From Where You Dream

by Robert Olen Butler

  Fiction is a temporal art form. Fiction exists in time. Poems by contrast are very condensed objects, virtually exempt from time. A poem may capture a fleeting momentary impulse; and the length of a line is usually a part of its essential form,

  so the poem is also an object on the page. But as soon as you let the line run on and you turn the page, you are upon a time, inevitably. And, as any Buddhist will tell you, you cannot exist as a human being on this planet for thirty seconds without desiring something.

  My favorite word in this regard—a word you will hear often when we discuss your manuscripts—is yearning. We yearn. We are the yearning creatures of this planet. There are superficial yearnings, and there are truly deep ones always pulsing beneath, but every second we yearn for something. And fiction, inescapably, is the art form of human yearning.

  Yearning is always part of fictional character. In fact, one way to understand plot is that it represents the dynamics of desire. It's the dynamics of desire that is at the heart of narrative and plot.

  Those failed manuscripts of students and aspiring writers—many of them showing a lot of talent—contained characters with problems, attitudes, opinions, sensibility, voice, personality—all of those things, and often a wonderfully evoked milieu to boot. But none of those things automatically carries with it yearning. The dynamics of desire can be utterly missing from a story that is rich with all of those things.

  James Joyce appropriated from the Catholic church the term epiphany. An epiphany literally means "a shining forth." He brought that concept to bear on the moment in a work of art when something shines forth in its essence. That, he said, is the epiphany in a story or novel.

  What I would suggest is that there are two epiphanies in any good work of fiction. Joyce's is the second, the one often called the climax or crisis of a story. The first epiphany comes very near the beginning, where the sensual details accumulate around a moment in which the deepest yearning of the main character shines forth. The reader responds in a deep visceral way to that first epiphany—and that's the epiphany missing from virtually every student manuscript I've read.

  It is an element also, of course, missing from much published fiction. Various stories you read may leave you a little cold, distanced—you may admire, maybe you have a kind of "smart" reaction—but nothing resonates in the marrow of your bones, and the reason is that the character's yearning is not manifest.

  This lack is interesting, because writers who aspire to a different kind of fiction—entertainment fiction, let's call it, genre fiction—have never forgotten this necessity of the character's yearning. Maybe that's why they're selling books and we're not—because you cannot find a book on the bestseller list without a central character who clearly wants something, is driving for something, has a clear objective: I want to solve the crime. I want to kill the monster. I want to go to bed with that woman or that man. I want to win the war. You name the genre. Every story has a character full of desire.

  The difference between the desires expressed in entertainment fiction and literary fiction is only a difference of level. Instead of: I want a man, a woman, wealth, power, or to solve a mystery or to drive a stake through a vampire's heart, a literary desire is on the order of: I yearn for self, I yearn for an identity, I yearn for a place in the universe, I yearn to connect to the other. But that there must be yearning the genre writers never forget. We do.

  Desire is the driving force behind plot. The character yearns, the character does something in pursuit of that yearning, and some force or other will block the attempt to fulfill that yearning. The character will respond to the force in some way, go round or through or over or under it, and continue the pursuit. This dynamic beneath the story is plot: the attempt to fulfill the yearning and the world's attempt to thwart that.

  Most of the time, good fiction comes out of an inspiration that includes an intuition of yearning. In your unconscious, in your dreamspace, a character presents herself to you. She is a product of your own deepest white-hot center, but she is an other. When she presents herself, there will probably be a place involved, or an external circumstance, perhaps even a moment in our history—a crash, a war, the death of a mother —not your mother, understand, but the death of this character's mother. There will probably be an event that comes to you somehow, which summons her up. This character is summoned into your unconscious. You recognize her there, those luminous events and places surround her; but however vivid she seems to you, you may not yet be ready to write her story if the yearning is not there. For me, the thing that triggers the moment in my unconscious when a character is ready to speak or be spoken of, ready to be a story, is a flash of intuition about that character's yearning. What is it at her deepest level that she yearns for?

  Until a character with yearning has emerged from your unconscious, I don't encourage you to write. Again, I emphasize intuition. It's not that you come to some intellectual understanding. It's an intuition of her wanting, a sense of her desiring. And then you're ready to write.

  But perhaps you have a character pressing himself upon you and you don't feel that intuitive connection to his yearning. Try to wait for it. But if it's just not coming, you can begin to write in the way you have done in most of your manuscripts so far—moving around in the problems of the character, trying on the voice of a narrator, exploring the character's attitudes and opinions and reactions. However, it is crucial you understand that this isn't the work of art you've commenced to create. It is a kind of line-to-line rumination. A working exercise. You must realize that all you're doing here is keeping your eyes and ears open for that whiff of true, dynamic yearning in your character. At the moment you get that whiff, you stop writing this thing and put it away and never look at it again. You'll hear these words again from me in a later context. It's equally important here. Once you have that link to your character's yearning, only then does the real work of literary fiction begin.

