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I keep trying to find ways to test Midjourney, and today a had an inspiration. Such that it was. I would take one of my poems written years ago and feed it into the bot and see what images it developed in response. I decide on one with a lot of imagery. What I provide below is a presentation of separate stanzas that I fed into Midjourney as a text prompt and then the 4-image cluster it generated to give the reader an idea of the breadth of Mindjourny’s interpretation. First, the poem.

Lights from a ship.

There is a place on this planet where all
must go alone, a scene where ocean meets
land, where civilization ceases and the
gathering of destruction never ends.

The air there fills with a wet fog
familiar to even Homer and the cry
of water fowl, like that of pterodactyls,
clashes and rolls with the concussion

of waves on shore. Sand sips a broth-like
sea, made of times quarry, that dips and
rushes among dunes, then marches through
inland marshes, dissolving and decaying.

Fresh gusts of wind bring soft salt drops
and the smell of life’s renewed debris, and
the sun rests permanently below the horizon,
providing just the absence of darkness, perhaps

for the staging of a Sophoclean play. I walk
into waves, smelling ruin and stare out to sea,
into darkness, searching for lights from
a ship that sails beyond these marsh lands,

a ship that sails to a shore where all is
forgiven and life does not decay giving
life, where life follows life, not by
consequence but by choice.

Next comes my interaction with Midjourney. At times I had to use just a few words from the next stanza to ensure the prompt made sense. I started with the title alone. (If you click on an image, you should get a larger version.)

Lights from a Ship

There is a place on this planet where all
must go alone, a scene where ocean meets
land, where civilization ceases and the
gathering of destruction never ends.

The air there fills with a wet fog
familiar to even Homer and the cry
of water fowl, like that of pterodactyls,
clashes and rolls with the concussion

of waves on shore. Sand sips a broth-like
sea, made of times quarry, that dips and
rushes among dunes, then marches through
inland marshes, dissolving and decaying.

Fresh gusts of wind bring soft salt drops
and the smell of life’s renewed debris, and
the sun rests permanently below the horizon,
providing just the absence of darkness, perhaps

for the staging of a Sophoclean play. I walk
into waves, smelling ruin and stare out to sea,
into darkness, searching for lights from
a ship that sails beyond these marsh lands,

a ship that sails to a shore where all is
forgiven and life does not decay giving
life, where life follows life, not by
consequence but by choice.

I then input the entire text of the poem into Midjourney as a single prompt. This is what it returned.

I’m not sure what to think of all this. I waited a few days before I published it online. Keep in mind that Midjourney is never literal. But does it give the poem life? Substance? Or does it detract from the reader generated images from the poem prompts? Perhaps it adds another dimension to the poem? Perhaps each reader will have a different reaction.

I’m 80% complete with my three-volume novel, Robot Dawn. A couple of months ago I ran onto an article online that piqued my curiosity about artificial intelligence software programs that generate images from text. Sounded like an interesting idea, and since a trial subscription was free, I took the plunge. The software is called Midjourney, and it’s a bot hosted by Discord.com. The article discussion was mostly about artists and whether using AI to generate the work was fair. Was it cheating? I was interested in how it might expand my visualization skills to inspire me to find the words to provide the reader with a better physical feel for scenes within my novel and some of it strange characters. Long story short, it blew my mind. Now I’m exploring how to integrate Midjourney with my writing. Here’s what I have learned so far.

First of all, since Midjourney provides images from words, and I had an alien creature that was ambiguous as to physical attributes but well-defined in function, I needed some way to better visualize this beast. Here are the words I used and Midjourney’s response:

“woodchipper that eats dead bodies as the grim reaper and excretes wood chips”

I was intrigued by all four responses. As you can tell, the character immediately came to life, and I had more than I had imagined to deal with. After a lot of consideration, I requested variations of the lower-left image. I got the following:

After a few more variations, I finally settled on an image to represent my character.

