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

The scene partly represents a technical problem — not, I need hardly stress anymore, that I was conscious of finding a technical solution to an analytically perceived problem. This is analysis after the fact. But the problem was that I wrote the book in the third-person limited omniscient, with two point-of-view characters, Deborah and Jeremy. In the sections that begin in Jeremy's sensibility, the narrator has no access to Deborah. And in the sections that begin with Deborah, the narrator has no access to Jeremy. This is so for the first eighty-some pages of the book. But in this scene of the picnic, just as they aspire to come together — so does the narrator get into both sensibilities at the same time. The narrator moves between these two isolated reveries, hoping to bring them together somehow.

A couple of things you need to know: the memory that Deborah has is of seeing Lizzy outside the house one day crouching near the grass, swaying in front of a poisonous copperhead snake, singing a variation of the old nursery rhyme "Hush little snaky, don't you cry." The copperhead is swaying and coiling as well; Lizzy has literally charmed the snake.

Jeremy's memory involves Lizzy and his work at the steel mill. He has Lizzy on his shoulders. It's nighttime. He's stopped near the slag pile and has an unobstructed view of the blast furnace. He's watching its beauty: the flames of the ovens and the billows of smoke, the constellation of lights on the equipment, and a single prominent smokestack that is flaring off a flame from the excess gasses.

Here is the passage that uses the technique of the dissolve:

Deborah waited motionless as Lizzy sang to the snake and finally Deborah whispered, Come away now, and her daughter rose slowly and left the copperhead where it lay charmed on the grass and when Lizzy was near, Deborah grasped her hand and Jeremy reached up to grasp his daughter's hand and she said, What's that jelly fire? and he looked and he knew at once what she meant — the flame coming from the tall, thin stack. It's a bleeder valve, he said, and he felt her chin touch the top of his head; he could imagine her resting her head on his so that she could study this beautiful flame and when Lizzy looked up at her mother she smiled a smile that seemed full of some special knowledge and Lizzy's thoughtful study of the flame and her smile at the charming of the snake brought both Jeremy and Deborah to the same tremor of grief. They each felt it in the other's body and to feel the other's grief was too much to add to their own and they pulled gently apart. Jeremy rose and walked to the western edge of the mound and he looked off to the mill and Deborah lay flat and closed her eyes against the sky and she thought she heard a gliding nearby in the grass but she did not care and did not move.

Did you hear the dissolve? It's set up with Lizzy's question, "What's that jelly fire?" and Jeremy knows at once what she means. Focus on "He could imagine her resting her head on his so that she could study this beautiful flame and when Lizzy looked up at her mother. " Now we are in his reverie, and for a moment there the two images are superimposed because the "looking up" we first take to mean Lizzy looking up from her father's head toward that bleeder valve; but then we realize it's with her mother. "And when Lizzy looked up." It's even tapped a little bit, because it is linked to the same gesture that Jeremy made to look in the same direction. So we have a clear sense of her looking up at the flame while she's with Jeremy and then all of a sudden she's also looking at her mother. Then we adjust to seeing her looking up only at her mother. And so one dissolves into the other. After this, the narrative voice goes back for a long while into the two separate sensibilities. So the flowing together in the narrative voice has a kind of ironic sadness to it, which resonates in the detail, because it gives a sense of what could happen between these two people but, in fact, does not.

So I urge you as fiction writers to recognize that the nature of the process you're working with is filmic. A lot of the problems that I've been articulating for you in the last few weeks can yield to you if you give yourself over to elements that are visual, sensual, transitional. Otherwise, you can get bogged down in the stodgy, unyielding doughiness of abstraction. You try to put the transitions in and explain these things, and the narrative power is lost.

Before I leave you with all this talk of film, I want to borrow one more notion from another art form, music, which you will recognize as relevant to film and also important to fiction. When you're listening to a song, a certain kind of expectation develops — harmonically, or in its key or in its rhythm or in its color — and when that expectation is set up, the moment that gives you chill bumps is when the music cuts against the grain. It suddenly spins the harmonic, shifts the key, varies the rhythm, sets the orchestration askew. Musicians call it the rub. Two things rub against each other, and that's what gives it life, the unexpected thing that nevertheless feels just right. And that is what happens, too, in the creation of character. When you are inside your characters' yearnings, whenever they're feeling one way, going in one direction, showing certain attitudes, emotions — open your unconscious to the opposite; cut against the grain. Rub the thing that seems predictable.

I want to move on now to suggest a system of predreaming, which I used in its purest form for a novel I published back in 1983 called Countrymen of Bones and which I think helped to shape my deep instinctive reactions in the process. But hear me when I say "shape" and "instinctive." Our dreams are not "smart." There is no intellect in this world powerful enough to create a great work of novelistic art. Only the unconscious can fit together the stuff of fiction; the conscious mind cannot.

When I said earlier that you could get away with a certain, carefully managed amount of abstraction and analysis that was a part of your character's voice, I put a pistol in your mouth. This is a shotgun. I'm even going to cock the trigger for you. I'm going to teach you a way of getting your sensibility around the daunting prospect of creating such an object as a novel. I can't emphasize strongly enough that this is a dangerous system; it must be used as an aid to your unconscious, your trance. If you let this process draw you into your analytic mind, it will do far more harm than good.

Let me describe two kinds of novelists. First there are those who preplan. They outline. They know the end before they begin. But those who figure out what they're going to say before they begin to say it are utterly lost, because if they adhere to the stages of their plan in a kind of "all right, that's done" sort of way, they will end up writing from their heads, automatically.

Then there's the draft writer, who leads an admirably dismal existence. He starts the same way every other sensual artist does. He's got characters floating in his unconscious. He intuits their yearning. He has attached to them a milieu, a circumstance, perhaps an external moment in the world, some event to block that yearning. These are the basic elements you all have when you start a novel. The draft writer begins a draft for the very purposes I've been talking about; he is rightly afraid of being drawn into his mind and his analytical self. He would never preplan, because that would trap him like literal memory, like a "message," like preconceived ends, and thereby destroy his ability to get into the unconscious. So the draft writer feels the necessity of taking the merest hints to start the novel and then plunging in, making approximations, writing rough, by any and all means continuing to write and write and write through a great sprawling draft. And the draft writer relishes this. "Ah, I've got this mass of stuff, and OK, I've got to do the second draft now and the third and the fourth, and the seventeenth, and that's fine. " Great works of art have been created this way, and I suspect statistically it's the more common way to write a novel. It's done because those artists understand the danger of being sucked into their heads.