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

Brandy: And it's cooler, like there's air.

ROB: A sudden rush of coolness on your thighs as you lift off, right? The prickles are gone and the air replaces them, yes? Where else in your body?

Brandy: My hands are kind of pulled away. They're not gripping as tight, they're pulled to the fingers.

ROB: What do you smell? Do you smell sweat?

Brandy: Yeah.

ROB: What else?

Brandy: A metallic smell.

ROB: What do you hear? What's the sound in your ears?

Brandy: Like a wind or a breath, or…

ROB: OK, thank you, Brandy. Even if we're not fighting off serious emotion, this is still tough, isn't it? There were some very good things coming there.

All right, Leslie, let's send you out into the field. You're following your brother into the field. Give us that moment.

Leslie: Let me just say my brother's name is Prince. It's a family name.

ROB: The brother formerly known as Prince. [Laughter.] Or actually known as Prince. Say anything you want to after approaching the bales.

Leslie: The grass is deep and wet and grainy with seeds and Prince's head and arms rise up against the white sky washed with red, black as if he were part of the hill beyond.

ROB: How's he moving?

Leslie: The rows of hay bales like a row of animals against the sky. Prince wades through the grass with his arms outstretched as if he were walking through deep water.

ROB: What part of your own body are you most aware of at the moment?

Leslie: The dampness from the tall grass has wet my legs and shorts, but the cold rises up my stomach like a button being pulled on a drawstring from my sacrum up into the center of my chest, and I shiver. ROB: Where?

Leslie: Pulling my arms into the sleeves of my T-shirt, wrapping them around my chest as I jump over the grass to catch up to him.

ROB: A flash of memory now.

Leslie: But he's running too fast. And in the darkness I imagine that if I were to catch him and grab the back of his T-shirt something frightening would happen.

ROB: You're starting to analyze too much for this exercise, OK? Fr ightening is also being abstract. You've just shivered, trying to keep up, and you see him quite wonderfully, vividly before you, and the rows of bales like animals are out there. Just go straight to another concrete moment in the past like this. It could be the distant past. Just something comes to you, OK?

Leslie: I found the puppy on the hilltop beyond the hay bale.

ROB: Don't summarize, OK? Let's see the very moment you see the puppy.

Leslie: In a swirl of grass, as if it had bedded down as it squirmed to move, its legs broken, flies swarming in its ears and eyes.

ROB: Let's look at the leg more closely. See, you've analyzed the leg for me. I want to see the leg with you. In the very moment you perceive it's broken, I want to see it.

Leslie: Against the orange fur there was a deeper red, a black hole, where the puppy had been…

ROB: Don't analyze it, that's enough. What part of your own body are you conscious of now, seeing that puppy?

Leslie: The breath rushes out of me, and I stumble back so that the puppy is lost in the grass.

ROB: Link that to a parent, an image of a parent.

Leslie: My mother's eyes looked dark in the shape of fish with streaks running out of them down her cheeks.

ROB: Where are you? Look around. Look away from your mother's face and see something.

Leslie: In the rick of rotted pine beside the back door we heard the cat weeping. She, my mother, stepped down the concrete steps and reached for one silver stick of wood as if she were afraid it would collapse when she moved one piece.

ROB: That's a little bit of an analysis. Show me her body and her body language; have them reveal that she's afraid. Tell me how you perceive in the moment through the senses.

Leslie: She bends and leans, swaying on the edge of the step, touching the rough corner of the stick with just her forefinger, testing its balance in the pile.

ROB: What part of your body are you most aware of

now?

Leslie: My feet seem a long way away from me, as if I were very tall, but my head feels heavy.

ROB: Hear the cat again. Hear it more clearly in an extended way.

Leslie: The noise seems to come from inside the ribs, just a handful of ribs, a small noise that seems torn, already broken beyond repair.

ROB: Now what part of your body are you feeling?

Leslie: It's as if I swallow something sharp. I swallow and swallow and it won't go down.

ROB: Come back to your brother now. He does something; let's see him do a specific different thing now.

Leslie: Prince runs into the bale, digs his foot just above the coiled center, launches up onto the top as if he were running against the sky, his arms spread out, his thin hair wisp-ing around his head, each finger spread like a feather.

ROB: Let him turn and face you; see his face.

Leslie: It's too dark to see his face, but the sunset is reddish on the side of his cheek.

ROB: Red like what? [Long pause.] Reincorporate. Red like what?

Leslie: Red like blood in a sink.

ROB: OK. Thank you, Leslie.

That was very good, thank you, Leslie. This is what I'm getting at. Couldn't have planned it better. [Laughter.] Look, if it didn't work for you tonight, don't feel bad about it. This is really tough. You're approaching an awareness that you haven't been led to before but that is an essential basic skill. You must be masters of the sensual moment. These questions I've asked — when, in fact, you can range anywhere — are much less demanding than the questions your work will ask of you under similar circumstances. You must move your characters from here to there. They have to be in the moment, and they have to look into a face and see something, and you cannot analyze it, and you cannot abstract it. You're in the sensibility of the character, and you must be in the moment in terms of that character, and also there in terms of the rest of the piece. But what we've done tonight is artificial in many ways, and if it didn't work for you, don't feel bad about it. Just open up the negotiations between you and your unconscious and your computer. You'll make a lot of mistakes, and that's OK. It's part of the process of getting to where you want to go.

Actually, all of you had very good moments. None of you was up here without at least a few very good moments, and I hope you felt what you tapped into briefly when you were inventing, recombining, in the sensual moment.

Tonight we're going to do on the page exactly what we did last week orally; that is, to write moment by moment through the senses only. This will be a coached writing exercise in seven stages. I'll give you the first stage and you'll begin to write; then I'll drop in six more times, each time to give you another step. It's important not to go beyond the parameters of what I tell you to do. When I describe a new stage, if you've not finished the previous one, note the new instructions in the margin, then go back to where you were, pick that up, and move as quickly as you can to the new stage.

Don't run ahead, though. Stay within the boundaries of each instruction. Once again: no abstraction, no generalization, no summary, no analysis, no interpretation. Force yourself to write moment to moment through the senses only. Don't hassle your style at this point, don't agonize over just the right word; just keep the flow of it through the senses—

flowing, flowing, flowing. Don't think, don't think. Senses, senses, senses. If you really do that rigorously, you'll find yourself flowing right down — at least into the foyer of — this great house that is your unconscious.