I just finished the rough draft of a new novel. I still can't quite believe the story started where it did: with a dream. A year and a half ago, I woke up in the middle of the night with an image reverberating in my mind, noted it down on my phone, and went back to sleep. The next morning I read over the note and realized it was the perfect opening for a novel. So I scrapped the outline I'd been working on for months, copied the note into a document, and kept going. I've been writing it sentence by sentence ever since.
I like reading about your process, Eliot. I never had a start of a writing project from a dream, though certain highly memorable dreams have set off searches for "right things" in my life - like knowing, oh, I really need to find a good therapist now, that dream was BIG. And the therapy lasted longer than I ever could have imagined and produced changes - well, yeah, unexpected. I started writing my very first novel from a journaling session where two people started "dictating" their story to me. I PROTESTED! I don't write fiction, all that, but they returned day after day. Most fun I ever had!
I like reading about your process, Eliot. I never had a start of a writing project from a dream, though certain highly memorable dreams have set off searches for "right things" in my life - like knowing, oh, I really need to find a good therapist now, that dream was BIG. And the therapy lasted longer than I ever could have imagined and produced changes - well, yeah, unexpected. I started writing my very first novel from a journaling session where two people started "dictating" their story to me. I PROTESTED! I don't write fiction, all that, but they returned day after day. Most fun I ever had!