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

I want you to write in the first person. When I say "you," I am referring to your character.

Now, about the character. If you have a character you're working with closely, you may write from the viewpoint of that character, but I'm reluctant to encourage this, because if that character happens to be one you're willing into being, then the exercise will not be very useful to you. In the absence of any character you feel a desperate need to get in touch with, I urge you to write through a character with demographics very similar to your own. This is not you, this is not autobiography, but unless you've got a really burning character that you need to explore, then the character you choose needs to be very close to you in age, gender, ethnicity, and so forth.

If you get to the end of a stage before I come in, don 'twrite ahead, and don't go back and start rewriting; just put your pen down and meditate. I'll notice if there are a lot of pens down, and I'll jump in. It's likely, though, that if you finish these stages before I get to the next, you're not giving it enough intense moment-to-moment attention. In that case, try to focus more intently on the next stage.

When you finish the piece and feel done, just close your notebook and pick up your pen and go away. At some point if there are only a few of you left we may decide that you need to take your piece home and finish it later. I wouldn't think

that you'd be able to bear spending more than an hour and a half on this, if you do it as intensely as you should. Let's start. Here's your first stage. [Editor's note: what follows are the seven stages of the exercise, succeeded by three examples of the results from the class on the evening when the exercise was recorded.] The seven stages:

1. You awake abruptly, though it isn't morning, and you're not in a bed. But you are in the place where you live. The room where you awake is rich in objects and their associations. You are breathless and anxious from a dream you can't, and won't, remember. You look around the room, everything in it shaped by an unspecified anxiety. Let's see the room, in the moment, through the senses.

2. One object in particular catches your attention and suggests a strong connection to your anxiety. Move toward that object; touch it; experience it sensually.

3. The object evokes a memory as vivid as a dream but not the one you woke from. It is a real memory, one based on wanting, desiring something. But this is a surface thing you want — an object, a gesture, a touch, whatever. Focus on the moment-to-moment, specific memory of desiring this thing, which, nevertheless, carries an intimation of deeper yearning. But don't go to that deeper desire yet. Experience the surface thing through your character's sensibility.

4. Now let the memory of this want include a moment when a second memory is evoked. This second memory

involves another object, different from the one you are touching in the present time but similar to it in its basic sensual pattern. This second memory surprises you. You deeply connect it to the first. And the wanting suddenly goes deeper, into a state of being, a state of self. Don't label it. Play it out in the moment through the senses.

5. In that second memory you are moved to an action, driven by your yearning. Let the action happen moment to moment.

6. Some part of the action will bring you back to the present, to an awareness of the first object. Reexperience the object. Your sensual perception of it is altered, re-shaped by the emotion and yearning you have experienced in these two linked memories.

7. Now, back in the present, in the light of all this, you take an action.

The examples:

Rita Mae Reese

Magnets

A small spot of the green Formica table and the left corner of my mouth is slick with my warm drool. What woke me up? How did I fall asleep here? Outside the kitchen window is just darkness crouching and I can hear the hum of the little fluorescent light twitching over the sink, full of dirty dishes, but nothing else. There is no other sound in the house. The round white clock's hands say 5:16 but its battery ran out weeks ago. 1 look at the microwave but it isn't programmed. I'm sweating, my mouth is horrible, like I've been siphoning gasoline with it. I push the chair away from the table, noticing the letter I'd pushed to the other side before falling asleep. The white paper with its rows of neat black ink strains up from its creases like a tired child unwilling to go to sleep.

I ignore it and walk across the sticky linoleum. Had I spilled something? I open the fridge door and the light is too bright even in this brightly lit room. My heart kicks and I can almost see a scene — something slithers from the back of my neck, through my throat, and stops at my larynx. My mind struggles to see — some dream fragment, repulsive and indistinct. I stare at the carton of milk, the cartons of leftovers, and the little round jar of horseradish. What had I dreamed? I felt like I'd missed something important, the bus back home or a lover's last call. Is that what I'd dreamed?

I grab the carton of milk and it slips from my hands, the white ghostness of it splashing on my legs and over the dirty yellow linoleum. I bite my lip. I will not cry. I shut the door a little too forcefully and Jill's picture that she'd drawn of me and Sam slides with its magnet down and flutters into the milk. I crouch down and put the drawing on the table, after blotting it against my dress.

I pick the carton of milk up — there is still some inside— and put it back in the fridge. I wipe up the milk with paper towels and as I stand up to go to the trash can, my bare foot comes down on something cold and hard. It is the magnet. I pick it up and instead of just putting it back on the fridge, I sit down with it still in my hand. I hear the neighbor's dog bark, twice. I lift my head and listen but the house is still quiet. The magnet is an old-fashioned valentine, fifties-style cornball romance, a smiling orange saying "Orange you glad you're mine, valentine?" on metal, heavily laminated.

Sam had been on a magnet-making kick, and took anything she got her hands on — old stamps, postcards, cards, pictures — and turned them into an endless stream of magnets. Sam was with Diana then and I remember seeing them in their kitchen together, Diana was doing the dishes and Sam leaned into her in a way that made my own back feel cold and exposed. I thought of what it would be like to have Sam's lips on my neck, warm, laughing into my skin over some private joke. I pretended to look at the books on their shelves in the dining room, a good fifty square feet of shelving displaying Foxfire books, Marion Zimmer Bradley's entire body of work, and a lot of Quality Paperback selections. I was going to ask Diana if she wanted help washing up from the dinner they'd made for me, the new single girl at work. Diana at work is perfect and I admit I'd sort of hoped her home life was different but it was worse. Her girlfriend Sam was beautiful and handsome, with olive skin, an aquiline nose, and eyes that really looked at a person. She repeated my name when we were introduced and asked me what I thought of St. Petersburg. She looked in my eyes as I stumbled over the answer, revising it for her approval as I went along. I looked down, just to avoid her eyes, and saw the best mouth I'd ever stared at — a little smirk, with the lightest laugh line on the left. I thought of kissing her then but told myself that I'd been without a girlfriend for too long.

Holding the magnet, so square and so dense, a nice hard weight in the center of my palm now. Sam's mother had a laugh line just like hers in that little picture, the only picture, Sam had of her. I remember going to Sam's apartment after she'd moved out of Diana's, the sparseness of the furnishings— a rocker, a table and chairs, a dresser, a bed, a stereo, and one set of bookshelves. She kept her books boxed up by the wall next to the front door. On her dresser she had a photo of Diana (it hurt me every time I saw it but I'd never asked her to take it down) and the tiny photo in the metal frame of her mother. I'd picked it up while she was in the kitchen, making us dinner. I'd gone to the bathroom and since her bedroom door was open, I stepped inside, amazed at the austerity of the room— the unmade bed, the clean floor, the bare walls, the dresser with its two pictures. I'd lifted the picture of her mother, cupped it in my hands and lifted it to my face as if I were smelling it. I have no idea why. "That's my mother," her voice came over my shoulder and I jerked, put it back on the dresser, nearly knocking over the picture of Diana. Sam reached her arm around me and picked it up.