From Where You Dream

by Robert Olen Butler

  Now, there are a couple of ways to go here. Let me deal first with the possibility that you're going to go all the way through to the end of the book, arranging your cards, plotting your whole novel this way. I did that with Countrymen of Bones (and in the process my two hundred cards resolved themselves into ninety-two).

  What happens as you move along, in your trance, picking up your cards one after the other? Say you get to card number 22—scene number 22—and when you choose the next scene out of the remaining 178, you realize there's a hiatus.

  There's a gap in the action between 22 and the next card. Now you can dream up some scenes to fill the gap. Go back into your trance and dream two or three cards in there. At some point you're going to find yourself dreaming, on cue, scenes that you didn't get to the first time, filling gaps. You'll also find that a lot of scenes you have dreamed aren't going to make it into the final structure of the novel. And you'll find that the contradictions become reconciled as the structure takes shape and you find your way through to the end. If you're arranging your cards in this extreme way, all the way to the end of the book, number the cards, one to however many represents the whole structure.

  During the brainstorming phase, do not give any consideration whatsoever to continuity. Embrace the seeming randomness. If you are tapping into your unconscious and moving around a legitimate character with legitimate yearning, it's hard to say what your unconscious is already perceiving and contextualizing. Once you finish the dreamstorming—weeks—then you try to bring order to that randomness. However, you're simply looking for continuity from one scene to the next. You are looking for the through-line among all those disparate parts. The nature of transition is totally unconsidered. There are so many potential moments and so many possibilities of scene in this book that the only way to explore them fully without willing them into a structure is to let them happen at their own seemingly random pace. Then, only after that, your job is indeed to see the sequence that makes narrative sense of the disparate pieces.

  Let me digress for a moment on the subject of research. I always record the books I read on index cards. I'm looking for different things than people look for in academic research, and my cards usually represent a personal index of sense details. Sense details, scenes, images you find in your research you can record on your cards and plug them into the sequence as you arrange. For example, Countrymen of Bones was set in the Alamogordo desert during the building of the first atomic bomb. This book took some historical research, as well as reading in nuclear physics and archeology, and the cards allowed me to indicate briefly certain things I might need to know for certain scenes. For example, one of my main characters worked on the bomb, and his job was to lead the team trying to craft the lens in exactly the right shape to hold in the explosion. I didn't have to know everything about the bomb; as soon as I read about the team working on that lens, I said, "That's Lloyd." So I did a lot of indexing of that particular job, the cloud chamber where they tracked the beta particles as they flew off the explosion, the photographs they took of the smoke in the chamber, the track of the beta particle as it poops out. Such details were suggested by scenes in my brainstorming, and some suggested scenes. (For example, Lloyd rearranges a table of cloud chamber photos in a scene.) When you record such details, on your card are just six or eight words, a sense detail, an indicator of scene, or maybe a reference to a book where you can fill in a historical or professional detail. The juice is not written out of these scenes because you've made sure you didn't start writing the description or the dialogue; you just put down the bare indicator and then you went on.

  When your cards are arranged, you take the first card and you start writing the novel. Here's the first scene. And it's ready for your unconscious because all you have here is eight words, a sense impression to call up that scene. You go into your trance and you write that scene, and now the second scene comes up, and you write that scene, and then you write the third card, and—guess what happens in the third scene. Something you didn't expect. You don't even know where it came from, because it's coming from your unconscious. Great. That leads you to a fourth scene and a fifth scene you didn't expect. Great.

  But now you feel that the story has to be drawn back into the main thrust of everything yet to come. Now that you've got an unexpected third, fourth, and fifth scene, you go back and look at the fourth card, and it doesn't fit quite the way it did at first. Wait a minute, this changes some things. In fact, you must go back and look at all the cards, numbers 4 to 92 (or however many you have). What do you do now? The next day you go into your trance and lay out cards 4 to 92 and rearrange them. In essence, you rewrite your book structurally.

