The Maiden Writing Voyage

Dream is the personalized myth, myth the depersonalized dream.

Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces

I remember the exact date I started my first novel. February 7, 2000. I was 13 years old, in the throes of middle school loneliness. We were running Windows 98, saving things to 3 inch floppy discs, and my parents firmly believed that if we wanted computer time, we had to read first, and even then, it was a 25 minute max. In these parameters, I decided that I was going to not only consume the available literature, I was going to contribute to it. It began with a dream the night before.

Book cover to The Hero With a Thousand Faces

It would be another ten years before I came to know the works of Carl Jung, and another few after that before I read Campbell’s work on the hero’s journey. Yet the book fit the philosophies.

The dream was no more than an image of a group of refugees wandering through the woods. Yet, 23 years later and I still remember it clearly. I took that dream and turned it into a story of redemption: a girl is just four when her community is thrust from their foreclosed homes, and she grows up in squalor, where poverty and addiction dominate. Another former member of the community finds her and together, they help heal the wounds their circumstances thrust upon them.

The story was not well written. The narrative is choppy and trite. I would never share it with anyone, but the story was much more alive than any movie or book I had consumed up to that point, and therefore, I succeeded in what I set out to do.

I have since written complete drafts of seven other novels in the 23 years since then. At least one other of those has come from a dream.