If you want to experience the next-closest thing to lucid dreaming, try being a writer. Non-writers generally don’t believe me when I say that I don’t always have control over what my characters do, or what happens to them, but a common refrain amongst writers is “I didn’t expect that”.

Imagination is an amazing thing, as is the process of creation. Telling a story often begins with the seed of an idea that you germinate into a majestic tree, full of life and colour. And like a growing tree, you can’t always account for the actions of the weather and the other life around you. Perhaps the weather turns bad, or there is a bushfire, your tree becomes dormant and damaged. On the other hand, sometimes the weather is good, too good, and you end up with wild overgrowth that needs to be hacked away into something more manageable and attractive.

Some writers are planners. Their ideas are more like bonsai, shaped and influenced from the very beginning. They usually have a pretty good sense of what will happen when, but even if you plan or things to go a certain way, you might not get what you want. When I was writing Speak for the Dead, I saw a way for my characters to get together. I had put them in the same room, all I needed to do was write the dialogue between them & have them end up in bed together. However, at the end of the conversation, one party walked out – it simply felt more natural for that to happen.

It’s hard to explain the process of writing, of drawing ideas from your mind and committing them to paper. I’m doing it right now, words are coming out of my brain & after I think them, I type them for you to read. It kinda just happens. Writers often attribute their ideas to their characters for no better reason than “where else could the idea have come from?”

A long time ago, someone shared this link with me, a talk by Elizabeth Gilbert on nurturing your creative side. The entire video is 20 minutes long &, if you can spare the time, please do, because it is one of the most beautiful & moving things I have ever watched. In her speech, Ms Gilbert discusses the idea that genius is not something you ARE, but something you HAVE. Having always felt that writing was something that moved through me, rather than coming from me, it was an idea that I could especially relate to.

So, if you hear voices in your head, you might not be crazy, you might just be a writer.