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

When the lights came up, Thanh and I remained as the others drifted out of the tent or back to the bar. Thanh was looking at his hands.

"Enjoyable, wasn't it?" I said.

"It was so short."

At first I didn't understand. Three hours, after all. I smiled.

"Only two years." He looked at me. Then the easy smile came again. He shook my hand and we spoke the conventional Vietnames good-byes before he left.

Lots of stuff wrong with this; in fact, everything's wrong with it in exactly the way I've been describing. "Hey, Yank. " Opening with a piece of dialogue very rarely works,

because there's no context. And, important, in this whole piece there's not a single line of dialogue with subtext. Nothing's going on beneath the surface. Dialogue gives you the illusion of moment-to-moment sensual experience— after all, these are the words this character is speaking aloud in the moment — but in bad dialogue all you're getting is the information, exposition, or emotional declaration; and that's where your summary, your generalization, your abstraction, your analysis, run and hide in plain sight. Beware of that as you work to get that unselected, unironic, there-for-information stuff out of your writing: it's going to try to find a new home in the mouths of your characters. This story is full of sheer chunks of analysis and abstraction, often straight from my undigested notes, included just for the convenience of the story.

The story is also inorganic. Even though there appears to be a motif, the images are totally unrelated. Looking out of the tent, and the trees, and going purple against the sky —what's all that about? It does not connect in its sensual pattern to anything going on in the story. Remember that I had written twelve just as awful plays, so these passages are like little stage directions (which was my failure as a playwright too): He's looking, I'm looking out, then he looks out, and I look out, and now we're both looking out. No resonance whatsoever.

The trap of literal memory is very clear here. It was eighteen years later that I wrote "Open Arms," which as you can see grew out of the composting of the same event. Let's call "The Chieu Hoi" the bad story and "Open Arms" the good story. In the bad story, things happen exactly as they did in real life, whereas the good story involves a dramatic inversion of the literal event. In the bad story Thanh's motivation is that he was in a place where he was comfortable and where he belonged, a South Vietnamese democratic society. The thing he did against his own deeper nature was go off to join the VC in response to the killing of his wife and child by a South Vietnamese soldier. And now, in the bad story, he's basically back where he belongs. You notice that in "Open Arms" all this is inverted. He was a Viet Cong true believer and the Viet Cong killed his wife and child, and this Australian porn show where we find him is not where he belongs but a place where he also doesn't belong. I had to free myself from the way it literally happened in order to make "Open Arms" work.

In the bad story the narrator is a passive observer. It's me. I'm sure every one of you has at least one story — and you may write another — where you are the sensitive writer responding to this unusual character you've met in life. You encounter somebody interesting and you go, Oh boy, that's a story. You sit down and write it, putting yourself in the middle as a passive observer watching this other person. Right? What's missing in every story where you've got a passive observer in the middle? The yearning. If the narrator in my bad story desires anything at all, it's to show what a swell sensitive American guy he is. Which of course is not a yearning at all. The narrator is doing fine, meeting this interesting guy he can communicate with in his own language, and the guy's doing fine, back where he belongs. Oh yeah, his wife and child are dead, but, you know, that's a problem, not a yearning. The dynamics of desire are utterly missing.

I don't care how smart you are. Your mind is stupid artistically, and here's another striking example of that. I have to emphasize that this event in the story I'm about to point out did not happen in real life. In "The Chieu Hoi," this sensitive American who speaks Vietnamese says, "Why did you join?" Thanh turns to him. His "easy smile was gone…" And Thanh even tries to avoid answering. " 'The government was robbing the people. It was corrupt and wasteful and repressive.."' And so forth. Then Thanh pauses, obviously hoping that's all he has to say on the subject. And the narrator drills in." 'Was that all?'" he asks. He makes Thanh talk about the tragedy.

This is utterly cruel. But it's no longer about people, it's about crudely applying fiction technique. The writer wants to get this information about Thanh into the story in his own voice, and to show how the guy is struggling, trying not to face the terrible thing that's happened. Gee, how do you show that? Well, you have your narrator ask him, and when he waffles, you press him. Now I promise you I never would have done this in real life. But when I wrote the story I was totally oblivious to the moral implications and didn't notice until I came to teach creative writing and pulled the old bad story out that this sensitive American guy does something truly heinous. That's what comes from writing from your head. As writers we must have compassion for all the characters we create. If we're going to play God, we have to be a loving God, and you can't love with your brain.

By contrast, the Vietnamese narrator in "Open Arms," whose yearning resonates organically into the story as it's reconceived, does a similar heinous thing; but he himself is conscious of it — and so am I as writer. Both the Vietnamese narrator in "Open Arms" and the American narrator in "Chieu Hoi" know ahead of time that the man's family was murdered and that is why he left his home. In both cases, even though they know it, they make him say it. But the Vietnamese narrator, says: "To my shame." He says it both times. To my shame. He knows he's doing a terrible thing here and acknowledges it. We see that tension in him.

Of course, you might write a story with an insensitive character like the narrator of "The Chieu Hoi." Obviously there are cruel characters and cruel acts in fiction. But in that story the cruelty is totally incidental — or maybe the intent of the author was to show a sensitive guy responding to a sad character who misses his wife. And that's all he takes away from an afternoon of porn films. How pathetic. The narrator's insensitivity is not an issue; there's no repercussion, there's no realization, and no seeming ill effect on Thanh. We don't see the cruelty of it in any manifest way. It's just on-the-surface cruelty, and it stays on the surface.

Let me elaborate on a point I made earlier in passing about the beginning of "Open Arms": "I have no hatred in me. I am almost certain of that." How do you establish dramatic irony in a story? Well, to begin with, anyone who has to say he's got no hatred in him is already protesting too much. And then, one way to suggest irony is with a qualifier, in this case just that one word almost. "I have no hatred in me. I am almost certain of that." He has self-doubt that lets us doubt him. "I fought for my country long enough to lose my wife to another man, a cripple. This was because even though I was alive, I was dead to her, being far away. Perhaps it bothers me a little" — perhaps —"that his deformity was something he was born with and not earned in the war. But even that doesn't matter. In the end, my country itself was lost. " My country.

This whole story, as you soon learn, has to do with trying to find a place in the world. "In the end my country was lost and I am no longer there.." It's not that it's no longer his country, it is his country, but he's no longer there. He takes some pleasure in the fact that his wife and her new lover are suffering. And then he brings up this stranger, this guy: