Robert Butler - From Where You Dream - The Process of Writing Fiction

"Pip. Pip, sir."

"Show us where you live," said the man. "Pint out the place!"

I pointed to where our village lay, on the flat inshore, among the alder-trees and pollards, a mile or more from the church.

The man, after looking at me for a moment, turned me upside down, and emptied my pockets. There was nothing in them but a piece of bread. When the church came to itself — for he was so sudden and strong that he made it go head over heels before me, and I saw the steeple under my feet — when the church came to itself, I say, I was seated on a high tombstone, trembling, while he ate the bread ravenously.

Dickens begins with what they call the establishing shot. We're at "a memorable raw afternoon towards evening. At such a time I found out for certain that this bleak place overgrown with nettles was the churchyard…" We get a long shot in the gathering dark of the churchyard. And then, what does Dickens do? He cuts to close-ups and pans one after another along the tombstones — as we can tell from the formal phrasing "Late of the parish":

. that Philip Pirrip, Late of the Parish, and Also Georgiana Wife of the Above, were dead and buried; and that Alexander, Bartholomew, Abraham, Tobias, and Roger, infant children of the aforesaid, were also dead and buried.

These are, in fact, the graves of Pip's dead father, his dead mother, and dead brother, dead brother, dead brother, dead brother, dead brother — one after another.

You see the absolutely essential quality of fiction-as-film when you see what he does then. We go from that last dead brother to what?

. and that the dark flat wilderness beyond the churchyard, intersected with dikes and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle feeding on it, was the marshes.

He lifts his camera from the dead brother and looks off to a long shot out over the mounds and gates and dikes to the marshes, beyond the churchyard, and then where?

. and that the low, leaden line beyond was the river.

Then we go to an even longer shot:

… and that the distant savage lair from which the wind was rushing was the sea.

He takes us to an extreme shot at the farthest horizon. Then what? He cuts from that distant horizon to a close-up of the orphan child, the narrator of our novel, "the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry was Pip."

How many writers would do this, with perfect logic?

My first most vivid and broad impression of the identity of things seems to me to have been gained on a memorable raw afternoon towards evening. At such a time I found out for certain that this bleak place overgrown with nettles was the churchyard; and that Philip Pirrip, Late of the Parish, and Also Georgiana Wife of the Above, were dead and buried; and that Alexander, Bartholomew, Abraham, Tobias, and Roger, infant children of the aforesaid, were also dead and buried; and that the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry was Pip.

Perfectly logical. Perfectly thoughtful. Dead father, dead mother, dead brother, dead brother, dead brother, dead brother, dead brother, last remaining child of the family.

Montage, of course. But in such a novel, where you went from the last dead brother to the remaining child, you would be in a totally different world from the one that Dickens is creating. You would be in a world where the focus is on the plight of an orphan, a family in trouble — a sociological problem, a sentimental tale of a struggling child.

Dickens's world is about something far greater, and Pip does not yearn for a family; he yearns for his destiny. When you move from that last dead child to the marshes and the river and to the far horizon, and the whole sensual world is bleak and empty and mysterious, and there's a dark wind blowing from that far horizon, and then you cut to the child — that montage creates something utterly different, a world in which the issue is not just, "Gosh, I don't have parents. I'm a kid struggling," but "I am a human soul trying to work out the destiny of my existence."

Let's go further.

"Hold your noise!" cried a terrible voice, as a man started up from among the graves at the side of the church porch. "Keep still, you little devil, or I'll cut your throat!"

How does Pip respond to this?" 'Oh, don't cut my throat, sir,' I pleaded in terror.." Now, I don't mean to presume to edit Charles Dickens, but Dickens sometimes wrote in haste. Does he really need to say "in terror"? Do you understand what I'm talking about in terms of abstractions? Certainly the world of emotional abundance he's creating can tolerate these extra taps on the knee, but they are not necessary. Pip's terror is manifest already, is it not?

But the important thing to understand here is that the man says, "I'll cut your throat," and Pip says, "Don't cut my throat." How long do you think it took him to come to that response? A nanosecond. And how is it written? Pay attention, because there's something really interesting about these three sentences:

.. "Keep still, you little devil, or I'll cut your throat!"

A fearful man, all in coarse gray, with a great iron on his leg. A man with no hat, and with broken shoes, and with an old rag tied around his head. A man who had been soaked in water, and smothered in mud, and lamed by stones, and cut by flints, and stung by nettles, and torn by briars; who limped, and shivered, and glared and growled; and whose teeth chattered in his head as he seized me by the chin.

"Oh, don't cut my throat, sir,"..

Time stops here, doesn't it? This is extreme slow motion, because all of that comes between "I'm going to cut your throat" and "Oh, don't. " What is the psychological reality of that? When was the last time you skidded your car on a wet pavement? What happens? You hear every beat of your heart; that telephone pole is floating in your direction, in extreme slow motion, right? It is absolutely organically appropriate for time to slow down drastically in a moment of terror like that. And remember I'm talking about the organic nature of art; every tiny sensual detail has to resonate into everything else. What's unusual about those three sentences in that paragraph where time has stopped? I bet most of you didn't even notice that not one of them is a complete sentence. Listen to it again:

A fearful man, all in coarse gray, with a great iron on his leg. A man with no hat, and with broken shoes, and with an old rag tied round his head. ["Tied round his head" is a subordinate clause here.] A man who had been soaked in water, and smothered in mud, and lamed by stones, and cut by flints, and stung by nettles, and torn by briars; who limped, and shivered, and glared and growled; and whose teeth chattered in his head as he seized me by the chin.

There's not a single independent verb in those three sentences. Why? Time has stopped. What are the parts of speech that signify the passage of time? Active verbs. Things happen. But here nothing is happening except perception. It is beautifully appropriate — and you don't even notice, except afterward, in an analytic way.

The organic nature of art, down to syntax. We've dealt so far with very clear examples, I think, of the correspondence of film and fiction techniques, but there are many, many others. I daresay that if you examine the tiniest filmic concept, the most subtle, nuanced filmic concept, you can find its equivalence in fiction.

I want to leave you with one more example, a subtle one, but I think an unmistakable one: the common transitional device called dissolve. The dissolve is a transition from one image to another where the first fades while the second comes into focus superimposed over the first. The two things, then, mix inextricably for a time.

I want to give you an example of dissolve from my own work — a novel hardly ever read by anybody, called Wabash. I need to give you some background first. Deborah and Jeremy Cole live in the fictional steel mill town of Wabash, Illinois. It's 1932. They're both struggling with private demons of one sort or another. He's getting involved in radical politics at the steel mill where he works; she's trying to reconcile a family of women who rip each other to pieces as a matter of daily course. But Jeremy and Deborah carry a shared grief that has been a barrier in their marriage for some time — the death of their little girl, Lizzy, who died from pneumonia a couple of years before. They have not made love since Lizzy died. They do not touch. There's no intimacy between them at all. In this scene they go off for a picnic on an ancient Indian burial mound, a gesture toward reconciliation, trying to find moments when they can reconnect. But as the scene progresses, they lapse into separate memories about their daughter, memories that are lovely but painful.