From Where You Dream

by Robert Olen Butler

  CONTENTS

  Introduction i

  PART I: THE LECTURES

  1 Boot Camp 9

  2 The Zone 23

  3 Yearning 39

  4 Cinema of the Mind 63 5 A Writer Prepares 85

  PART II: THE WORKSHOP

  6 Reading, Lit Crit, and the Workshop 107 7 The Bad Story 123 8 The Anecdote Exercise 141 9 The Written Exercise 165

  PART III: THE STORIES, ANALYZED

  10 "Flamenco" by Erich Sysak 187 11 "My Impossibles" by Brandy T. Wilson 207 12 "My Summer in Vulcan" by Rita Mae Reese 229

  Appendix: "Open Arms" by Robert Olen Butler 253

  INTRODUCTION

  Sometime in the early 1980s, the playwright Maria Irene Fornes came to Florida State University to conduct a series of workshops. I had already been teaching writing for a decade and had published a book on Writing Fiction, and I was disconcerted, not to say traumatized, by her methods. She had us do calisthenics, pair up and draw portraits of each other, imagine the insides of our stomachs and set play scenes there. At the end of the last session, I told her, "I've spent twenty years understanding my process, and you're asking me to change it entirely."

  Fornes bounced her palms at the air. "You must always keep changing your process!" she declared. "Because there are two of you, one who wants to write and one who doesn't. The one who wants to write has to keep fooling the one who doesn't."

  I have taken her advice to heart and have tried to keep changing—expanding, twisting, tricking—my writing process, but the truth is that only two teachers have radically changed it for me. One was Fornes, and the other is Robert Olen Butler, who joined the FSU faculty in 2000 as Eppes Professor of Creative Writing. Butler's method is largely lecture—his students do not draw, dance, or gather in small groups—yet his teaching, like Fornes's, offers a door into the unconscious where fiction lies.

  Butler's background is in theater—he trained in both acting and oral interpretation and began his professional career as an actor—and what he often calls "method writing" owes much to the director Konstantin Stanislavsky of the Moscow Art Theatre, who revolutionized dramatic practice for the twentieth century and, in effect, made possible the emotional realism of film. The so-called Stanislavsky Method rests on two principles: that the actor's body is an instrument that must be supple, strong, and prepared; and that craft is always secondary to the truth of emotional connection. Both of these principles have their counterpart in Butler's teaching of the fictional process. In place of the body, it is the imagination that must be a strong and supple instrument, ready to lead the reader through moment-by-moment sensual experience. And it is in the realm of the unconscious rather than that of technique or intellect that the writer seeks fictional truth.

  I attended Butler's graduate fiction course in the fall of 2001, took copious notes, began applying his advice to my own work, and proposed—because he will not set non-fictional pen to paper—that I would get the lectures out in the world. In the fall of 2002 I attended again while Butler wore a minirecorder to tape his talks. These were (impeccably) transcribed by graduate writer Nikki Louis, and then I set to work to edit them. The lectures are delivered extempore from five three-by-five cards from which Butler picks almost at random. Consequently, in the editing I have cut and shuffled, sometimes incorporating the answer to a student question where it fits into the body of the text. I've tried to snip the ravelings, expunge the repetitions, and sift out the er-uh factor of impromptu speech while leaving the informality and energy intact. It's a task closer to proofreading than to translating, but involving a little of both.

  As Butler frequently points out, his lectures are necessarily the inverse of his advice; he generalizes, analyzes, and abstracts as a way of inveighing against generalization, analysis, and abstraction. His self-declared obsessions have to do with the descent into the dreamspace of the unconscious in order to discover the yearning that is at the center of every person and therefore of every character, and with the moment-to-moment sensual experiencing of that character's story. He proposes fiction as the exploration of the human condition and yearning as its compass. He conducts exercises to achieve the dreamspace. He offers insights into the nature of voice. He is eloquent on fiction as a "cinema of the mind," to be experienced by the reader as a sensual series of takes and scenes. And he has devised a system whereby revision is undertaken at the level of structure rather than sentence.

  Many practitioners and teachers of writing (myself included) have preached freewriting, clustering, drafting, and generally "making clay"—getting any words whatsoever on the page, in order to have material to work with. Butler's writing "zone" is instead a place of meditation on the sense experience of the characters, requiring both patience and a depth of concentration that must be surrendered to and cannot be willed.

  Yet over and over again, in modes practical and inspiring, Butler's perspective has helped me to my own best writing. In

  a 1978 journal that turned up as part of Janet Sternburg's anthology, The Writer on Her Work, I complained that "the grind, the shit, of fiction, is the need to shape and construct. Letters flow from me. I always intend to let a novel do the same; every time 1 promise myself that I'll do a quick imperfect draft . . . But I can't do so. These three days have yielded six pages, plus an opening about opening The Opening that I scrapped entirely. And that are imperfect by a long shot yet. Decisions have to be made in them—about character, the focus of the reader's anticipation, tone—that make it impossible to proceed until the decisions are made." Butler's "dangerous system" of novel construction addresses precisely this perennial problem of the draft writer and offers a way out. It allows the simultaneous emergence of structure, character, and motif. The system is primarily intended for the novel, but I have found it, for both short stories and plays, a way to bypass the gnarled intellectual process that had marred my "plotting."