  I personally write from beginning to end of a book. I don't want to be dogmatic about this, because I'm sure a particular artist may do it some other way. But it's hard for me to imagine writing very much out of sequence, because sequence is crucial in a narrative. If everything is organic in a work of art, and I skip six or eight or ten scenes to write this scene that feels hot to me right now, how do I make decisions about character, voice, image, event in that scene? And there are crucial matters of motif, of recomposition, that I will soon speak of, which are impossible to manage by skipping ahead out of context. In a contextual vacuum, you make decisions that are at best tentative. And why are you doing that? I think oftentimes the impulse is to avert your eyes: that's the scene I can do safely; the scene that is not really going to challenge me; that's a good scene to unite today.

  So I would say it probably doesn't work to "write around" in a novel. Structure happens from the imperatives of the whole object you're creating. When you are driven by the desire for the organic wholeness of the object, and by the need to recompose the elements that are already in the work, and by the dynamics of your character's desire, structure will inevitably come from that.

  Yet this system, if it's going to work for you, has to be totally flexible. The fact that you've got ninety-two cards in a row doesn't mean that you're going to write those ninety-two cards out one after the other and think you've got a book. No, you're rewriting and rewriting and rewriting, over and over, not on the level of phrases and paragraphs, but on the level of structure. There's a lot of rewriting going on here, but it's not in drafts, it's in following those instinctive, from-the-hot-spot surprising things, and then restructuring everything to come as a result. It's got to stay flexible, and it's got to stay from the trance, or you will pull the trigger on the shotgun and blow off the back of your novel.

  It's also possible to use this system in a more limited, but still more flexible way. In They Whisper, my seventh novel, for instance, I was dealing with a very complex structure driven by the flow of delicate emotional associations. No way in hell I could anticipate what the sequence was going to be. But I dreamstormed two hundred cards, and then all I did was look for eight cards that might be near the beginning, and I strung them out and rearranged and rearranged them. Then I wrote those scenes. Once they were exhausted, I went and got six or eight more cards, and so forth. The useful thing was that the possibilities already indicated on the cards helped to guide and structure my unconscious, which was improvising the form as it went.

  I've never used the cards the same way twice—maybe they operate for me like a tarot deck. But this is fundamental: keep it open, fluid; realize that nothing you do here is locked in, it's got to stay subordinate to the trance state in order to work.

  The advantage I see of this system over multiple drafts is that in the big sprawling rough draft, no matter how open-minded the writer is, she has to make approximations in the first draft, then she must make approximations in the second, and more in the third, adding more rough, headlong stuff in the fourth. If the book is at all complex, the draft writer will hit forks in the road, over and over, and must choose this fork instead of that. If that happens early in the book, or even in the middle, by the time she gets to the end and the novel is sprawling in whatever way it sprawls, it's very difficult to go b
ack and take the other fork she faced on page 30. With this system, all the forks are fine—you follow this one, you follow that one; you go down this fork in the sixth week of dream-storming; in the tenth week, you go down that one, as far as you want to go—because at each point you are rewriting and redreaming the book on the level of structure.

  For me, it feels as if this system gives the writer something that she loses doing the draft. But, ultimately you've got to get into your own personal white-hot center and get rid of anything in your process that interferes with that. If it means getting rid of draft writing, you get rid of it; if it means getting rid of dreamstorming, you get rid of that.

  If you dreamstorm a short story, you have to understand that the working parts of short stories are not scenes, because most short stories don't have more than a handful of scenes. The working parts are of various sizes and shapes, perhaps a scene but also maybe an image, a fast-forward, a detail, a beat of dialogue. The lift of an eyebrow and Joe rapes Anna—each of those could be working pieces in the dreamstorming of a short story. Having five cards to represent a structure is not much use to you. You almost have to be a draft writer for short stories.

