Ficstructor
Read this quotation (note that Dexter references himself as “the critic”): “… The critic doesn’t trust references to popular culture even if he can’t say why, and as a rule when he — the critic … — reads a novel he skips the parts about dreams.”* Good point and good advice. Tack to that: don’t write dreams in your story. I know it’s tempting and you already got three, four—shit all of your stories have dreams in them. Think about it. A story, when well-wrought, is ideally a dream-like narrative for your reader. When you put in another level of dreaming (which is usually incoherent rubbish meant to foretell some innocuous plot point somewhere later in the narrative … usually in some mystical, watery way with symbolic imagery and crap) you’re turning your story into a really really shitty version of Inception. A dream within a dream. Ooohhhh. Spooky. Real dreams make no goddamned sense and they sure as shit tell you nothing about your coming future. Where are my crystals? Now go read “Deadwood.” And after that go read “The Woman Lit by Fireflies,” which is a very weeny title for a very un-weeny Harrison collection of shnovels. shnovel – (n.) a term for a short novel, used in place of “novella” because “novella” is a very precious term only to be used if you don’t want your shnovel published or sold, and if you want people to correctly assume that your book is filled with long contemplative moments where a character ruminates while staring at one of the following: flower gardens, babbling streams, wind-swept prairies, distant mountains, or navel fuzz**
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