Do Your Dreams Ever Have A Plot?

The other night I had a dream that involved two weensie kittens, the smaller of which I saved from certain death through my incredible milk-doling-out-dream-skills.

Dream me didn't have her nails did, though.


I'm not going to bother to try to tell you more about it, because it's a universally-accepted fact that there is nothing on earth more boring than someone else's dreams.

Except maybe young children's baseball games. Those are DEADLY.

That's gonna be another strike.

But sometimes--super rarely, but occasionally--my dreams unfold like an especially awesome children's story (I'm far too immature for them to unfold like an adult story, all layers of meaning and expansive description of setting and lyrical, but often aimless, prose--in fact, this is making me start to think the not-well-plotted dreams are just the literary fiction of my sleeping self...WHOA...).

Leaps of Faith

So here's a question for you creative-types: do you trust your talent?

Do you even trust that you HAVE talent?

I feel like there's a conundrum at the heart of any creative endeavor: on the one hand, we're profoundly fragile people, sculpted out of spun sugar and butterfly wings, ready to fall apart at the first breath of whispered criticism.

A portrait of the artist.

On the other hand, we're arrogant enough to try to create something in the first place, assuming people will want it, even (maybe) want to pay us for the privilege of it.

Sure, there are folks who walk around telling you what an amazing talent they have, and how they just refuse to waste it on less-worthy forms, and how everyone is dying to work with them, and how they would never get out of bed for less than $Large#.

But I'm not those people. I don't even like to be AROUND those people.

The First IMPORTANT Book You Read

I remember dozens of books from my childhood.

I can picture myself breezing through any of the interchangeable dozens of American Girls books my mom had been forced to buy us on the dark, carpeted hallway that led to my father's tiny den. Or see me and my sisters snuggling up against my mother as she read us Laura Ingalls Wilder's novels, or cried through Where the Red Fern Grows. I remember gloating about the 437-page length of Amy's Eyes (though I now have no recollection whatsoever of what the book was about), a book I was directed towards after I exhausted my elementary school library's stock of John Bellairs stories, starting with The House with a Clock in its Walls.

But everyone has a FIRST most-important-book. A book that changed things for you, made you a reader, somehow inflected the literary life you've had since.