  Still, if you dreamstorm all those various elements, you might try this, which I've done sometimes: you take a legal pad and—maybe there are only three scenes in the story—put your indicator phrase of one at the top, one in the middle, and one toward the bottom. Then all the other elements you've dreamstormed for the story you might plug in under what scenes they may visit. It feels awkward to me, but I came late to writing short stories, after I'd been in my unconscious for a decade and written half a dozen novels from there. But I have talked to writers who have found the card system useful for short stories. It works particularly well for the rare sort of story that covers a long period of time or has a large number of scenes. I've also heard from writers for whom the system gives them impetus in their work; they know better where they're going, what sense details juice their scenes.

  Now, how do you make all the pieces fit together? How does something so irrational, so composed of minute details, so thoroughly rooted in the moment-to-moment sense—how does such an object cohere? How does a vision of the human condition emerge from such a thing?

  I've already mentioned my premise: that the literary art object is organic and emerges because every sensual detail interlocks with and resonates with every other detail. Everything circles back on itself. The deep patterning of the sensual details mirrors that deep, most patterned level of sense detail in the world. In music it's called motif, and we borrow that term for literature. Things return and return. The associative values of these returning things evolve and interconnect. As a reader you recognize the presence of motif, and as a writer, you create meaning in this way.

  At the beginning of the twentieth century acting was understood to be an art form in which an actor intellectually, consciously, willfully—often quite brilliantly, but willfully— took on the gestures, postures, facial expressions, and tone of voice of the character. Then Konstantin Stanislavsky came along to the Moscow Art Theatre and reimagined this art form. He said: No, you do not consciously, analytically put on a performance; that's not where performance comes from. Instead, the actor brings her own internal sense memory, her own sensory mechanism, into internal alignment with the sensory mechanism of the character. Once that has been accomplished, the external performance results. He said: Craft and technique are necessary, but they are secondary. They are downstream from where the performance begins, which is inside you. Inside you. This is what came to be called "method acting." It is at the heart of every good performance you see on the television, on the movie screen, on the stage today. Indeed, what I've been talking about with you all along could quite accurately be termed "method writing." It's based on many of the same insights.

  There's a teacher named Keith Johnstone, who writes on improvisation and on a process he calls reincorporating. People who do improvisation work with disparate elements, some of which may come to them from the audience. Johnstone says the improvising actor is like a man walking backward. He's going forward, but he's doing so constantly with reference to where he's been. The improviser makes progress only by looking back and reincorporating the things that are already present in the narrative.

  In a work of fiction those initial disparate, instinctive things come out of your dreamspace. But in writing as in improv—I promise you it's parallel—you cannot move forward narratively by transferring those elements onto your computer screen and saying, "OK, what's next?" Let's go back to Graham Greene and think about the decomposition of your life, that compost heap where all of your experiences have decomposed. Now you wish to compose a work of art. Your unconscious yields up things in an ongoing way, and as a narrator you're looking back always to what's already there. You move forward in a narrative by recomposing, reincorporating the things that are already at work in the story. What you end up with then are the interlocking elements, the return of elements, the motifs that bind everything in the work sensually together. When you do that, a gestalt emerges, a sum that is much greater than those parts. And the work thrums. The thrumming has to do with the interlocking of various tones and sounds and movements of the air.

  I want to give you an example. Forgive me, I'm going to go into some detail about that novel, Countrymen of Bones— a novel you've almost certainly not read—largely because I have trouble remembering anything else. Did I mention Graham Greene?

  Countrymen of Bones, as I said, is set in 1945, mostly in the Alamogordo desert. It's told as a third person narrative with two main point-of-view characters—that is, the narrator has access to two sensibilities. One of them is Darryl Reeves, an archeologist, who has found an Indian burial mound out in the middle of the desert. The mound dates from the seventeenth century, though the desert Indians of the seventeenth century were nomads. So this Indian tribe had to come from the Midwest where the mound builders were. What is it doing here? It's a great archeological find.