  Because in the pursuit of sensual truth Butler so often dismisses concept and abstraction, it's a pleasurable paradox to find in these lectures thoughtful and original perspectives on ideas that touch science, psychology, and other arts. The "five ways of experiencing emotion" outlined in chapter one— about which Butler has been casually holding forth for nearly twenty years—correspond directly to the neural research analyzed in Antonio Damasio's 1999 The Feeling of What Happens. His discussion of the writer in search of his form describes the struggle in Gabriel Josipovici's classic essay on Nathaniel Hawthorne in The World and the Book. His analysis of Dickens as moviemaker illustrates and elaborates D. W. Griffith's perception on that subject.

  I have to say that, as with Fornes, my initial resistance to Butler's message was strong. His central obsessions lead him toward words about which I am preternaturally squeamish— like dream and unconscious and trance and yearning and white-hot center and art object—whereas I have been known to describe myself as a contriver, which would certainly make him squirm. I am fascinated by the intricacies of craft, which Butler assures me are a distraction. I have a crusading high regard for intellect, whereas he insists that as a fiction writer I must not "think."

  In the teaching continuum from therapist to maestro, Butler is definitely in the camp of the maestro. I once assigned a graduate class Annie Dillard's The Writing Life—a book I love—and one of the students said, "It's so effing high-minded it makes me want to go to the Kmart." Butler is effing high-minded. He is an enthusiast, demanding and prescriptive. But his lectures also exhilarate. They respect your reach.

  JB

  I need to make this clear first off: no matter where you are in your writing career, if you aspire to create literature, if you aspire to be an artist in the medium of language, if you aspire to create narratives of whatever length tha
t arrive at the condition of art—there are fundamental truths about the artistic process to which you must attend.

  In the nearly two decades I've been teaching this subject, I have read many thousands of manuscripts from aspiring writers, and virtually all of them—virtually all of them—fail to show an intuitive command of the essentials of the process of fictional art. Because of the creative writing pedagogy in this country, and because of the nature of this art form, and because of the medium you work with, and because of the rigors of artistic vision, and because of youth, and because no one has ever told you these things clearly, the great likelihood is that all of the fiction you've written is mortally flawed in terms of the essentials of process.

  This, I think, is why my students have come to call this boot camp: because—and I will do this in as friendly and gentle and encouraging a way as I possibly can—what I have to say to you will indict virtually everything you've written.

  It's not going to be an easy message to hear. But I'm going to tell you right up front: before I wrote my first published novel, The Alleys of Eden, I wrote literally a million words of absolute dreck. Five god-awful novels, forty dreadful short stories, and a dozen truly terrible full-length plays. I made all those fatal errors of process I would bet my mortgage you're making now. I want to help you get around that. But you've got to open up and listen to me about this. If you're not prepared to do that, if you're not prepared to open your sensibilities—and, incidentally, your minds—to what I'm going to tell you and to the implications for the work you have done and will do, then it is best that you and I part ways now. There are some folks in this room who will attest to the fact that it's going to be tough, it's going to be nerve-racking, it's going to unsettle you. But I think they will also attest that the rewards are worth it.

  You must, to be in here, have the highest aspirations for yourselves as writers—the desire to create works of fiction that will endure, that reflect and articulate the deepest truth about the human condition. If that is your aspiration, then this is where you belong. I will not blow you off. I will take your aspirations seriously, and I will demand that you take them seriously.

  I always begin with something the great Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa once said. He said, "To be an artist means never to avert your eyes." To be an artist means never to avert your eyes—this is the absolute essential truth here.

  You're going to be, and probably always have been, led to avert your eyes. But turning from that path is what it means to be an artist. You need courage, and that's something I can't teach you. I can teach you that you've got to have it.

  What does an artist do?

  As an artist, like everyone else on this planet, you encounter the world out there primarily in your bodies, moment to moment through your senses. Everything else derives from that. You are creatures of your senses. All that follows—all the stuff of the mind, all the analysis, all the rationalization, all the abstracting and interpreting—follows upon that point of contact, in the moment, through your senses.

  If you live in the moment, through your senses, your first impression certainly will be that at the heart of things is chaos. God knows we had a very clear example of that in September of 2001. You can be sitting on the ninetieth floor of the World Trade Center on a beautiful late summer morning, smelling your Starbucks coffee, glad they brewed Sumatra today, and someone with visions of seventy-two virgins waiting for him in heaven flies a United Airlines jet through your window. That is a paradigm of the human condition.

  Artists are intensely aware of the chaos implied by the moment-to-moment sensual experience of human beings on this planet. But they also, paradoxically, have an intuition that behind the chaos there is meaning; behind the flux of moment-to-moment experience there is a deep and abiding order.

