybody be interested? Was it a movie or a book? How would I tell the story?

Maybe I should just forget it. The idea is not very “me.” I’ve never done anything like it before. I don’t know how to attack it, I don’t know how to position it, I don’t know how to promote it …

I decided to shelve it.

Then I had this dream.

I was playing golf with my old friend Phil. We were on the first tee of some course I had never played before. Two other guys were paired with us. The course was crowded. A bunch of foursomes were lining up behind us, ready for their turn.

I reached for my golf bag. Only it wasn’t my golf bag. It was some terrible, ratty bag about eighty years old. The clubs were antiques—scruffy, beat-up old sticks with wooden shafts warped with age and cracking with mildew. Then I zipped open the pocket that held the golf balls. OMG, all I had was the scroungiest collection of dimple-free, waterlogged, dead-ass balls that looked like they wouldn’t fly ten yards. Arrrgggh!

Meanwhile Phll was teeing off; our other two guys were getting ready. Somebody said to me, “There’s a decent ball out there.” He was pointing about two hundred yards away, down a side patch of grass. I took off on a run, picked up the ball and raced back to the tee. By now the other two guys had hit their drives; Phil was 150 yards away, striding down the fairway. The next foursome was already teeing their balls. I was out of breath, sweating, totally discombobulated.

WTF, there’s no point in even swinging. I picked up my ball and ratty old bag and gave up.

 

Now I may not be the greatest interpreter of dreams, but this one’s message seemed pretty unmistakable.

The first tee is the start of a project.

It’s an unknown golf course, i.e. totally new.

I’m unprepared. I’m rushing. I’m freaking out. I’m letting intangibles completely throw me off my stride.

I’m quitting before I begin.

In other words, the dream was simply depicting my state of mind in regard to this new project. I could see it now, and I didn’t like what I saw.

I changed my mind. I decided I would do the project.

I started the next day.

I got in about two hours (pretty much my max for the inception of a long-term work).

The day went pretty well. I was just trying to get my thoughts down on paper—what the story was about, who the characters were, Act One, Act Two, Act Three, how would it end. Just a toehold.

That night I had this dream.

I was in a foreign country, in a rental car, heading somewhere on a freeway that was not too crowded. I found myself behind a couple of cars driving ridiculously slowly. I began cursing them. What’s wrong with these foreign drivers? Then the cars turned off. I kept going.

The freeway got worse and worse in terms of road condition. Suddenly the pavement ended entirely. I was driving over a bed of gravel and rocks. Then the road became a dirt track. Suddenly the surface dropped down a slope and an actual stream cut across. I was cursing out loud, “This is like a freakin’ Third World country.” I decided to keep going. What else could I do? I drove deliberately down over the road edge toward the stream, aiming for a sort of natural causeway so I could drive over. The causeway ran out and suddenly I was in the water …

[Side note: water is a recurring image in dreams for me. It always means creativity, the flow of ideas. The greater the volume of water in a dream and the faster that water is flowing, the more creative power is moving through me.]

Somehow my rental car vanished and I was floating in the air, still going forward along the channel of the now-long-gone freeway.The channel still existed but it had become a river.

I found I could move forward if I “swam” through the air. I was maybe fifteen, twenty feet above the surface of the river, which was crystal-clear and about 100 feet wide, passing through shaded, canopied jungle. Not dense, there was plenty of soft sunlight. It was gorgeous, like Gabriel Marquez’ magical realism. It even felt South American.

I was propelling myself forward by drifting to the bluffs at the side of the river (kind of like retaining walls beside a freeway) and pushing off with my hands. Suddenly the river turned left. A breeze hit me, pushing me back. I was struggling against the wind. But when I got around the corner slightly, the wind changed and was now at my back. I looked ahead to the right and I could see the ocean. The sky was bright through the jungled canopy. I could see part of a beach, like a fishing village in South or Central America.

Suddenly ahead, between the river and the ocean, I saw a spectacular domed cathedral rising in the sunlight beyond the jungle. Spanish-looking. Absolutely gorgeous. I thought, Wow, what the hell have I stumbled onto here? Then I looked downriver. About a mile ahead, out in the clear on the right-hand bank, I saw a city. A beautiful city with South American style architecture.

I was close alongshore now, still flying. I passed slowly, just above a couple of local fishermen mending their nets. One told me, “It’s better to go all the way down to the city traveling along the river, rather than cutting inland, and land at the city so that you’re coming in off the river. More impressive. Good karma.”

I liked that. I decided that was just what I would do.

 

What could this dream mean? I take the universe depicted to refer to the work now, the new project I’ve just started. I’m in some “new world,” like the kind discovered by Cortez or Balboa, of which I’ve been very dubious and in fact didn’t even know or believe that it existed. Could I survive there? Yes! There’s plenty of water (creativity),  a whole brilliant new species of architecture, and a spectacular new city to explore. And the water is pellucid-clear, straight out of Eden.

