A good amount of my ideas come from my dreams. I’ll have a dream about an incomplete narrative that appeals to me, then try to add more characters to it. I’ve had varying luck in the past with this technique. Sometimes the inspiration will drive me to dozens of pages, sometimes the spark fizzles out before I’ve grown attached. This story fragment, “Hello, World,” falls somewhere in between.
I can’t remember much of the dream that spurred me to write this. It had a group of girls working together in some capacity, but everything seemed to center around two of them. There were some elements of hacking involved, but they were vague.
The moment I woke up, I instantly hurried to my computer to type out a loose plotline. The characters I wanted to write about came quickly, and I enjoyed injecting a magical realism-adjacent vibe into the story. I based the worldbuilding premise on coding and changing the environment around you – “Upgrading the Universe” was my stand-in title.
However, I reached a stumbling block early on – I don’t know much about coding. I took one introductory course a while back, but I definitely didn’t retain enough to keep up the conceit of a story like this one. This first chapter is heavily character-focused, with the more technological aspects coming in at the end. And I wouldn’t call that part accurate – by then, I was just saying words.
I can conceptualize the other characters I’d add to this story later on, especially all of their emotional beats. But I’d have to do a lot of research to make the conceit stand on its own. From what I have so far, here’s chapter 1 of “Hello, World.”