Not only did Midjourney turn vague images into specifics, it provoked more character function, life history, and suggested a lifestyle that I could exploit in the narration. It opened up so many possibilities that my writing stalled. I couldn’t put into words the imaginative implications of my character. It had a story of its own. I could write a novel about him, it, her. Did it have a mate? Yes! Obviously. What was their life like? I was overwhelmed.

I also had a scene set in Yosemite near the end of the novel that I was more attuned to and thought I might see what Midjourney could do with it. Here are my words:

“12 Ahawhnechee warrior ghosts war dance around a camp fire at night in Yosemite below Half Dome”

And here’s the result after several variations and upscaling:

Midjourney had given me more than I expected. Yet, it wasn’t perfect. The Native Americans weren’t actually ghosts. They were silhouettes, but close enough! Also Half Dome isn’t perfectly portrayed. But again, the image is so beautiful that I just couldn’t resist it. That is the one thing about Midjourney that makes it so impressive. The quality of its output is almost always beyond expectations.

It can also provide surprising connections within the story. As an example, I was writing a scene where my character went to see his brother only to learn upon arrival that his house had burned to the ground. When he arrived, the house was still burning, and it was apparent that his brother’s family had perished inside the flames. I put some words in Midjourney to see what the scene of the burning home would trigger. After some manipulation, this is what I ended up with:

“burned out home with five human bodies in the ashes”

I had difficulty understanding why Midjourney would show the people walking around and standing inside the flames of a burning home. Then I considered the broader context. In the story, the entire city was encountering aliens that were walking about. They were golem like creatures made of sand and other elements and solidified by microwaves into functional human-like form. These “people” walking about in the fire were not the brother’s family. They had already died. These were the golems come to see what was going on. Of course, Midjourney knew none of this. But this realization changed my perception of what was happening, added depth to the story, and helped tie the tragic event to other elements of the story. Midjourney had added immensely to my own imagination and allowed me to create a more consistent and interesting story. It all just worked better with Midjourney’s help.

After two months of this sort of activity, I have started wondering if I might be able to illustrate my novel using Midjourney. Would seem to work great in digital format where the images could be displayed as they came out of Midjourney. Not sure how it would work in print. Particularly in color. Cost a fortune. But the problem is that you never get exactly what you’re looking for, and striving for connections doesn’t always work. I have considered using imprecise images as illustrations and telling the reader in the caption that the image is from “Midjourney, non-literal”, i.e., not an exact representation of the scene. Still, Midjourney’s results can be so captivating that they can add another dimension to the storytelling. You sort of have your version of the novel, and Midjourney has its own interpretation of what’s happening. At least it can be interpreted that way when looking for resonances with the storyline. Which is a little like your readers. No reader ever reads the story you wrote, or what you thought you wrote. That’s one of the things that makes reader discussion groups so interesting. You get to hear other people’s interpretation of the novel. Here, using Midjourney, you get AI’s interpretation of what’s happening—or can be view that way for creativity’s sake. It’s always skewed but sort of interesting. At least to me.

But frequently Midjourney’s results are so far from what you want that the images aren’t usable. Also note that you don’t use the actual story text. You provide what you believe are the salient features to provoke Midjourney. Here’s an example of how it didn’t work for me.

“traditional Japanese home in Tomioka with a large treehouse in a ginkgo tree at night”

I did get a traditional Japanese home with a ginkgo, but not a treehouse. I didn’t expect it to be perfect, but this wasn’t even close, even though the images were interesting. I made another effort.

“traditional Japanese home in Tomioka, a large ginkgo tree with treehouse out back, at night”

Interesting, gorgeous images but too far from what I had written about in the text. I tried again.

“traditional Japanese home in Tomioka, a large ginkgo tree with a large treehouse out back, at night”

Another attempt:

“outside a traditional Japanese home in Tomioka among ginkgo trees at sunset”

After this, I gave up. I might come back to it later, but this particular setting might be better served with text and no illustration.