  So then you need to reenter your character's world afresh and dream your way into whatever it is that might upset the equilibrium of that world. You will seek what is called the "inciting incident." Things are in balance in the world of this character, and then the equilibrium is upset by the inciting incident. This does not necessarily have to occur within the story; it often doesn't. But somehow the world of the character becomes unbalanced, and this challenges whatever it is the character deeply yearns for. And this is how things begin.

  Following the "inciting incident" is the "point of attack"—these terms are commonly used in connection with plot, but I think it's important to remind you about them in regard to yearning. Both can occur at the same moment, but because the inciting incident may well have happened prior to the beginning of the story, there may equally be a separate point of attack. To use a dramatic analogy: in Hamlet, the inciting incident is the murder of Hamlet's father, which has occurred well before the rising of the curtain. The point of attack is the appearance of the father's ghost to Hamlet.

  Point of attack, which introduces the conflict—the particular manifestation of a character's yearning—is an important notion because when you write a story you need to make sure that something is at stake. It doesn't need to be an external thing; it must have inner magnitude, though. Your character's yearning is deep and important; you need to treat it with respect.

  Conflict can be internal or external. An external conflict pits the character against the natural world, or society, or other characters. The internal conflict exists between or among various aspects of the character's own self. I think it's rare that a literary work touches the deepest realms of human experience without presenting some sort of internal conflict. Often in the most exciting literary works, an internal conflict runs parallel to, or resonates through, some larger conflict in the external world. That interaction between the inner and the outer is a unique provenance of narrative. No other art form can really grasp the interaction between the external world and the internal world as fiction can.

  Let's
deal again for a moment with the distinction between literature and nonliterature. I talked about what it means to be an artist, why people become artists, what the sensibility of an artist is, where you have to look in yourself to be an artist; and I have even, in terms of yearning, complimented our nonartist writer colleagues. But I think it's important to make a couple of distinctions regarding attention to the moment-by-moment sensual flow of experience, which I claim as necessary to art in fiction.

  Nonart, genre writing, entertainment writing, is typically filled with abstraction, generalization, summary, analysis, and interpretation. I ran across a book a few months ago in a Borders somewhere, called The Romance Writer's Phrase Book, in which you could look up an emotion and find fifty punchy phrases to describe it. Passion, for instance: "Her heart beat wild with passion." I pulled out that example because it's somewhat deceptive. There does seem to be a sense impression there. We talked about the five ways we can feel emotions through our senses; one of them is a sensual reaction within your body. Isn't the wildly beating heart such a thing?

  Yes, strictly speaking, it is. We had a faculty meeting today in the commons room on the ground floor of this building, and when I came out there was a great crowd around the elevator, and I was with Rip Lhamon, who's in seriously good shape. He said, "Too many people, let's walk." Not wanting to seem a wimp, I said, "Sure," and we walked up five floors. My heart was beating wildly by the end of this climb. It was not from passion.

  That particular internal sense impression is so easy, so widely applicable, as to have the impact of an abstraction. "My heart was beating wildly"; we don't know what that's all about. Well, "with passion." Now, passion is an abstraction—you know, you're feeling "passion"; you have an intellectual response to that.

  Let's go back to the romance novel example—believe me, men have their literary equivalents—and say that within a half-mile radius of this room tonight, there is a woman sitting in her study or in her kitchen, and her own heart is beating wildly in empathy. She is weeping, she is growing ardent— that's an abstraction, but that's what we're talking right now— over such sentences as "Her heart beat wild with passion." Does that not prove that this is literature? How is that not art if it can induce that kind of reaction in a reader?

  It is not art, because her emotional response is a result of her filling in the blanks left by that abstraction. The direct, visceral response to the text results from her filling in from her own fantasies, her own past, and her own aspirations. Abstract, summarizing, generalizing, and analytic language will induce the reader to fill in the blanks and thereby distance her from the work and the characters. The moment-to-moment, fresh, organically connected sense impressions of the work of art will draw the reader into it. In the emotional reaction to a work of art, you do not fill in from yourself; you leave yourself. You enter into the character and into the character's sensibility and psychology and spirit and world. It's the difference between masturbation and making love. The former is a self-referential experience; you have, on the surface, a similar response, but it's a closed loop. In making love, you leave yourself and enter into the other; that is the experience between two people who are connecting in deeper ways. And that's the experience of literature.

  I am talking here about the reader's experience, but we understand that what the writer puts on the page produces that experience. This is another important difference between the creation of a fictional work of art and a work of entertainment. The evidence is in the text. Nonartists—and I would include not only entertainment writers, by the way, but didactic writers as well; not only Stephen King but, let's say, Jean-Paul Sartre as a novelist—before they write a single word, the nonartists know exactly the effect they wish to have on their readers, whether emotional or intellectual. Stephen King wants to scare the hell out of you. Jean-Paul Sartre wants, well, to scare the hell out of you, but also to convince you of the cosmic verities inherent in the existentialist worldview. These writers know these effects ahead of time and so they construct an object to produce them.

  But the artist does not know. She doesn't know what she knows about the world until she creates the object. For the artist, the writing of a work of art is as much an act of exploration as it is expression, an exploration of images, of moment-to-moment sensual experience. And this exploration comes from the nature of art and the nature of the artistic process as I've been trying to describe it to you.

