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.