  Darryl has two grad students working with him, trying to uncover this Indian burial site, and as the book opens they've just cleared the mound away and are about to go into the tableau below the surface of the ground. There are B-29S doing practice bombing nearby, but most important, a thousand yards down the desert south of them, the first atomic bomb is being assembled. The first test is going to happen in fourteen weeks.

  The second major character is Lloyd Coulter, a nuclear physicist working on the bomb with J. Robert Oppenheimer, who's a minor character in the book. What we have are two men of the mind, Darryl and Lloyd, scientists who pride themselves on their rationality but who yearn for connection because they are very much disconnected from the world.

  I'm going to talk in secondary, artificial ways about this book now, not in the way the book is meant to be encountered.

  Each of the men is reining in a potential for violence. Lloyd, particularly, saw his father beat his mother, badly, over and over, and that knowledge roils deep inside him. Darryl seems at first not to have a potential for violence; his problem is disconnectedness, and the devastating loss of a wife who left him several years before.

  There's a third major character—not a point-of-view character—Anna Brown, in the Women's Army Corps. She's awakening to her independence, as many women did during the war. Lloyd has encountered her in the supply house of Los Alamos, and he greatly desires her. He arranges for her to be transferred down to the bomb site to work for him. At some point, Darryl also meets Anna and also falls for her. Oppenheimer, sympathetic to the young archaeologist, loans Anna Brown to the excavation site, so an intense jealous rivalry springs up between Lloyd and Darryl.

  On one site, then, the atom bomb is being created. On the other, that tableau being uncovered from the earth reveals an Indian king laid out on a cape of twenty thousand polished shell beads—meaning he was a great power. Darryl finds one, then another, and finally a third body within the sacred circle, all three of quite young wom
en whose necks have been broken. It's clear they were ritually murdered to accompany the king to the afterlife.

  When the army took over the Alamogordo desert, they put some ranchers off their property. At the very opening of the novel, in addition to the bombs on the horizon, you hear gunfire off to the east because one of those ranchers is holed up there, conducting a kind of guerrilla warfare in rage at having been forced off his ranch.

  The book, in its large patterns, is already about violence, is it not? That theme is tapped again when Darryl goes back to Santa Fe and meets a professor who had joined the army, had his back and leg shot off, and who brings rumors of the Holocaust going on in Europe. Political violence echoes the personal violence building between the two men.

  In its pattern of small details, also, the book returns to and recomposes its motifs.

  Look at their occupations. Darryl is an archeologist opening up the earth. When he thinks of the wife who left him, from whom he was aloof, he understands her only by looking at the things she has left on her dresser: a hair brush, a mirror, objects he examines as if they were pieces of an ancient excavation.

  He's awkward with Anna, but when he uncovers the first skeleton of a murdered woman (the sexing of a skeleton is a matter of feeling the pelvis; certain parts of the pelvis gape open farther in a woman), this is an intensely erotic scene. The young woman's presence in his consciousness is very strong.

  On the second page of the book, he pauses and wipes his brow. He looks at the trowel in his hand, his primary tool for uncovering the past, and he notes that the blade is as strong and as flexible "as a Toledo sword." Toledo, Spain, was a great sword-making center at the time that these Indians he's uncovering flourished.

  Well into the book, 158 pages into it, one of the ranchers who has been displaced by the government comes and takes Darryl and his two grad assistants hostage. The army has the place surrounded. The rancher threatens to kill his hostages. At some point, the young woman starts to weep, which angers the rancher, and he moves his rifle as if to kill her. Darryl is appalled, but what can he do? The rancher doesn't kill her, but a few moments later, to show he means business, he turns and fires his gun, and what he chooses for a target is the skull of one of the young women. The skull shatters. This is what makes Darryl act and exposes the pattern of his psychology. Lying there unnoticed in the dirt is the trowel that was introduced a hundred pages earlier in what metaphor? The Toledo sword. That's what he uses to kill the rancher. He is capable of killing a man, and he does it with what is the very symbol of his humane science but which was introduced with a metaphor of violence.