“Yttat”

4 thoughts on ““Yttat””

1. Lovely, Tetman. Where did the story of Yttat/Wyatt come from?

2. it came from dream. it’s been a couple years and the details are hazy now. it may have been one long, bifurcated dream, or it may have been two dreams in one night with a short period of wakefulness intervening, or it may have been two dreams in two consecutive nights or two nights within the same week. however it was, the core of the story (the reunion and the storm and yttat) came from dream of such vivid narrative structure that i quickly sketched out some notes and wrote it up. to get it to work as a story took some hammering and melding and bending and shaping, most notably including the character of juliette. i don’t believe there was a unifying presence outside the dreaming consciousness (expressed as the secretary) and i intuited there needed to be that; hence, juliette accompanies the secretary throughout the story. without her, there really wouldn’t be a story.

   kafka was a big influence, too. i read all of his fiction six years ago and was intrigued by the surreal dreaminess of his work. while i don’t believe he ever explicitly said he was writing from dream, i can’t recall that any of his fiction lacks the feeling of dream.

   i knew i had some sort of useful raw material from the dream or dreams that inspired the story. the trick was to get it to work as a story. no small part of what i sought to do was to both break the rules and follow the rules and see what i could fashion.

3. Fascinating. I wish my dreams were so fruitful.

4. most of mine are not. i mean, the great great majority of my dreaming is simply dreaming. every so often, though, i pass through one that inspires me to write. in fact, the first two stories i wrote, when i was barely twelve years old, came from dreaming. it was another of those situations of having a couple vivid dreams in close proximity to one another.

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