Dreaming Up Dreams in Your Writing? Be Wary

Because all people experience dreaming, it is tempting for authors to include a "dream sequence" in works of fiction. Some reasons for fictional dreams include illuminating a character's suppressed anxieties or desires, creating a foreshadowing or mood, or inserting an explanatory flashback. In general, writing critics discourage the urge to insert dreams because botched efforts are so common. You've no doubt encountered fictional dream descriptions that bore and impede rather than propel the story, that annoy as obviously hokey manipulations, or that confuse by their ambiguous truthfulness and significance. Most writers can't match great literature's dream usage. For example, Homer's epic Iliad uses a false dream sent by Zeus to Agamemnon to spur the attack on Troy. Many of William Shakespeare's plays include vivid dreams, such as Macbeth, Richard III, The Tempest and, of course, A Midsummer Night's Dream. In Emily Bronte's gothic Wuthering Heights, characters are guided by their dreams. Russian greats Leo Tolstoy in War and Peace and Fyodor Dostoyevsky in Crime and Punishment rely on dream motifs, too. Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland uses a dream setting to play with logic and satire. James Joyce's Ulysses has dream sequences that inspire Freudian and Jungian analysis. Note how assumptions about dreams have changed in the West, from the ancient belief that dreams come from outside supernatural sources, to Romantic personal inspiration and revelation, and finally to the modern focus on science and psychological insight. No matter what theory of dreaming is used, writers must make sure a believable dream sequence is relevant to character and integral to the plot. Here are some dream facts to consider: https://www.verywell.com/facts-about-dreams-2795938

Add Mystery & Thrills to Your 2016 Beach Reads

It's time to pack for that summer vacation, including, of course, a couple of mysteries or thrillers to get the heart pounding and the blood chilled despite the lazy, sunny days ahead. Here are some reviewer-favored suggestions that you may also want to add to your beach reading list. John Hart, who has won two Edgar Awards back to back, returns with the crime thriller Redemption Road, in which damaged yet courageous North Carolina police detective Elizabeth Black, who is white, faces a media a circus and the prospect of criminal charges after gunning down two black men sexually abusing 18-year-old Channing Shore in an abandoned house. North Carolina features again in All the Missing Girls by Megan Miranda, a noted YA author with an adult fiction debut: A prep school counselor makes a return visit to her North Carolina hometown--and the unsolved disappearance of her best friend after their high school graduation a decade earlier. Let Me Die in His Footsteps by Lori Roy, another Edgar winner, evokes Southern gothic tradition with her tale of two families, first in 1936 and then in 1952, and an evil passed down the generations in a small Kentucky town. The Girls in the Garden by New York Times best-selling author Lisa Jewell leaves the South and takes us to a midsummer night's party for neighbors on a communal garden square in London. But the secure urban oasis is shattered when preteen Pip discovers her 13-year-old sister lying unconscious and bloody in a hidden corner of a rose garden, drawing the reader into a mystery about the dark games children and adults play. Memory, madness and lies also bring danger to psychiatric ward resident Dr. Zoe Goldman in Little Black Lies by Sandra Block. Goldman is dedicated to helping patients but she is also wrestling with her own demons, seeking to piece together the truth of her mother's death from nightmares about a fire and her adoptive mother's dementia-tattered memories. For more Publishers Weekly "best summer reads" in the mystery category, check out
http://best-books.publishersweekly.com/pw/best-books/summer-reads-2016/mystery#book/book-1

The 'Bad Seed' in Fact and Fiction

Psychopathic villains--manipulative, aggressive, remorseless and unemotional--abound in murder mysteries, but when those psychopaths are children, an element of horror enters. Remember Rhoda, the too-perfect little girl murderess in the 1954 novel The Bad Seed by William March? Or Kevin, a school massacre perpetrator, whose mother suspects his evil capacity long before his final horrific acts in Lionel Shriver's We Need to Talk About Kevin. Agatha Christie's Crooked House also featured a deadly child in scheming 12-year-old Josephine Leonides, who kills her grandfather because he won't pay for ballet lessons--and almost gets away with it. Author Jonathan Kellerman, a clinical child psychologist who writes New York Times best-selling mysteries featuring psychologist sleuth Dr. Alex Delaware, gives support to fictional "bad seed" characterizations. He notes in his nonfiction Savage Spawn, inspired by the spate of 1997-1998 schoolyard shootings, that “psychopathic tendencies begin very early in life, as young as three, and they endure.” Though research shows psychopathy is 50% genetic, biology is not destiny for our complex human personalities, and nurture can guide nature. Budding pre-psychopaths can be tempered by a non-aggressive environment and by a parenting style that is neither too permissive nor too authoritarian while providing structure and limits, according to psychology experts. After all, children with psychopathic traits do not all become killers; many grow up to use the daring, charming and manipulative aspects of their personalities as successful business tycoons, political leaders or sports stars. Still, the fictional tales of young murderers are not just fantasy and are reinforced every year by headlines about preteen killers and school shootings. We need to be alert to signs in children that presage criminal acts--violence toward people or animals, lack of guilt or remorse, social isolation, defiance and sensation-seeking--and commit to timely intervention. For more on youthful violence prediction and intervention, see http://crimefeed.com/2016/01/predicting-violent-criminal-behavior-how-to-spot-the-warning-signs-intervene/

Dark Mysteries Lit by Las Vegas Neon

Last week I took relatives visiting from abroad to Las Vegas--because foreign tourists see its neon-magicked, cigarette- and alcohol-hazed glamorization of fantasy and vice as a top American entertainment experience.  The glitz of Sin City long ago ceased to enthrall me, but I admit that the "what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas" world is a perfect setting for mystery novels that I do enjoy. For example, 2015 Edgar Award-winner Chris Albani's The Secret History of Las Vegas: A Novel offers an original plot in which a near-retirement Las Vegas detective and a South African doctor studying psychopaths join forces to solve a spate of murders implicating a pair of conjoined twins. Dark Eye by William Bernhardt features psychologist Susan Pulaski, a Las Vegas police consultant whose life has spun out of control after the death of her cop husband, ending with an LVPD pink slip and a trip to detox. As a serial killer begins decorating Sin City with the horribly disfigured bodies of once beautiful young women, Pulaski is trying to regain her job and reputation, and stop a madman. She gets surprise help from a 25-year-old autistic savant whose unusual perspective forces her to see the crimes from a bizarre–but ultimately insightful–viewpoint. For a different Vegas journey, try Ron Chaney's Tony Hillerman Prize-winning The Ragged End of Nowhere, which stars a former CIA agent seeking his war veteran brother's killer in the Vegas criminal underworld, a case complicated by allegations that the victim was in possession of a stolen ancient relic. For more mysteries set in Vegas, check out http://www.indianprairielibrary.org/books-movies-more/book/1199-all-time-faves-what-happens-in-vegas-mysteries-set-in-las-vegas