  Since I have been insisting on the dangers of abstraction, I'm going to offer you a potentially very dangerous paradox. I'm going to give you a loaded gun and tell you to stick it into your mouth. You hear me talking about the antiartistic modes of discourse: generalization, interpretation, and so forth. If you read a fairy tale it's always flat and disappointing and full of summary, yet all of us have had intense, memorable experiences of them. A fairy tale is not really meant to be read on the page, and your memory of that kind of story originates, let's say—let's not talk about Florida, but up north—on a cold winter night, fresh out of a hot bath, snuggled into the covers—got them up to your ears—the wind is blowing outside you can hear it in the eaves of the house—your mother is sitting at your elbow, the lamp is low, and she's reading this fairy tale to you, and the voice goes up and down. Your toes are warm now and it's a ravishing experience. It's those other elements that make for the moment-to-moment sensual experience of that kind of storytelling.

  A similar experience can potentially occur in a work of literary art, because the narrator sits in your sensibility as a character. The voice of that character can offer the reader a sensual moment-to-moment experience. For a later session you all will have read my short story "Open Arms" [see appendix]. In the first sentence, the narrator says, "I have no hatred in me." Well, hatred is an abstraction, and it's a bit of an analysis. But the next sentence is "I'm almost certain of that." With that "almost" we have a context in which we hear something different from what he's saying. Dramatic irony is now at work. We have a place to stand that allows us to interpret differently from the way he interprets. His abstraction doesn't engage our minds; it engages us in the response to his personality, which is a sensual response.

  You will find many voices, even in extended passages, that use some abstraction or analysis in literary fiction, but you will never find those modes of discourse used for surface effects or surface information. They have to do with the sensual presence of voice. This is especially true of first person narrators, but each third person voice also is absolutely distinctive. All writing, in fact, has a narrative persona—your cereal box this morning had a personality. All writing has within it a persona identifiable by diction, vocabulary, syntax. You don't analyze it. You respond to it directly.

  You understand why this is a dangerous notion for you, when you're still trying to find your way into your unconscious and trying not to avert your eyes? The little voice that has failed to get you to cut your nails instead of writing, or clean the toilet instead of writing, or read a good book instead of writing—that little voice is going to seize on this paradox and say, "Oh well, my character can explain that; it's just his character." Very dangerous.

  I want now to give you some examples from literature of this slippery, evasive, most important thing called yearning. I'm going to read four passages from four diverse works by four wonderful writers and then look at them in terms of yearning.

  The first piece is the opening of Janet Burroway's novel, Cutting Stone, a novel set back early in the twentieth century. Eleanor, our point-of-view character, and her husband, Laurel, are on a train heading west. He has tuberculosis. They're going to Arizona for his health; he's taken a job there as a bank manager. Notice that the yearning is not addressed here explicitly, but the first epiphany happens very early.

  Outside the club car window, flat desert nothing as far as the eye could see; endless stubble in level light. They were still two days short of Arizona. Eleanor sipped an early aperitif, perspiring jagged rings on the armholes of her pongee suit. L
aurel was skimming a Commerce Chronicle, occasionally coughing a discreet, dry cough. He had taken off his jacket, self-deprecating, murmuring, "When in Rome .. . ," and in pin-striped vest and four-in-hand he looked crisp, compact.

  Under the rhythmic chug of the train ran a thinner sound, a continuous screech of metal on metal that put Eleanor in mind of rending silk. She felt this image through her abdomen as if the track were a single tear all the way back to Maryland. A copy of House Beautiful lay in her lap, and she read, "No nation has studied homebuilding so persistently and long as the English, and consequently none has arrived at anything like such general excellence."

  This sentence had nothing to do with her and could not logically be met with grief. But the raw lot of her unbuilt house rose in her mind, overgrown with lush creeper, a stand of oak. She had spent the better part of a year imagining, then sketching, a facade in that little Baltimore wilderness, and a layout she knew so well that she could walk it out on the ground.

  She was losing everything. Everything in memory and all that never was to be; and things the more poignant because she hadn't noticed that she cared for them. The wood planes in Daddy's warehouse, her hand

  patting along the shelf as she told over their names by heart: plow, bull nose, dado, beading, rabbet, slitting. Who ever would have thought she'd grieve for the planes?

  "Outside the club car window, flat desert nothing as far as the eye can see; endless stubble in level light." This is our first image. We have not yet placed the point of view, although we will shortly see that this is Eleanor's perception and see the landscape as revealing character. What's missing there? First of all, there's no home, no house, there's no place to live here, and—interestingly—there's no verb. Very quickly, the yearning for a place in the world becomes clear. In a world where there is no place, there is no life, and so the very part of speech which signifies life and movement is missing from the first image in the book. A pseudosentence—even, ironically, a semicolon, as though there were sentences on either side, but it's grammatical nonsense—displays the fact that there's no verb, no life. I talked to you about the organic nature of art, everything echoing everything else. This is a wonderful example of that.