Another thing that happens with Midjourney is serendipity. A while back, I was experimenting, just dumping things into Midjourney and seeing what popped out. You can use images to seed the AI bot, and on a whim, I fed the full cover image of Story Alchemy into Midjourney without text. Here’s the cover:

And here’s what Midjourney returned:

How it came up with that black and white image of a girl’s face was beyond me. But I was intrigued. I did some variations of the one image:

I immediately selected the bottom right image and upscaled it to max. This was the result:

At first I couldn’t understand why I was so intrigued by this one image. And then I realized. I had been struggling for seven years to get a good perception of my protagonist in Robot Dawn. She is a 12 year old girl prodigy from the future, 2070. Looks a little older than her age. Into hacking and some other stuff she shouldn’t be doing. She has a Greek heritage. I could never get a handle on her hair. I finally realized that this image produced by Midjourney was my protagonist, Daisy Daniels. The image is a little goth which fits the character perfectly. Couldn’t have imagined a better fit. Pure serendipity.

The image isn’t flawless. Although you might not be able to tell in the above image, in larger versions her right eyebrow seems to become separated from her head and float off a little. Plus, Daisy has a few freckles across the bridge of her nose, which aren’t shown here. She’s self conscious about them. I could have my son, the illustrator, add them sometime in the future. How the image of Daisy could be so perfect is a mystery to me.

So, here I am only a couple of months into using Midjourney to enhance my writing and still working on my relationship with it. I find it too easy to get stalled out working with it because it is so easy. Plus, you get to sit back and watch it work. Constant surprises. After working with it a while, I find it difficult to drag myself away from Midjourney and get back to putting words on the page. I anticipate that when I get used to working with Midjourney and get it fully integrated into my method, it will be a tremendous asset. Right now, it’s both distracting and disruptive to my writing process. And I’m wondering what to do with the images. Surely, I can’t just abandon them after I complete the novel.

What does all this mean? I believe this is a watershed moment in storytelling. An author working with a visualization tool like Midjourney could take the entire endeavor to a new level. I was a long ways into Robot Dawn before I started using AI. What if I had used Midjourney as a creative tool from the very beginning? Words and images. This could be the beginning of storytelling as a collaboration between the author and an AI bot that enables the author to produce irresistible stories using both the power of the written word and the fascination of supremely correlated—if a little skewed—images. I am intrigued by the idea that the illustrations not being a literal interpretation of the story can add another dimension to pull in the reader. Plus, the images are so easy to create that the narration can be littered with them. How many to use? That would be another choice left up to the author.

My trial subscription to Midjourney soon ran out, and I upgraded to a paid account with full privacy. Costs $50/month. I don’t foresee dumping it anytime in the near future. I have been seduced, and it looks like a long romance. I hope to provide updates to this continuing story of my conflict, tribulations, and amazing collaboration with Midjourney. Stay tuned.

The more I use the techniques developed in Story Alchemy for generating story, the more I understand how shallow our insight is into our own creativity. We should realize that the Unconscious contains a vast storehouse of knowledge concerning the subject matter because it comes from a separate reality. Once you realize that the material comes from within a place of total existence, your vision of the scope of your story changes.

I keep going back, as I did in Story Alchemy from time to time, to the old movie Forbidden Planet. Cyril Hume wrote the screenplay, probably with the help of the original story creator Adam Adler. What got me about the movie the first time I saw it back in 1956 was how the story kept providing revelations about the ancient Krell and the implications of the extinct civilization’s vast knowledge. Just when you thought you had learned everything important about the Krell, revelations would go to a new level. We as viewers kept getting more and more information about their civilization and how it applied to the story as it progressed and eventually led to the resolution of the conflict. It was that sense of discovery that ran in parallel with the progression of the central conflict (plot) that provided that inevitable sense of forward motion to hold our attention.

