Book Of Authors

Perhaps due to the nature of my job, I'll always have some fantastical dreams almost every night. Most of the time, my memory will be hazy when I wake up, but sometimes, a dream will leave me with an incredibly deep impression, like the dream I had last night.

In that dream, I thought of an amazing topic that made me incredibly excited to the point where words wouldn't do my emotions justice. In my dream, I contacted an author and we wrote a tremendously popular book, while making copyright deals for other versions such as a movie and a television series…

Yet, when I woke up, my brain became much clearer and started suspecting my own idea's viability despite the fact that my excited emotions hadn't calmed down yet. Upon thinking it over carefully, this so-called wonderful topic of mine was just an incredibly normal story about the love between a Cinderella type girl and a CEO, wasn't it?

After getting out of bed, I couldn't help but recall a dream I had before this one which gave me an even deeper impression.

In this dream, I was locked away in a dark, cold, and damp dungeon. Numerous classmates of mine were locked together with me in this dungeon. There was no food or water available, so staying here meant certain death. On the other hand, vicious and powerful monsters were patrolling outside the dungeon, and we would have to defeat them in order to escape.

Since we were only ordinary students, this was something that would lead to an almost certain death. No matter if it was staying behind in the scary dungeon, or heading out of it to face the scary monsters, both options were difficult for us to accept. Even now, I can still vividly remember the fear I felt in that dream.

Finally, some of the students began to attempt an escape. As each classmate fell to the sharp claws of these monsters, being viciously murdered, the rest of us gradually grew stronger as we battled. As time went on, ordinary monsters were no longer on our level at all.

Fewer and fewer of us remained after countless battles, while our skills kept increasing as we went farther and farther away from the original dungeon. Yet, right before the final victory, I finally collapsed due to a lack of energy in front of the final boss monster.

My dream didn't end there just with my "death." Instead, after the monster sliced me to pieces, I returned to the original dungeon yet again.

This was that same dark, cold, and damp dungeon with those classmates of mine who were shivering in fear, with the not-so-strong monsters outside, blocking the path…

Everything had returned to the starting point. The only difference was that I had experienced much already. The current me had a totally different me from the me at the start. I was no longer tense and afraid. Instead, I was relaxed and enjoying myself, and was even excited and looking forward to what was coming up.

Soon, I woke up from my dream. Yet, it was difficult for me to forget the complex emotions I felt during my dream. At that moment, I truly felt like I was just like a god. Not only that, right after I woke up, I felt like this dream was filled with wish fulfillment elements that would easily make it into a classical .

But, once I truly woke up and thought over it more carefully, wasn't this just an incredibly ordinary reincarnation novel about a powerful individual returning to the past? And, the endlessly complex experiences I had in my dreams were actually just a simple small scenario, wasn't it?

While these two dreams had much different content, they shared one thing in common. That is, the story that I felt was wonderful when I was dreaming became something I realized was only ordinary after I woke up.

Today, I'm sharing these experiences with everyone because we'll often meet with similar problems in our own writing.

Even though it's a fight that's supposed to be awesome, why does it feel so dry when you write it? Even though it's supposed to be an ultimate wish fulfillment scenario, why does it have zero popularity after you write it? Even though it's a plot that makes you incredibly excited, why is it that even you yourself don't want to read it after you write it?

I believe that many authors out there have met with similar problems that frustrate them. I believe that there are two main reasons that cause this.

First and most obviously, it's because of the lack of writing ability. When asking different authors to describe the same scene, the result will obviously be incredibly different. Being able to clearly depict imagined scenes in words isn't something that's so easy to do.

The more important part is that the amazingness of something that comes from your imagination isn't that reliable. We shouldn't overly believe in what we come up with through our imaginations. Or, another way of putting it is that we shouldn't underestimate our own power of imagination.

The two dreams I just mentioned above are excellent examples. Originally ordinary stories will seem incredibly amazing after our dreams make some modifications to these very normal plotlines. But in reality, our daydreams typically won't be so exaggerated. Still, the power of imagination isn't something you should look down upon.

This is something that's quite necessary for authors to understand. That's why there are two points that we need to pay attention to during our typical writing process.

First, don't overly believe in the power of your own imagination. Once you discover that the scene you've written doesn't seem nearly as good as you've imagined, you should both suspect your own writing abilities as well as your own imagination. "Is the scene I came up with really as good as I think it is?"

Second, you shouldn't write every single wonderful detail of the scene you come up with. If you really do write everything there is to write, that actually won't give any room for the readers to imagine. We should intentionally leave some parts undescribed so that the readers can imagine the scene for themselves. Just as how it's incredibly difficult for us to do a perfect job at describing the scene we imagine, the readers might be able to do a better job than us at imagining this scene that you described.

Have all of you noticed these two points about your own writing?