In other words the dream is saying that this new work will be, at least for me (if not necessarily for anyone else), a totally-novel, consciousness-expanding adventure and experience.

This dream is one of the greatest I’ve ever had. It’s almost a Big Dream in the Jungian sense of once-in-a-decade, life-changing, epochal communiqués from the Unconscious.

I put aside all doubts about the new project.

I decided to go for it.

I was all in.

I’ll continue this exploration next week with the succeeding couple of dreams (and maybe the week after) to track the progress of this crazy thing. But the bottom line for me is the amazing dynamic architecture of the psyche.

It’s a battle.

A war.

On one shoulder we’ve got Resistance, diabolical as hell and absolutely out to destroy us, mind and soul.

On the other shoulder we have our brilliant sage/Merlin/Harry Potter/whatever, our benevolent Unconscious, sending us a Netflix movie tailored specifically for us and exotically beautiful, insightful, loaded with significance and meaning and wisdom.

And we’re there in the middle.

This is the artist’s inner world.

This is the artist’s life.

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Writing Wednesdays

How to Make Your Novel Universal

By Steven Pressfield | Published: April 6, 2016

My answer will not surprise you.

Dana Wynter and Kevin McCarthy in “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”

Theme.

Theme is what makes the specific universal.

Remember the first post in this series? I was relating a conversation with a friend who’s a literary agent in Hollywood. She represents screenwriters. She told me that she had read 500 screenplays in one year and couldn’t find a single one she wanted to represent. Why? “Because so many of them were not about anything.”

What she meant, in crassly commercial terms, was this:

I can’t sell a script unless the reader (studio, director, production company, actor) can either identify with it or imagine that the audience can identify with it. The story has to be universal. We have to root for its hero. We have to care. The story has to resonate across a wide, or at least a significant, bandwidth of readers or moviegoers.

What makes us, as readers or moviegoers, root for a hero? What makes us get involved in a story? What makes us care?

One factor is theme. Why? Because theme makes the specific universal. Theme can take a slasher film or a cheesy detective story and make it pop. It can take a narrow, superspecific premise and make it irresistible to millions.

Consider Invasion of the Body Snatchers, from the 1955 novel by Jack Finney (who also wrote Assault on a Queen and Time and Again). If there ever was a low-budget “B” horror flick that seemed on the surface to be exactly like every other, this is it. But Body Snatchers became a cult phenomenon, spawning two remakes and endless movie-buff articles and tributes. To this day, it packs revival houses and produces late night fits of the munchies every time it appears on cable.

Yes, the actors (Kevin McCarthy and Dana Wynter among others) were terrific. Yeah, Don Siegel’s directing was spooky and paranoia-saturated, cinematography suitably creepy, the script crisp and crackling.

But the theme (and the levels of theme) was what made Invasion of the Body Snatchers universal. Remember the story? Evil spores from space land in Northern California. They grow, evolving into plant-like pods that become weird featureless doppelgangers of individual humans. When a human falls asleep, its pod takes over its body. Each new “recruit” joins the others in propagating the pods (and the pod people) worldwide.

What is the theme? What’s the movie about?

The theme is “If you sleep, you die.”

The movie is about coerced manipulation of consciousness. The Specific is alien entities taking over and inhabiting human beings by stealth, rendering these humans soulless, vacant—and creepily content. The Universal is we are all being brainwashed and we don’t know it.

The book came out in ’55, the movie in ’56—i.e. the Eisenhower Era.

The Age of Conformity.

Body Snatchers may have looked like a run-of-the-mill sci-fi freakout flick. But it was anything but. It was different from the others because its theme hit the sweet spot of unconscious paranoia in the era of Ozzie and Harriet and Ward and June Cleaver.

“OMG!”, viewers thought when they caught this feature at the drive-in, side by side with every other generic Chevy and Ford. “That’s my life! I feel like the pods are taking me over too!”

In ’93 The X-Files accomplished the same trick, using a slightly different theme of paranoia and conspiracy, and in ’99 The Matrix took the same theme and raised the ante one more time.

The key to these stories’ success was the universality of their themes.

Everyone could relate, even if they couldn’t articulate why.

Peter Finch in Paddy Chayefsky’s NETWORK. “I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna take it anymore!”

Paddy Chayefsky’s Network came out in 1976. (How about a shout-out, by the way, for the man who gave us not just three Oscar-winning scripts, but Chayefsky’s Rule of Theme?) Its narrative was of a TV conglomerate cynically and shamelessly pursuing ratings by turning its once-prestigious news division into a pandering-to-the-lowest-common-denominator laughingstock.

Its theme was selling your soul on every level.

In other words, a universal theme.

It’s an enlightening exercise to pick at random a handful of books or movies that have become runaway hits and ask yourself, “What’s the theme of each? No matter how insular or specific the subject matter, is the theme universal?”

Trust me, it will be.

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