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

ROB: No matter how much beautiful stuff — we all have to learn this — I know I do — we're all struggling with it — if you write a thing from your head, everything in that piece is tainted. Even if you have passages that are beautifully written, brilliantly sensual, and maybe in their beauty and sensuality have actually come from the outer foyer of your unconscious — you don't go back and try to save those passages. Don't say, "OK, I've already got a good description of New Orleans; I'll just stick that in." An art object is organic, and this beautiful rendering of New Orleans may be exactly the wrong beautiful rendering of New Orleans for the object that's going to come out of this place. This make sense to you, Jocelyn?

Jocelyn: It's so hard.

ROB: It's the hardest thing in the world, but it's necessary. You go back and pull something out of one piece and stick it in another and everything is lost. It will just bend the story to fit an external factor. It's the same danger you run with a literal memory. Yes, Kent.

Kent: In the scene in New Orleans where they're walking down the street — say you go back to your trance, maybe there's something about his mother or something like that.. it won't be rendered the same way..

ROB: It's in the realm of human possibility that the same brilliant sentence may come back and flow right out of your unconscious once again and work perfectly.

Kent: Or you go back into the artist's studio or into.

ROB: Oh, absolutely. Scenes, actions, movements — you can redream them. Sure, he brings Megami into the studio and asks his father to paint her. But you might do that after a scene in which either he sees hanging in his father's studio or remembers from his childhood a painting of his mother that the father had done, that memory having been rendered moment to moment from his yearning to find a home again, or to reconnect with his parents, or to something lost — if such a scene is already in the story, then the minute he and Megumi walk into that artist's studio — everything will be different than it was in this version. Every detail — all the receptors will be thrumming to something in the piece that isn't there now. However, if you have some brilliant phrase from the previous draft that you're bound to work in, but which was created in a context without these new scenes in which the yearnings are manifest, then you've got a problem. As I say, it's in the realm of human possibility that walking into that studio, the same brilliant sentence may roll out and turn out to be perfect, but not if you go and get it to save it.

Janet: There's a parallel here with Mary Lee Settle's advice about research, where she says: Don't read about the period that you're researching, read in the period. magazines, memoirs, letters that were written in that period, and take no notes. Because when you come to write the thing, if you've taken notes you think you have to use them, whereas if you've immersed yourself in the period, what you need will come to you.

ROB: Absolutely. The work is an organism. Any external thing that has its own existence, anything outside the creation of the work that insists on getting in, is like a virus. Once it gets into the body, it will eat up everything around it. The organic nature of art is such that within the process everything must be utterly malleable, utterly fluent, so that everything ultimately can be brought together; and if there's anything in there that will not yield, is not open to change, you cannot create the object.

My Impossibles

My mother stood beside me with the shovel in her hand and I stood looking at the ground wishing I had the shovel and that sweat was dripping from my forehead instead of hers. My mother and I seemed to always be flying at different ends of the earth, and whatever I did, she did it better. It was a quarter past four on the Saturday afternoon of my weekend visit and the poles for the garden arch were still in plastic wrap at my foot. I bought the thing for a project my mother and I could do together while I broke the news to her. I had miscarried and she wouldn't be a grandmother after all, and never would be, through me anyway. She delivered and raised three children practically on her own and I couldn't even carry one. It had been a last-ditch effort on my part anyway. My marriage was falling apart and I thought it would mend that as well as change the way my mother saw me. Now my plan was to toil over this structure for my mother's garden and hope she wouldn't see me as the worthless failure of a woman I felt I was. But, as I said, she had the shovel and was about to start digging the holes at the very same instant that I was trying to find the sentence in the instructions that told us we needed to dig holes.

"You gonna move, or am I gonna have to shovel around

ya?"

"Just a minute, Mother! I'll do it, just let me see how far apart they're supposed to be." I scanned the page and flipped the instructions over. There was nothing but a diagram on the other side, with no measurements. "You don't know where you want it anyway."

"I know exactly where I want it. So dig the first hole, then we'll see how far apart they need to be." She held out the handle.

I stood up and stuck the shovel into the hard black clay that crumbled into a nearby crack instead of scooping in as I pushed down with my foot.

"Give me that. For God's sake, Becky, don't you know how to shovel?" She yanked it from my hand and dug into the clay. With one swift nudge of her foot, she scooped up a chunk and threw it to the side. She did this two more times. "That oughta be enough. Gimme the pole."

"But, Mom, we've got to measure it."

"All right, get down there and measure it."

I grabbed the tape measure from the tool box and measured from the center of the hole to where I thought the next hole should be. She was grinning when I stood back up. "What?"

"Ain't you gonna measure the width of the arch first or we just gonna dig and hope it all works out?" She held out her hand for the measuring tape and I complied. "Why don't you just sit and watch. You don't need to be out here in the hot sun anyway."

Here was my chance. She brought it up; now I could tell her. But this was not what she meant.

"Becky, did you hear me? At least go in the house and put some sunscreen on if you're gonna just stand there and not get in the shade. This is Texas, you can still get a sunburn after four." She snapped the measuring tape back in and then pulled it out over the pole that connected the front of the arch to the back. I dusted my hands and moped toward the house.

It had always been this way. No matter how hard I tried to live up to the woman my mother was and wanted me to be, I couldn't. This was never more clear to me than when we lived alone together for the first time. At the end of the first summer in the house my mother bought after the divorce, the heat of the summer battles was over and she didn't talk about my father much anymore. We were settled. The furniture was in place, the boxes unpacked, and the yard, the one thing my father would never let my mother spend money on before, was gorgeous. This small rectangular patch of grass was placed directly in front of our porch. I say "placed" because that's just what it was. My mother bought a truckload of grass squares at the local lawn-and-garden center and placed them, like she was playing Tetris, between railroad ties that outlined the flower beds and our house. I had always wanted grass like this and the plush blades tickled my bare feet when on a day that August I took my shoes off just to walk across it.