I had an experience last night that illustrates that illustrates what I’m getting at. I was in bed and had just finished reading a few pages of The Lord of the Rings on my iPhone. I put my it down on my Bluetooth keyboard within its leather cover, turned off the light and thought I was going to sleep. But then I heard a thump. I turned on the light and saw that my iPhone had slipped off the cover onto my nightstand. Curiously, it seemed to be calling me. Yes, I realize that seems silly, but still, it’s what came to mind. I have learned to take little coincidences as an omen of writing possibilities. I grabbed my iPhone, opened it to the Pages app, set it aside and started typing.

When I started writing this blog post, I thought I would provide the raw text of the creative session for Robot Dawn, my novel in progress, which went on for about three hours during which time I wrote 1,800 words. But after reading through it, I have decided that it would give away too much of the story. So, you’ll have to wait until it’s published. Sorry, but that’s just the way it goes. You’ll have to trust me when I say that this morning when I inserted it into the novel and started editing it, I was surprise and how much I had accomplished and how usable it all was. Yet, I had no inkling that I was ready for a major creative session before the iPhone slipped off the keyboard cover onto the nightstand with a clunk.

Not every story needs the depth I’m achieving with my hypnagogia sessions. But frequently the implications of events within the story provide a sense of meaning that holds the story together and makes for a more satisfying reading experience. The deeper I get into Robot Dawn, the more I realize how meaningful the story is, and the more it seems imperative that I flesh it out to provide the reader with something special and worthy of the time spent.

Last night I read a little of Lord of the Rings before I went to sleep. I don’t always sleep so soundly during the first couple of hours, and that was true then. Even though I was asleep, I heard voices off at the edge of my mind. I understood them, I thought, and was perfectly content to allow them to stream past. But then I came more fully awake and realized that I didn’t understand what was being said at all. It was a steady stream of amorphous sounds that somehow made sense at the edge of consciousness but when fully awake just seemed like a stream of uncharacterized dialogue.

After a couple of hours of this, I woke fully and decided to write. I frequently work on my novel in progress, Robot Dawn, during the night, and I found this session unusually productive. I wrote nonstop for a couple of hours, focusing on the internal dialogue of my protagonist as she mulled over thoughts of her home town that had just been bombed and her relationship with the captain of the spaceship she was on traveling to Mars. All very intimate and personally revealing.

Somehow, this event seems a really in that it reveals a characteristic of consciousness and its relationship to the unconscious. I’m reminded of the ancient Greek view of the duality of life as characterized by the two words bios and zoë. Bios was viewed as a characterized life here on earth with all its nuances, including both a birth and a death. Zoë on the other hand was an uncharacterized eternal life of the spiritual realm. Bioses appeared as pearls strung along the thread of zoë like beads on a neclace. The dialogue I heard in my stream of unconscious at the very edge of sleep seemed like a discussion between several manifestations of zoë. I can’t say that I heard or recognized individual words. It was just that the stream of dialogue made sense, but when I tried to interpret it in terms of a characterized conversation, it disappeared entirely. It was as if enough consciousness wasn’t there to interpret the unconscious’s efforts to supply creative material. Usually, we just see consciousness’s side of the creative act, and I was then viewing only unconsciousness’s side.

Strange experience. Really exciting to someone researching the deep recesses of our creative instinct.

Rarely are we quick-minded enough to catch the exact moment and circumstance that produces a new idea. But one of my moments of discovery stands out and has been bugging me for years. It’s time I expose to my reading public how the epiphany occurred and the circumstances surround it.

The origin for the plot pentagon presented in Chapter 3 The Plot Pentagon of Story Alchemy started way back while I was writing Novelsmithing. In particular, Chapter 2 Plot, Page 24, Figure 2 of Novelsmithing presents the order and sequencing of plot points that define the nature of the central conflict that is the essence of story.

It’s laid out as a two-dimensional diagram, the horizontal axis being time, but the vertical axis is left unexplained. The vertical axis is not even shown. I didn’t know what it represented. The plot rose and fell for no good reason until the conflict was resolved at the end. Even when I presented this graph to university students, they didn’t object or find anything to criticize about it. As a matter of fact, in Chapter 8, Figure 10 where I provide a spacing of chapters relative to plot points, one author called it pure genius. She finally finished a novel she had been working on for years but couldn’t get it to jell properly. I thought the figure was problematic, but I accept praise where ever and whenever I get it.

Still, the plot as depicted stood, problematic as it was, and I let my contrariness about it slide.

Then one evening while reading in bed, I had an epiphany. I was reading a book by Joseph Mazur, a professor of mathematics at Marlboro College, titled The Motion Paradox: The 2,500-Year-Old Puzzle Behind All the Mysteries of Space and Time. I was still at the beginning of the book but well into Chapter 2: Zeno’s Visit to Athens, and Mazur had just finished talking about the pentagon and its shrinking and growing replicas and had started on the Pythagoreans fascination with numerical patterns. Here is the complete paragraph that had its impact on me:

Numerical patterns also suggested to Pythagoreans that numbers were the clues to understanding the nature of the physical world. They saw numbers in music when they discovered that a plucked string produces the same note (one octave higher) as a string twice its length, and extended music theory to a harmony of the soul. They saw numbers in nature, observing the fine structures of flowers. They saw numbers in the construction of their temples, where form followed what they considered to be the spiritual beauty of divine number relationships. They saw numbers in sculpture and art as their artists sought to represent the general makeup of shared attributes, rather than the soul of an individual. They saw numbers in their plays, built on structured themes of crimes and curses. All this logic, structure, and clarity, all this love of symmetry, form, and perfection was applied to reasoning and a belief that the universe is ordered and explainable. [page 17]

Of course, the part about seeing “numbers in their plays” coupled with the previous discussion of the pentagon was what triggered my epiphany. I grabbed a copy of Novelsmithing and turned to my tiresome plot diagram. And there was the answer to my long-suffering plotting problem, and it came in the form of the pentagon. I realized that I had five plot points, and if I shrunk the axis representing time, and left the lines between plot points straight but allowed them to pivot at the plot points, it would form a pentagon. But what then had happened to time? The answer was obvious. Time was imbedded in the flow of events around the pentagon.

From this plot pentagonal shape, ideas about what it all meant started flowing from my imagination nonstop. I realized that I had to add the circular arrow to indicate the flow of time and that the premise had to be in the center. I also realized that the diagram existed in the mythic world, that that was where conflict of the story variety existed. It all made so much sense.

But it was only the beginning of the revelations. I connected subplots with adjacent pentagons, and the dodecahedron practically formed itself. Once the all-inclosing circle and all-encompassing sphere appeared the Philosopher’s Stone of storytelling was born. It was as if it just fell into my lap.

So this is the story of how the plot pentagon came to be, and I could leave this story of discovery there, and we could all remark about how conveniently coincidental those events happened, but that would trivialize the event. How to put it into perspective?

The first way would be to recognize that the discovery was just that, a discovery and not an act of creativity. I didn’t invent anything. All I did was realize a remarkable correspondence between geometry and the nature of storytelling that already existed, just as had the ancient Greeks with their revelations concerning correlations between numbers and the natural world.

The other thing to realize is that this plot pentagon discovery led to a waterfall of related discoveries concerning storytelling, each coming on the heels of the previous, in such a non-stop fashion that it’s difficult to understand how it all came together. And that is something important to understand — how it all came together.

Obviously, the discovery of the plot pentagon was just the tip of the iceberg, so to speak, concerning the nature of storytelling. The fact that it fit so well within the Buddhist and Hindu traditions, or that they shed light on it, was another indication that it exists out there somewhere independent of the person who discovered it. The plot pentagon and the Philosopher’s Stone for storytelling no more belong to me than relativity belongs to Einstein or DNA belongs to Crick, Watson and Rosalind Franklin.

The fact that it is a part of such a wide variety of related disciplines indicates that in all probably it is related to other fields of study. Indeed, I have been thinking of this from time to time and have come to realize that the Philosopher’s Stone of storytelling can tell us a great deal about politics, the justice system, international relations and many other conflict driven relationships. We just have to recognize that conflict is built off of narratives. Practically everything social has its narrative, and conflicting narratives have a nature that can be studied, understood and resolved by use of this particular Philosopher’s Stone. It can teach us not only about the nature of narrative conflict, but also how to resolve those conflicts and live peacefully together. All we need is the will to use it.

Well, here I am finally getting back into the swing of this writing thing after having a mini stroke — it was no fun and you can trust me on that — and I’ve been thinking about my technique of typing with my eyes closed and close to sleep using my wireless keyboard and new iPhone Xs Max. Yes, you can’t take your iPhone into a psychic state with you to take a video of the proceedings, but you can type what you see with the mind’s eye, as they say, so I’ve been thinking what a fabulous technique this is and wanting to clue everyone in to it, again. Of course, I cover this subject in more detail in Story Alchemy, Chapter 8.

I also just recently ran onto Jennifer Dumpert’s technique she calls liminal dreaming (Click here for her website.) to investigate other states of consciousness while close to sleep. I’m very excited about her new book that will be coming out toward the end of May. It’s titled Liminal Dreaming: Exploring Consciousness at the Edges of Sleep. Can’t wait.

So anyway, I’m getting back into what Carl Jung calls active imagination where you can visit and create other realities. Of course I use it for writing fiction. So here I am rebooting writing, and I realize anew how marvelous it is to imagine your story unfolding while in this liminal state within what I call the Imaginarium. I enter it through the Iris of Time, which is another psychic location that I created while writing Story Alchemy.

The other thing is that the little introduction I always write for myself as I enter hypnagogia, obeying the Code of Conduct, I call it, is also extremely important because it is a set pattern of images that conditions you for the discipline of typing while creating, and you need to do it every time you enter the Iris. Here is an example of what I type out as enforced by the Code of Conduct each time I enter:

I see the lady in white standing on the balcony. She puts something in a drawer, smiles at me, walks into the house through a sliding glass door. I open the drawer and see a key, which I pickup and enter the house also. I walk through a living room, through an archway and into another small, dark room with a large mechanism on the far wall that looks something like a bank vault. Before it stands a woman, the Keeper of the Gate. I hand the key to her, she inserts it into a mechanism and the center of the mechanism takes on a new form. A long slender dragon bathed in fire has wrapped itself about the circular mechanism and the center of it opens up, a small hole at first, that expands like an overgrown camera shutter. This of course is the Iris of Time. I position the dragon, Ouroboros, to where its head is approximately at the location where I am working on my story on the pentagon plot diagram. Then I walk through the opening into the Philosopher’s Stone, the Imaginarium. There I see Mnemosyne and her daughters, the nine muses. They all come to me and circle me then all close on me in a group hug. I feel loved and that my writing project is not only worthwhile but also of great interest to them. They then step back and disolve into the fabric of the universe and in their place stands Nyloh, who smiles and takes my hands in hers. “Be brave,” she says, “for there are hard times ahead.” Behind her stands her father, LrGon, looking unapologetic and eager to get started.

Typing out this activity that I am visualizing as I do so is the conduit through which my word engine flows. It starts the motor and sets the wheels in motion. Plus, of course, it also conditions the imagination to take you into the collective unconscious where you can find the story you are trying to tell. The imagination is that go-between that brings creative stuff from the collective unconscious into consciousness.

An additional benefit of this preliminary activity is that you learn how to manipulate hypnagogia, and if you have insomnia, can then teach yourself how to get through hypnagogia quickly by avoiding its many distractions that could be causing your insomnia problem. To learn more about this, read my book In Pursuit of Sleep: The Origins of Insomnia and What to Do About it.

Let me know what you think on twitter: @SheppardDavid.

