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

When you go back and examine the twang, I want you to focus not on the symptoms — that is, the technical aspects of it — but the cause. Think of cause in light of what I've been saying about process. If the evidence shows that this work absolutely comes from the unconscious and the character has manifest, felt yearning, only then can you begin to think in technical terms. I don't want to hear technical observations until these other things are right. My most common critique will be to show you in the text where I feel the yearning is absent; the indicators that the fiction came from your head.

I warn you that my most common recommendation will he: Put this away and never look at it again. Do not rewrite, do not edit, do not fiddle, do not work this over. It came from the wrong place. You see how you got into your head this time; next time go somewhere else. In your own criticism of each other, as well, I want you to focus on the root problems — yearning, moment-to-moment sensual experience — we've been talking about here. Then we can move on to matters of craft and technique that you'll get with brilliant insight elsewhere.

In our workshops, always cite text when you comment. This is the spot. And if you can't say what the matter is exactly, don't make something up. Just say, "You know, I don't know why this didn't work but it didn't work for me here," and we can examine it. Don't feel we've got to find technical solutions or think up reasons. That draws you into your head too, and I'd rather you say, "Fourth paragraph, twang," and that's your critical comment, and that will be useful.

Misty has asked about a problem beyond the workshop. She says she's got stories that she's worked on for two or three years. These stories were workshopped, and she got a lot of suggestions, and she did a lot of revising, and yet there's so much work to be done — there always seems to be work to be done — that she doesn't even feel she should send them out. What do you do? How do you know when to send a story out and when to give up on it? Well, any short story you've been working on for two or three years — this might not be true of a novel, of course — the odds are that the story came from your head to start with. You need to go back and look at it as if you were a reader coming to somebody else's work. If you are convinced that in spite of all the problems in that story, the work originated in your unconscious, and you feel there is manifest yearning in that character, then by all means you should revisit it. But just as you can have bad from-the-head writing, you can have bad from-the-head criticism, so I would urge you to go back to the very first draft you did and put aside anything anybody has said to you. Go back to the draft that is closest to your center. It may need work — even if we are in touch with our unconscious, parts of the story get willed in and some don't, so you still have to overcome all that — but the fact is that many, many workshops give wrongheaded criticism. You know, it's the blind leading the potentially sighted here. And ultimately, you will and should have only a very small number of people you trust to read your work.

So revisit your own work as if it were someone else's; do the best you can with it, and when you've revisited it a few times, and the twangs are now essentially gone in your own artistic view, put it in an envelope and send it out. As soon as you put it out in the world, let it go; just let it go. You move on to the next thing kicking around in your unconscious; you go down there and wrestle it out of there. Just keep on doing that.

If somebody rejects the story, with whatever criticism— you're going to get bad criticism from literary magazines too, let's face it — you let it go. What is the editorial reader's frame of mind? They have fifty things on their desk today, and there are going to be fifty tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. Do you think this puts them in a frame of mind where they are naked to each manuscript they open? Where they put aside the worldview they've held all their lives and open up to a new voice, a new vision of the world? Rarely. That's why a lot of bad stuff gets perpetuated, the bland stuff and the mediocre stuff. It's because often those screening readers — I'm talking about those first two people who see it — those readers, just by the very nature of what they do, are going to be if not consciously looking for, at least more open to, things familiar to them. So all of this works against the unique voice of the real artist. And this happens at the highest, most prestigious, slickest magazines — for any number of reasons that don't have to do with art.

This is a good moment to make another point about how to read a work of art. You should read slowly. You should never read a work of literary art faster than would allow you to hear the narrative voice in your head. Speed-reading is one reason editors and, not incidentally, book reviewers can be so utterly wrongheaded about a particular work of art. By their professions they are driven to speed-read. Some book reviewers review three or four books a week. Such reviewers could theoretically be fine on works of nonfiction. Or certain works of fiction that do not rely on many of the essential qualities I've been trying to identify for you as the characteristics of art. But if you read four books a week and you read them all at pretty much the same pace, you are inevitably going to be a bad reader of literature. A speed-reader necessarily reads for concept, skipping "unnecessary" words; she is impervious to the rhythms of the prose and the revelations of narrative voice and the nuances of motif and irony. This makes a legitimate response to a work of art impossible.

For this and for other nonaesthetic reasons, you're going to get all kinds of responses from all kinds of people in your lives, folks, and the nonsense never ends. It will never end for you, so you need to cultivate now your own inner confidence in your vision of things.

Of course, the flip side of that is I had such inner confidence when I wrote "The Chieu Hoi," the terrible story I 'm going to read to you next week, that I was blind to its deficiencies. It's a paradox of life as an artist (or an artist manque).

While I'm at it, let me make a point about life experience. You grew up reading novels and collections of short stories — or Janet and I did — where no matter how short the bio of the eminent writer, there'd be a sentence like, "He picked grapes in California, drove an ambulance in Italy, worked as a newspaper reporter. Dishwasher. Worked in a power plant in Mississippi" — and so forth. It was understood in the culture that artists had to be directly connected to the real world. Now, even in this day and age, people who get lost in the track I'm about to describe to you have some kind of childhood or young adulthood, and the first novel of the hot young writer with the big-name publisher takes its power from the fact that there was some life actually lived at some point. But the bio says, "Got his undergraduate degree at Amherst or Brown, took his MFA at the University of Iowa, and has been teaching at such and such a college." The second novel, if the author is lucky, is a kind of derivation of the first; but the third novel is about a professor having an affair with a student, and the fourth novel is about a novelist. You just see the life — and, not incidentally, the career — shutting down. Then this author starts writing nonfiction. The enduring artists are ravenous for life, ravenous for experience. And so the things you've done in the world beyond academia, things that are not rooted in books and defined by ideas, these things fill up your unconscious, they are the primary stuff of your compost heap.

Now, in the context of certain stories or books you are given to write, some of your "life experience" will necessarily have to come from a kind of research, and I'd like to mention several rich resources for that research — beginning with the Internet, which is a whole new sort of library for writers. The kinds of sense detail you need are available in a way that they never were before. An example from my own experience: in Mr. Spaceman there's an old woman telling a story about her youth when she went out walking, came over the peak of a sand dune, and observed the flight of the first Wright brothers plane — which gave her the lifelong yearning to fly. When she describes that plane later in her life, she would know exactly what kind of cloth was stretched over the skeleton. But I didn't know. Now, how do you find out such a detail? You could spend hours searching in a traditional library — because you wouldn't find it in the obvious places like an encyclopedia. But on the Internet — at the time, Google didn't exist; AltaVista was the best search engine, so I went to AltaVista and put in "Wright brothers," "plane," and "material," and "cloth." Three minutes later, I'm at a Smithsonian Institute Web page where I discover that it was muslin.