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

There are also a number of useful books that should be on your shelf. One that's really helpful in terms of sense details is called The Oxford-Duden Pictorial English Dictionary,

published by Oxford University Press. It's about 650 pages of line drawings of everything under the sun — a warehouse, a riverfront, a grocery store, whatever, and each of these very detailed drawings has sixty or seventy little numbered arrows to tell you what every part is called. If your character is walking out onto a pier in the Hudson River, and you have him sit down on one of those tubular, rounded things that comes out of the pier, with ropes around it where they tie up the ship— you sort of lose the moment if you say, "Well, he sat down on that tubular thing…." OK, you go to the drawing of the docks and you see an arrow pointing at that thing and, by golly, it's a bollard. They've got two pages of hats that tell you the difference between a porkpie and a boater and a bowler and a fedora, and so forth. It's a great resource.

The M erriam-Webster's Collegiate and the Random House Webster's Unabridged are to my knowledge the only two dictionaries of American English that will tell you when a word entered the language — and when you're writing in period that can be crucial to know. I was writing Wabash, set in 1932, and the cop was swinging — I was going to say a billy club, but billy club came into the language in the 1940s. Nightstick came in at the turn of the twentieth century, so it's his nightstick he's swinging, not his billy club. These are very useful dictionaries in that respect. And, of course, there is the venerable Oxford English Dictionary, that gives you the timing for every subdefinition of each word, which the other two do not.

Another useful book is The Pantone Book of Color by Leatrice Eiseman and Lawrence Herbert, published by the art

house Harry Abrams, which contains thousands of different shades of colors along with their official names. Sometimes having such a visual point of reference will be helpful.

There are several books that can aid you with period detail, but one I like is called American Costume, 1915–1970 by Shirley Miles O'Donnol, Indiana University Press, which will show you what people wore every day. You might also look for copies of all those wonderful old reproductions of Sears, Roebuck catalogs, which were popular a few years ago. You should steal a big city phone book next time you go to New York or Los Angeles.

There are a number of baby-naming books that I find really useful. One I especially like is Beyond Jennifer and Jason, Madison and Montana, which gives the period popularity, connotation, classical meaning, and so forth of hundreds of names. I find it useful to name my characters very early in the process, and it can be important to find the right name.

There's a great book called A Field Guide to American Houses, which will give you a view of and the accurate names for architectural features of common domiciles. Another, called American Shelter, is also useful in this regard.

It's a good idea to have handy a good slang dictionary. Two I recommend are The New Dictionary of American Slang and the Thesaurus of American Slang, both edited by Robert Chapman.

I know that you've read "Open Arms" for tonight [see appendix], which is a story I'm proud of. But if I'm going to critique many of your stories by telling you to put them away and never look at them again, I think it's only fair that I begin by expos-ing to you a story that I had to put away and never look at again — except for the purpose of illustrating a good writer's bad beginnings — a story whose origins were, eventually, eighteen years later, recomposted into "Open Arms."

So tonight I'm going to treat you to that awful story, and I'm going to begin by reading a bit from the notebook that I carried around Vietnam in my hip pocket. I carried it with great self-importance. My ambition back then was to be famous. I carried that book in my hip pocket thinking that I could see it under glass some day: This was the curve of his butt. These are the smudges made by his fingers. Yes, this was his toothbrush.

These are the false things, where ambition goes wrong. Your ambition as an artist is to give voice to the deep, inchoate vision of the world that resides dynamically in your unconscious. That's what you must keep focused on; that's the only ambition worth anything to you as an artist. The desire to give voice and the desire to be published sometimes feel like the same thing, but they're not. The dream that comes from your white-hot center and the dream of fame — they are not the same.

In any case, I always carried a notebook around and I made hundreds of notes. After I figured out what art is all about, I never looked back at them again — except to look for this passage; and I didn't do that until I started to teach. Here's the passage from the notebook:

Nui Dat [the place where I was], chieu hoi [a Vietnamese phrase which means essentially "open arms"] at the stag films. Former political officer of large crack Viet Cong unit now watching the Aussies' Sunday night stag films, all four hours of them. Communist intense prudishness: punish people for having a pinup; what does he think of this? I talk to him later. He is very intelligent. A VC adjutant went to hills because he hated the wasteful, inefficient, corrupt government, and also because one day his wife and child were standing in a doorway and an ARVN [Army of the Republic of Vietnam; that is, South Vietnamese] soldier gunned them down. Went to the hills. Finally decided that the war would never end this way, returned and

became bushman scout for the Aussies, took them to base camp after base camp. Names, stats on dozens of VCI [Viet Cong infrastructure, the shadow government people]. Driving through village, saw woman, just lower half of face, identified her as VCI. He met her only once six weeks ago. It took him four days to find the ARVN soldier before he went to the hills. The chieu hoi was a platoon leader of Sapper Recon Platoon. Went to COSVN, which is the North Vietnamese Army headquarters that nobody ever found. Went to Cambodia, a month's march. There he learned sapper techniques. One day I was watching Vietnamese television. He came in and smiled and he sat down with me. He asked if I spoke Vietnamese. He asked if I was an American. We talked and watched television together. I told him what I thought of the Vietnamese people, their warmth and kindness to me in spite of the bitterness they should have after all these years of the war. He said they'd had hundreds of years of war already — the Chinese, the French, and so forth — and it is part of life. He said they all want peace very badly, both those who speak against the war and those who make the war, but when the Americans and Australians pull out the Communists will take over. He says the Communists don't allow people to be anything but poor, don't allow people to print newspapers or speak against the government. The people who are against the war don't understand this; he says when you have a choice between a bad Communist government and a bad democratic government, you must choose the

bad democratic government because you can change it eventually.

That's what was in this little notebook I carried around. About six months after that event, I wrote the first short story I ever wrote as an adult. I had finally decided that I wasn 'tgoing to write plays; my future was in fiction. Luckily I didn 'tknow how far-off that future was. The story is called "The Chieu Hoi," and — I take a deep breath — here it is: