Redreaming My Family History
For an hour and a half one Sunday morning in February, several friends sat on the corduroy sectional in my family room and discussed death with me. In the days that followed, spurred by an undigested teenage memory, I started to write a personal narrative that explores mortality, grief, and the unlived life, excavating early experiences that influenced my relationship to death, including events and ideas from my Latter-day Saint upbringing.
A friend who read the draft suggested I submit it, along with a brief proposal, to a literary magazine. After doing so I prepared to perform at a storytelling showcase and since then, carried by the momentum of that performance, I’ve been posting pieces here in my logbook. Recently, however, I’ve been swept up in a story about my ancestor Edwin D. Woolley. Given its large scope and narrative structure, I’m applying a technique I learned from fiction writer Robert Olen Butler and screenwriter Dustin Lance Black. Butler calls it dreamstorming.
Dreamstorming blends the best of writing with and without an outline. With no outline a writer may surprise herself as she makes intuitive choices that arise from her subconscious. But because it’s haphazard, these choices don’t always conform to a coherent internal logic and, as a result, she can paralyze herself while quilting the story together from multiple rough drafts, as the volume of words and number of inconsistencies overwhelm her.
Whereas with an outline, the writer has a clear sense of direction and is more able to draft sections out of order, knowing that key decisions have been made ahead of time. Yet this can distance the writer from his white hot center, the place where we dream, the source of art: the unconscious. Dreamstorming supplies structure without blocking intuition. As of today, index cards—each representing a scene—are lined up on my kitchen table in rows and columns. In a few days when I finish arranging the scenes and anchoring them in sensory details, I’ll begin writing the story from beginning to end, the way an audience will read it.
Currently I envision the story as narrative nonfiction, braiding the timeline of my ancestor with my past, from when I return home from my Mormon mission to when, eight years later, I separate from the church in the wake of a faith crisis. I’m retelling both mine and my ancestor’s history, including the moment we intersect when I, a returned missionary, first read about him and his dramatic life. I’m looking back on his life and my own through the perspective I have now, foregrounding elements that weren’t salient then. The task is teaching me a lot about the craft of creative writing.
I’m learning about narration, for instance. I’m planning to tell Edwin’s storyline constrained to his point of view (third person limited) but with access to his intimate thoughts and feelings (close distance). I’m giving myself license to intuit what he thought and felt and how he acted in everyday moments for which there’s no historical record. This draws on my (rudimentary) theater training, where I learned to make choices—conscious and unconscious—amid imaginary circumstances, with an aim for truthfulness. Edwin, I’ve realized, is a character whose image inhabits my psyche.
That said, the narration ought to be nearly unnoticeable to readers. I’m framing the story by what I choose to include or exclude and controlling pace by deciding what deserves weight versus what is summarized or skipped. But my voice should blend into the texture of the world as readers immerse themselves in its sights and sounds and experience it firsthand. For that reason I’ve been researching the mid-19th century American frontier to better portray the time and place vividly.
In September 2023, before moving to Oregon, I started to write again after a long hiatus, and I remember saying to myself then that a “cinematic” way of writing was wanting to come through. I didn’t dwell on that or follow that thread linearly. Nevertheless, I enrolled in acting classes a year later, and I’ve been studying the cinema of the mind, the way popular film editing techniques mimic perception. Robert Olen Butler references film techniques in his craft book and (of course) Dustin Lance Black is a screenwriter.
The story is alive and as I listen to its pulse, I wonder how much of the pull toward it is a shamanic impulse, a different angle on “soul retrieval,” to evolve my lineage by re-mythologizing our origin story.