  The artist shares her intuition of the world's order with the philosophers, the theologians, the scientists, the psychoanalysts—there are lots of people who believe there is order in the universe—but those others embrace the understanding and expression of that order through abstractions, through ideas, through analytical thought. The artist is deeply uncomfortable with those modes of understanding and expression. The theologians have their dogma and the philosophers their theories and the scientists their scientific principles and the psychoanalysts their Jungian or Freudian insights—but to those modes of expression and understanding the artist says, "That doesn't make sense to me. Those are not the terms in which I intuit the world." The artist cannot understand or access her vision of the world in any of those ways. The artist is comfortable only with going back to the way in which the chaos is first encountered—that is, moment to moment through the senses. Then, selecting from that sensual moment-to-moment experience, picking out bits and pieces of it, reshaping it, she recombines it into an object that a reader in turn encounters as if it were experience itself: a record of moment-to-moment sensual experience, an encounter as direct as those we have with life itself. Only in this way, by shaping and ordering experience into an art object, is the artist able to express her deep intuition of order.

  There's an interesting precedent for this idea—and what I'm about to observe has no intended religious message. A very influential person in Western and world culture taught almost exclusively in one way: only by parable, by telling stories. "Without a parable he spake not unto them." He asked questions similar to the ones I just suggested artists ask: What is the abiding universal human condition? What is this all about here on planet Earth? And his answer was, There was a guy who owned a vineyard and he had a son . . . and so forth. He told stories. That's what was clearly recorded in the books written closest to the time in which Jesus of Nazareth lived. Jesus said, emphatically, "He that hath ears to hear, let him hear." He did not say, "He that hath a brain to think, let him think." It's through the ear. By means of a story.

  The great jazz trumpeter Miles Davis said, "Man, you don't play what you know, you play what you hear." Davis had very strong political ideas—but he was an artist; he knew that you don't make music from ideas.

  Please get out of the habit of saying that you've got an idea for a short story. Art does not come from ideas. Art does not come from the mind. Art comes from the place where you dream. Art comes from your unconscious; it comes from the white-hot center of you.

  Does this make sense? Do you understand what I'm saying? If you want to think your way into your fiction, if you think you can analyze your way into a work of art, we're going to be totally at odds philosophically about what art is and where it comes from. But if you have this aspiration and an open sensibility, and if what I'm saying makes sense, then you have to tell your mind to back the hell off. It's another place in yourself entirely where you must look to create a work of art. And I'll wager that virtually everything you've written so far has come from your head.

  You know, it's easy to get caught up in the ambition of being a writer. It's easy to get caught up in loving literature and wishing to be the person on the dust jacket. This ambition, as innocent-seeming as it is, can very easily muscle out your deeper, more delicate, more difficult ambitions. It can

  muscle them out in favor of: I want to get published, I want to be famous, I want to win a prize. Or even in the terms: I want to be an artist. I said earlier, "If you aspire to create art." Please understand that's different from "I want to be a great artist." And even "I want to create art" is a bit of a dangerous ambition. What I want to nurture in you is the impulse: "I'm ravished by sensual experience. I yearn to take life in. My God! I've got this sense that the world has meaning. Things roil around in my dream space, and I've got to figure out how to make art objects of them." That's really the best ambition, to be hungry for sensual experience in your life. Ravenous. Artists are not intellectuals. We are sensualists. The objects we create are sensual objects, and the way you'll know that you're writing from your head is that you'll look at your story and find it full of abstraction and generalization and summary and analysis and interpretatio
n. These modes of discourse will be prevalent in works that are written from the head. Even if you can by force of will insert some nicely observed sense details into the work, you'll find the work moving toward analysis and description and generalization and abstraction when, in fact, in the work of art the most important moments are the most sensual of all, the most in the moment.

  Mies van der Rohe said that God is in the details. Let's substitute: the human condition resides in the details, the sense details.

  The primary point of contact for the reader is going to be an emotional one, because emotions reside in the senses. What we do with emotions after that, to protect ourselves in the world, is a different thing; but emotions are experienced in the senses and therefore are best expressed in fiction through the senses.

  Emotions are also basically experienced, and therefore expressed in fiction, in five ways. First, we have a sensual reaction inside our body—temperature, heartbeat, muscle reaction, neural change.

  Second, there is a sensual response that sends signals outside of our body—posture, gesture, facial expression, tone of voice, and so forth.

  Third, we have, as an experience of emotion, flashes of the past. Moments of reference in our past come back to us in our consciousness, not as ideas or analyses about the past, but as little vivid bursts of waking dream; they come back as images, sense impressions.

  The fourth way we experience emotion and can therefore express it in fiction is that there are flashes of the future, similar to flashes of the past, but of something that has not yet happened or that may happen, something we desire or fear or otherwise anticipate. Those also come to us as images, like bursts of waking dreams.

  And finally—this is important for the fiction writer— we experience what I would call sensual selectivity. At any given moment we, and therefore our characters, are surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of sensual cues. But in that moment only a very small number of those sensual cues will impinge on our consciousness. Now, what makes that selection for us? Well, our emotions do.