For the last two months I’ve been struggling with my work in progress, Robot Dawn. For a while, I just thought that my story had become so complex that I no longer had the intellectual capacity to deal with it. Of course, complexity issues generally mean that the author just can’t see the structure for the remainder of the story. In other words, plotting is the problem. Plotting is the story structure that provides clarity and a path through the wilderness. It turns chaos into meaningful structure. While the initial plotting provides the guidance necessary to see my way through the maze, it has to be reworked from time to time to take into account all those inspired events that have provided excitement but also may have caused the story to drift off the original intended path. This inspiration isn’t a mistake, but it does frequently provide deeper insight into the story that could not be seen in the beginning, and this may require some reworking. Also, subplots can’t always be well defined or plotted at the beginning, and they can need some additional plotting and reevaluation concerning the sequencing relative to the main storyline.

It’s time for a new plotting session.

This problem seems to arise in all my long works. I get two-thirds of the way through the story, and the wheels come off. Desperation and much gnashing of teeth follow. I’m always afraid I’ve lost all my skill as a writer. But this disillusionment is part and parcel of the author’s craft. The author seems to jump at the chance to become discouraged. I discuss this disillusionment in detail in Story Alchemy, Chapter 9, pages 127-130.

Last night while in one of my hypnogogic states (see In Pursuit of Sleep), I realized that I need to suspend writing Robot Dawn and concentrate on plotting for a significant period of time. This means relooking at the prima materia and plot diagram for the central conflict and each subconflict for the entire work.

Could be a while before I get back to writing the actual words.

William Perry, the US Secretary of Defense during the Clinton administration, had an unusual experience years before while working on his PhD. Here’s how Politico and he described the event in a recent article:

Perry had been brooding over the question for a year. It was in the early 1950s, he was still in his 20s, and the subject was partial differential equations—the topic of his Ph.D. thesis. A particular problem had been absorbing him, day in and day out, hours and hours on end. Then, out of nowhere, a light came on.

“I woke up in the middle of the night, and it was all there,” Perry recalled. “It was all there, and I got out of bed and sat down. The next two or three hours, I wrote my thesis, and from the first word I wrote down, I never doubted what the last word was going to be: It was a magic moment.”

There again is that moment of creativity, one might even say discovery, coming from deep within. You might call it an alchemical moment. Perry describes how the unconscious mind can be working a problem we give it even while our waking mind is no longer overseeing the activity. I would argue that a faith in the process is helpful and even the ability to look for the solved problem within our own mental processes.

Lately, I have been reading Neil Gaiman’s A View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction. My son bought it for me a while back, and I finally started reading it last week. A few nights ago, I ran onto this statement in reference to how Mr. Gaiman says he wrote American Gods:

It began in May 1997, with an idea that I couldn’t get out of my head. I’d find myself thinking about it at night in bed before I’d go to sleep, as if I were watching a movie clip in my head. Each night I’d see another couple of minutes of the story. [page 68]

There you have it and from one of the best authors in the business. Notice that Neil visualized his story as “a movie clip.” This really emphasizes how important it is for an author to actually “see” the story. The mind’s most basic element is images, and if an author focuses on images, she/he not only is in touch with the creative element of the mind but also will have much better recall of what happened when the time comes to put it on paper.

Quite possibly the most creative period of the day, many times, comes just before sleep, particularly if you have been doing something creative before crawling between the sheets. This is where Story Alchemy comes from. During the decades I have been writing, I slowly came to the conclusion that my post productive times were (1) at night before sleep, (2) during the night when I would wake after a dream, and (3) after waking in the morning and before getting out of bed. I also found that writing first thing in the morning, before breakfast even, helped to reboot my brain into the imaginative world and put me on the creative tract.

I remember when I first started writing seriously that I would set aside a day for writing, but that I would first do my chores so that I wouldn’t worry over them, and then I would go to the library, so I wouldn’t have any distractions. Bad decision. Seems my muse didn’t like libraries and didn’t like the middle of the morning either.

Story Alchemy capitalizes on this experience and even provides insight into the prelude of the writing event, as well as afterward, all of which suggests a ritual to ensure a successful writing session.