From Where You Dream

I am obsessed with books on writing and craft. I just did a quick count and I have somewhere on the order of forty-five of them. From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction by Robert Olen Butler, edited by Janet Burroway is one of the best.

This post is a bit of a cheat, since I used this review over at The Book Book several days ago, but I thought this book was worth talking about here too.

The book is less of a narrative on fiction writing than it is a transcription of a series of lectures Butler has given at Florida State University, where he teaches creative fiction writing.

Butler is the author of ten novels, two collections of short stories and is a Pulitzer Prize winner.

One of the things that make this book different from most is the tone. Most books on writing present methods and ideas as alternatives that may work for some writers and not for others. Butler makes no bones about what is and isn’t good fiction and he doesn’t mince words about how he believes you must pursue the creative process. Based on some of the reviews on Amazon, many readers couldn’t get past his voice and rejected what he said, based on that. My recommendation is to get over it, because he’s got a lot of great stuff in here.

The book is divided into three parts. The first has his lectures, and they read like lectures. He’s very clear that he’s talking about writing literary fiction, or creating art and he makes a distinction between art and commercial or genre fiction. Again, if this is going to offend you, you very likely won't care for this book, but you’d do well to smooth your feathers and see what he has to say, if you’re interested in some great ideas for elevating your fiction to the level of the best it can be.

He talks about “the zone”. All writers know this place and we do just about anything to find it as often as possible. He offers some valuable insights about “the zone” and accessing it. He talks a lot about writing from the unconscious, versus writing from the head. Unconscious = good; writing from the head = bad. He has an entire section on yearning and goes as far as to say that by far, the most common writing blunder that students and aspiring writers make is that they don’t make their characters yearn for something. The lecture called “Cinema of the Mind” is about the best I’ve ever read about showing and not telling, but it goes much deeper. By showing, he’s talking about concrete sensual details versus abstract, general description. Later on in the book, there is an actual exercise that he does with four students where he has them walk through a scene and describe what their characters are experiencing and it’s powerful. The students actually don’t do all that well – so useful in reading through this – because it’s very difficult to do, but by allowing us to be a fly on the wall, so to speak, the book really reinforces what sensual description is all about.

The section on Reading was especially intriguing to me, since I've been doing so much of it as a means to study great fiction. Butler emphasizes reading to evoke an aesthetic response, as opposed to reading analytically. From page 108-109:

“Your experience of this name should be aesthetic, not analytical. A kind of harmonic resonance is set up within you. That is the primary and appropriate response to a work of art. You don’t listen to a Beethoven symphony or look at a Monet painting or what Suzanne Farrell dance and walk away with your head full of ideas, having, say, sat in your chair and had the keen intellectual enjoyment of watching the way the themes of the first movement were echoed in the second and then turned into that crescendo in the fourth. That’s a separate kind of pleasure with certain value, but it is not the aesthetic response.

It seems to me that a lot of literature classes go wrong because the teachers, unintentionally but often intentionally, give the impression that writers are rather like idiots savants: they really want to say abstract, theoretical, philosophical things, but somehow they can’t quite make themselves do it. So they create these objects whose ultimate meaning and relevance and value come into being only after they have been subjected to the analysis of thoughtful literary critics, who translate that work into theoretical, philosophical, ideational terms.”

The third part of the book analyzes three actual short stories done by Butler’s students. The observations and critique are just invaluable.

I loved that this book touched on subjects that I just haven’t seen addressed quite in this way. There are some great techniques I’m anxious to try myself and I suspect this is one of the many books on writing that I will dog ear with repeated readings.

The biggest challenge I have with my current work in progress is that I've come to a point where I need to make a decision that impacts how I'll continue and how the story will be structured and it doesn't make any sense for me to write any more until I've done this. I feel very strongly that I need to access my unconscious mind in order to discover the rest of this story. It all makes sense on paper, but making that time and making that space to be open to inspiration is very difficult for me.

How do you do you find the space and the opportunity to open up your mind and solve your writing problems?

On Yearning

There was a great post on September 12th at One Hand Typing where Mardougrrl talked about some of the ideas Robert Olen Butler lays out in From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction. I was so intrigued that I bought the book and so far, I am captivated by his thought processes. There are things in this book that I’d not previously read in other books on writing and I feel like light bulbs are going off every time I read a new chapter.

Note on this book: Based on many of the Amazon reviews, a lot of readers are put off by Butlers very direct and opinionated style. Unlike many books on writing where the authors recommend that writers do what works for them, Butler comes across pretty strongly about the way to write. If you can get past the tone, it’s a great book.

My first epiphany was about what Butler refers to as yearning. Since I literally keep Kurt Vonnegut’s “Creative Writing 101” list of eight rules in front of me at all times (OK, I have them memorized), I certainly am aware of KV’s rule #3: “Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water”. This fundamental rule is in all books on craft. Until I read Butler, I was thinking about the things that characters want in much more concrete terms.

There is something about the way that Butler describes yearning that broke through to me. He rightly credits genre fiction with being very good at establishing a character’s desires. Typically, what the character wants is pretty clear in a romance or mystery, for example. Butler says that almost without exception, aspiring non-genre fiction writers tend to fail because they don’t establish their character’s yearning, or desires the vast majority of the time.

We can write great characterization, describe emotion, attitudes, opinions, and ideas but many times we overlook that major component – desire-- that is at the core of narrative and plot; that drives them.

It’s usually more subtle in contemporary fiction than it is in genre fiction, but it’s just as critical. Our characters yearn for love, for a sense of belonging, for success, respect, a home, community, friendship, acceptance, revenge, forgiveness, a mother, a father, a child, God, the past, escape from the past – literally dozens of possibilities.

What the characters yearn for is typically never stated. The reader and I suspect more often than not, the writer discovers early on what the character yearns for through our narrative descriptions and through the character’s thoughts and actions. I suspect it’s not something most writers are conscious of from the beginning.

For me, this was a Wyle E. Coyote moment – a cartoon anvil with the word “yearning” dropped out of the sky and landed on me. It gave me a true – holy @#$% moment. It all became clear to me why some contemporary novels seem to fall flat and it’s a huge reason why I often (OK always) struggle in my own writing. Knowing what my characters yearn for answers so many questions and solves so many problems for me, I just had to sit down and think about it. In the case of what I’m working on now, it was obvious – once I asked myself the question.

How much do you consciously think about what each of your characters yearns for? How much do you think it impacts everything else in your story?