Victoria—A question for your advice column: is it true that opening a story with the character coming out of a dream is a cliche and should be avoided?—Mark Salter
Short answer? Yes. Lewis Carroll really ruined the whole dream thing for everyone.
However. . .Somerset Maugham did say there are only four rules to fiction, and nobody knows what those are. So I ought to add a caveat:
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if you could encapsulate the whole point of your story in that dream without saying so, and
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if you were able to shape your story as a mystery in which the dream—like a crime—is never really shown, and
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if you built your story around the clues to create in the reader’s mind an experience of that dream that you never actually gave them, then. . .
I think you could do it.
As Flannery O’Connor said, “You can do anything in fiction you can get away with. It’s just that nobody’s ever gotten away with much.”
“The freshest and
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—Helen Gallagher,
Seattle P-I
The Art & Craft of Story