why I woke up every night screaming and crying and shaking like a leaf.
I told her it was “my thing.”
Some people collect stamps. Others ski. Some people like to bake cookies. I suffer from reoccurring dreams of a horrific robbery and the absolute certainty that I am about to die.
“Relax,” I told her. “It’s just my thing.”
Elysha told me that my nightmares did not qualify as a “thing” and sent me to a therapist. He discovered that in addition to my nightmares, I had lived a life of constant anxiety and meticulous precision in an effort to deal with my trauma.
Among the many things that he discovered (that I already knew):
• I create a mental map of the entrances and exits of every space that I enter.
• I position myself so that I can monitor the primary entrance to any space that I occupy.
• I constantly catalog potential threats as they enter and exit a space.
• I keep a baseball bat under my bed and have escape plans from every room in my home in the event of a home invasion. When Elysha and I began living together, I reviewed these escape plans with her regularly.
• What was most concerning to my therapist was that I would hear the click of the gun while wide awake. As I was walking down the street. Reading a book. Driving a car. Watching television.
It turns out that Elysha was right. I was a bit of a mess. Two years and many therapy sessions later, I stopped hearing the click of the gun while walking down the street. I relaxed a bit. My need to constantly plan my every moment receded. My anxiety level decreased significantly.
Best of all, my nightmares have become far less frequent. They aren’t gone by a long shot, and they probably never will be, but I can get through entire nights without seeing those three masked men and their guns in my dreams.
Those are very good nights for me. On those nights, I dream the dreams of a normal person. Dreams that I adore. Loosely constructed narratives that often diverge and intersect along odd, incomprehensible, and incongruent routes, filled with overlapping ideas and images of every variety. Kind of like Alice in Wonderland on steroid-filled mushrooms.
Even with a journal at my bedside, it’s almost impossible to remember any of these dreams, and rarely do I generate any useful ideas or content from them. But I have developed a way of engaging in a version of this dreamlike state while I am awake that has been incredibly productive and has resulted in many ideas for stories, anecdotes for stories, and much more. It’s also damn good for your soul.
Crash & Burn
The exercise is called Crash & Burn. It’s a simple concept, and certainly not groundbreaking in any way, but it relies on adhering to a few simple rules that I have developed that are necessary to make the exercise work well.
Essentially Crash & Burn is stream-of-consciousness writing. I like to think of it as dreaming on the end of your pen, because when it’s working well, it will mimic the free-associative thought patterns that so many of us experience while dreaming.
Stream of consciousness is the act of speaking or writing down whatever thought that enters your mind, regardless of how strange, incongruous, or even embarrassing it may be. People have been utilizing stream-of-consciousness strategies for a long time, beginning first with psychologists in the late nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, these strategies were adopted by writers and thinkers as a means of generating new ideas. Entire novels have been written to mimic stream-of-consciousness thinking.
I hate those novels.
But for our storytelling purposes, we will be utilizing stream-of-consciousness writing to generate new ideas and resurrect old memories, applying three important rules:
Rule #1: You must not get attached to any one idea.
The goal of Crash & Burn is to allow unexpected ideas to intersect and overrun current ones, just as that rain-drenched corner of Main Street with my dog produced an important revelation about my father and a memory of sex on a golf course. Two intersecting ideas crashed into and overran the meaningful moment that I was experiencing with Kaleigh.
So, regardless of how intriguing or compelling your current idea may be, you must release it immediately when a new idea comes crashing in, even if your new idea seems decidedly less compelling than the original one. When Crash & Burn is at its best, ideas are constantly crashing the party, slashing and burning the previous ones. It’s in these intersections of ideas that new ideas and memories are unearthed.
Rule #2: You must not judge any thought or idea that appears in your mind.
Everything must land on the page, regardless of how ridiculous, nonsensical, absurd, or humiliating it may be. Similarly, grammar, punctuation, and capitalization are meaningless. Penmanship is irrelevant.
This can be difficult for many people. For years, writing teachers have demanded that students think about grammar, spelling, and punctuation as they write. They have required students to outline their essays and stories before placing a single word on the page. They have handed their students archaic graphic organizers and insisted that they be completed prior to writing. They have ignored the reality of writing, which is this:
Many writers have no idea what their next sentence or paragraph will be. Much of writing is done in the dark. The next sentence is often as much of a surprise to the writer as it is to the reader.
The artificial demands of outlines, graphic organizers, and planning often subvert the creative process and force would-be writers to think about what they are writing before a word even hits the page rather than allowing them to spill their guts and evaluate the material later. This is because writing teachers often are not writers themselves and therefore never engage in the writing process in an authentic, honest way. Rather than teaching the writing process followed by actual writers, they speculate about strategies that might help a writer or follow the advice written in writing tomes by people who only write writing tomes, often doing more damage than good.
When it comes to Crash & Burn, you must free yourself of this dreadful, hobbling, ingrained need to prepare and self-monitor. You must spill your guts on the page, free from judgment or worry about whether what you are writing is good or right. Just put the damn words on the page as they appear in your head and on your fingertips. Ignore your inner demons.
Rule #3: You cannot allow the pen to stop moving.
I say pen because, although I do almost all my writing on a keyboard, I have found that engaging in Crash & Burn with a pen tends to trigger greater creativity (and there is some science to support this claim). But if you must use a keyboard, go for it.
Either way, your hand or fingers cannot stop moving. You must continue writing words even when your mind is empty. To make this happen, I use colors. When I have no other thought in my mind, I begin listing colors on the page until one of them triggers a thought or memory. For example:
Red, green, blue, black, brown . . . I tell kids that brown is my favorite color, and it makes them all crazy, which makes no sense, but in truth, I have no favorite color, which makes them even crazier . . .
Writing down numbers is also a popular strategy utilized by my workshop students, though I recommend that the numbers be listed in word form. For example:
One, two, three, four, five . . . I have five fingers on each hand, and there are scars on five no six of them, which seems like a lot, but maybe not . . .
I’ve known frequent travelers to list countries. I had a mechanic in one of my workshops list engine parts. I had a teenager in a workshop list the names of his previous girlfriends (and apparently had more than enough names to work with). It doesn’t matter what you choose. Your list of items simply needs to be long and familiar to you.
That’s it. Set a timer for ten minutes, follow these three rules, and go.
Here is an example of one