Your subconscious transported you to a pleasurable experience. Note how I phrased that statement. Out of boredom, you didn’t transport yourself. Your subconscious did. You had no control over it. You could strain your imagination all day and still not create as total and sensual an experience as your subconscious did. You don’t just see that beach. You hear the waves splashing. You feel the sand beneath you, the heat of the sun on your skin, and the tickle of the breeze in your nostrils. You taste the salt on the rim of your margarita. You smell the sweetness of an approaching afternoon rain shower. It’s not like watching a movie in your mind. A movie is apart from you, on a flat screen, presenting only images and sound. This is a three-dimensional imaginary experience that totally envelopes you, engaging all your physical senses.

Now let’s talk about the other kind of daydream-–the repellent one. You’re at a business meeting or you’re driving the kids to school, and suddenly, in your imagination, as vividly as in the Cancun experience, you’re trapped in a terrifying wide-awake nightmare. Interestingly, while most of us would agree that lying on the beach at a luxury resort is a situation we’d like to be in, we don’t have the same consensus when it comes to what terrifies us. I have a friend with a phobia about snakes, for example. In contrast, I find snakes kind of interesting. Another friend doesn’t like closed spaces whereas they don’t bother me a bit. Other things scare me a lot, though. All you have to do is read my fiction to find out what they are.

Consider the implications. It’s understandable why the subconscious would transport us from boring real-life situations into pleasurable fantasies. But why on earth does the subconscious sometimes transport us from those same boring real-life situations into fantasies that are terrifying? From one point of view, the mechanism doesn’t make sense. From another point of view, though, it makes all kinds of sense, and it parallels my question to my students: “Why do you want to be writers?” Why do you have spontaneous wide-awake nightmares? And what is the principle of selection by which your subconscious terrifies you in one way while my subconscious terrifies me in another?

We’re at the heart of the issue. The difference between fiction writers and civilians is that we make it our life’s work to put our daydreams and day-nightmares on paper. Most of the time we don’t understand the secrets and demons that our spontaneous imaginings contain. All we feel is that there’s something in us demanding to be released in the form of a story. Philip Klass told me, “What you fear is like a ferret gnawing at your soul. The more you try to catch it, the more it tries to hide. You’ll only get hints and guesses of what and where it is.” To this, I add: Day-nightmares are messages from your subconscious, hinting to you what that ferret is about. They’re disguised versions of your secret. They’re metaphors for why you want to be a writer.

The breakthrough I had as a writer came one hot August afternoon when I was twenty-five. I’d been writing tired conventional fiction for so long that I was in creative despair. I desperately wanted to be a writer, but I had no idea why I felt that way or what I wanted to write about. At the end of my creative resources, I gave up-–and immediately had the most intense wide-awake nightmare I’d ever experienced. I was making my way through a sweltering forest. Sweat rolled down my face. I heard noises behind me. At first, I assumed that a squirrel was rooting for something in the underbrush. But as the sporadic crinkle of leaves sounded closer, the sound seemed more and more like cautious footsteps. Someone was in the forest with me. Someone was creeping up on me. I can’t express how vividly I felt that I was actually in that forest–-and how fearfully certain I was that someone intended to kill me. As abruptly as it came, the multi-sense illusion ended. It was as if I’d had an out-of-body experience. Suddenly, I found myself staring not at a forest but at my desk and the typewriter on it, a blank sheet of paper taunting me. I’d never experienced any other daydream as powerfully. I didn’t understand the process, but one thing I was sure of: I wanted to know what happened next. Thus I began my first true David Morrell short story.

Ever since that long-ago afternoon, I’ve trained myself to pay attention to my daydreams/nightmares, to be aware of them as they’re happening, to wonder why certain imaginary situations are so insistent, and to use the most compelling
of them as the inspiration for novels and short stories. After the fact, I’ve learned to realize how the plots that attract me are metaphors for my psyche. That story about a man being hunted in a forest dramatizes the helplessness I felt at that time. What was hunting me? Time, ambition, frustration–-name it. In the story, the hero (me) survived by overcoming his fear and maintaining control, a theme that is constant in my work. Another constant theme shows up in my novel The Brotherhood of the Rose. There, two orphans are trained by a surrogate father to be killers for a rogue intelligence agency. They don’t kill for money or politics. They do it for love. And when the surrogate father turns against them in order to protect himself, they set out in a fury to get even. Freudian as can be. But I wrote the entire novel before I realized why my subconscious would have compelled me to write about orphans and fathers. The plot was a disguised version of the story of my life.

I want to emphasize the word “disguised.” I’m not suggesting that you write stories that explicitly address your psychological concerns. That would be tedious and mechanical. Plots are at their best when they serve as metaphors for, and not explicit descriptions of, their author’s psychological state. That’s what daydreams are: disguises. More often than not, the author can’t see through them. All he or she knows is that the story insisted on being told, that his or her imagination wouldn’t rest until the images and characters that haunted it were brought into the light. The best stories choose us. We don’t choose them.

I think that the type of stories we tell also chooses us. I’ve referred to Stephen King a couple of times. Might as well do it again. Critics often ask him (their tone is sniffingly aloof) why he writes horror. King’s response is, “What makes you think I have a choice?” Exactly. In his book On Writing, King describes the brutal poverty of his childhood and the twelve miles he hitchhiked each Saturday to a movie theater that specialized in horror movies, the latter providing a distraction from his poverty. The horror novels, stories, and comic books he compulsively read fulfilled the same function. Made-up horror helped him temporarily forget the burdens of life. Is it any surprise that his urge to write led him to tell the kind of stories that had given him relief when he was a boy?

A similar urge led me to write thrillers. When I was a kid, the family arguments drove me from our apartment above the hamburger joint. I went to a crowded bus stop, where I asked someone to give me a nickle. “Mister, I lost my bus fare.” A nickel is what it cost to get a ride on the bus, but fifteen cents is what it cost to get into a movie, which was my goal. So when everybody got on the bus, I hung back and went to another bus stop, where I again begged for a nickel. If the bus stops didn’t get me enough money, I waited outside bars, hoping that drunks would lose coins as they came outside, trying to pocket their money. Often my patience was rewarded. When I finally had my fifteen cents, I then had to beg an adult going into the movie theater to buy a ticket for me (I was only ten, and because it was after dark, I couldn’t get into the theater by myself.) I always picked a young couple who didn’t have wedding rings. “Mister, will you please pretend I’m your kid and buy my ticket for me? I promise you’ll never see me again when we’re inside.” The reason I picked unmarried couples was, the woman would look at the man to see how he reacted to a child’s request (i.e., what kind of father would this guy be?). Sensing that he was being tested, each man always bought my ticket.

So, finally, I was in the theater, which in those days looked like a palace and where I was safe from the family arguments, escaping into the movie on the screen. The films that made the most impression on me were Hitchcock-type thrillers. So is it any wonder that the stories I love to tell are the kind that gave me an escape when I was a kid? And is it any wonder that the fan letters I most treasure are from readers trying to cope with a personal disaster? A divorce, a fire, a flood, a crippling car accident, a loved one’s death, the loss of a job, name the worst thing that happened to you. People trying to survive these things write to thank me for distracting them from their pain just as I was distracted in that movie theater when I was a troubled child.

Apply this mechanism to yourself. Perhaps you want to write romances or science fiction or mainstream novels. Unlike many critics, I make no distinction in terms of whether any type of fiction is more worthy than any other type. They all offer opportunities for imagination and verbal skills. In this regard, Peter Straub is a model. He wrote Ghost Story and Mystery with such respect, brought to those genres such literary honesty, that he showed us the essence of what a ghost story and a mystery are about. Any type of story is only a means–-what a writer does with it is what matters. You’ll find it revealing if, after asking yourself “Why do I want to be a writer?”, you ask yourself, “Why do I want to write this particular kind of fiction?”
“Because I have to.”

“Why do you have to?”

If you follow the logic in the progression of these questions, if you pay attention to the ferret that’s gnawing inside you, you’ll have a subject matter that’s uniquely your own. You’ll also approach your favorite type of story in a way that has special meaning to you. You’ll be an original and not an imitator. Because you’re true to yourself. Because you use your unique one-of-a-kind psyche as your guide. It may be that you’ll never be one of those 200 writers who earn a living at it. But that was never the point in the first place. You didn’t become a writer to make money. You became a writer because your ferret and your daydreams/nightmares forced you to. If you do achieve financial success, all the better. But in the meantime, you did what you knew you had to, and your reward was–-only now is it a valid answer-–the satisfaction of self-expression, of being creative.

From the book, THE SUCCESSFUL NOVELIST: A LIFETIME OF LESSONS ABOUT WRITING AND PUBLISHING by David Morrell, (c) 2008 Source Books.

David Morrell is the award-winning author of First Blood, the novel in which Rambo was created. That "father" of all modern action novels was published in 1972 while Morrell was a professor in the English department at the University of Iowa. He taught there from 1970 to 1986, simultaneously writing other novels, many of them national bestsellers, such as The Brotherhood of the Rose (the basis for a highly rated NBC miniseries). Eventually wearying of two professions, he gave up his tenure in order to write full time.

"The mild-mannered professor with the bloody-minded visions," as one reviewer called him, Morrell is the author of twenty-eight books, including such novels of international intrigue as The Fifth Profession, Assumed Identity, and Extreme Denial (set in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he now lives with his wife, Donna). His most recent publication is the dark-suspense thriller Scavengers.

Morrell is the co-president of the International Thriller Writers organization (www.internationalthrillerwriters.com). Noted for his research, he is a graduate of the National Outdoor Leadership School for wilderness survival as well as the G. Gordon Liddy Academy of Corporate Security. He is also an honorary lifetime member of the Special Operations Association and the Association of Former Intelligence Officers. He has been trained in firearms, hostage negotiation, assuming identities, executive protection, and anti-terrorist driving, among numerous other action skills that he describes in his novels. With eighteen million copies in print, his work has been translated into twenty-six languages.