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

I fight this battle every day. Janet fights this battle every day. Every artist in the world fights this battle every day. To go to a scary place that makes some other part of you say: What are you doing1 No. Just no. No. No. Your hands are poised over the keyboard, and that voice says, Look at your fingernails; they need clipping. And when the voice has got you in the bathroom: Look at the toilet; it needs cleaning. And you say, Yes! Anything, anything but to go back and face this stuff.

Not only that. That voice wants to draw you up into your head. And you know what that head has been for you all your life? Everyone in this room, I'm sure, has been significantly smarter in all kinds of ways than the people around you. You've had your own view of things, and you haven't really followed the crowd, because you're a little too smart for that — or way too smart — and you see things in a different way. You're isolated. And in order to get through childhood and puberty and adolescence and young adulthood, broken relationships and a marriage or two, or four — you have identified with your mind. I'm smart, I'm smarter than they are. There's a part of your mind you've been rewarded for all through school, and that is your literal memory. You'll be rewarded for it again in classrooms in this same program. You remember things; you can talk these things back and command details. You know literature. You've always found your self-worth there, and what I'm telling you is that literal memory is your enemy. It's been a large part of your identity all your life, and that part is going to want to drag you down, to destroy the things you create. That's not an easy message to take.

Furthermore, you've got this self-conscious metavoice going all the time. I do, and I'm sure a lot of you do, too. You sit quietly and your metavoice is talking to you in your head. "Well, here I'm sitting," it says. And even, "OK, maybe I shouldn't think so much now. That sounds like it's something I probably should try, to see if I can do that." These words are going through your head, right? This is going on all the time; there's all this analytical garbage running through your mind. This self-conscious metavoice; it's a voice about the voice. It's like talking about my own consciousness.

This is why Catholics and Muslims have repetitive, predetermined prayers, why the Hindus and the Zen Buddhists and the Transcendental Meditationalists have their mantras. Because you repeat these repetitive predetermined prayers enough and they lose their meaning. So these words that have no rational meaning are falling through your mind. And what happens? The analytic flow stops. You prolong the moment of no voice in your head, and it induces a kind of spiritual high. The religions give this to you as a way to live, a way to get in touch with God.

Well, the artist has got to find a way to do something similar, although it cannot be — and this is harder for you— through repetitive, predetermined bits of text. Nevertheless, the only way to create a work of literary art is to stop that voice. Your total attention needs to be on the sensual flow of experience from the unconscious.

One of the ways of understanding your unconscious is by realizing that in order to get into it you have to actually stop that garbagey analytical reflex voice in your head and induce a kind of trance state. Religious trances are quite common. Well, there's a trance state also that the artist must induce in herself in order to create a work of art. You have to let go of that comforting, distancing voice, you have to then descend into that deep dream space of yours, and that will result in a kind of superconcentration.

Psychologists call it the "flow state," being in the flow. Athletes call it being "in the zone."

The athlete's zone and the artist's creative trance have a great deal in common. When I was teaching in Louisiana, a friend of mine was assistant athletic director at LSU. His name was Greg LeFleur, and he was once an excellent tight end for the then St. Louis Cardinals NFL football team. Greg and I at some point came to understand that what he did and what I do have this need for a trancelike state in common.

How did Greg take off at full speed, run twenty-five, thirty yards down the field while behind him his quarterback— I think it was Jim Hart — launched this odd-shaped object into the air — and Greg is running full tilt down the field and two linebackers are converging on him to crush the life out of his body, and Greg glances over his shoulder and throws his body out, extends his hands, and this object settles gently under his fingertips and he holds it even as he falls to the ground and the linebackers fall on top of him. How did he do that?

Well, I tell you how you don't do it and that's by thinking about it. Any athlete will tell you. Jackie Stewart, the great race car driver, said in his autobiography that when you drive a car really fast and really well, you don't have a sensation of speed at all; things slow down around you, you can count the bricks on the wall at the next turn. Baseball players, when they are batting and in a streak, say they can count the stitches on the ball. They are in the zone, and that means they are not thinking at all. They call it muscle memory. But for you, it's not muscle memory; it's dream space, it's sense memory. It is not literal memory, the thing that's made you good at school.

If the athlete begins to send the process into his head, he goes into a slump. He misses the basket, he misses that turn. Lights out. He drops the ball. I think, by the way, that's why athletes are so superstitious. Because if you believe that your current batting streak depends on wearing a pair of dirty socks, you're less likely to think it has to do with your technique. If it's technique, you think about it. If it's your socks, it's not rational. What superstitions do for the athlete is to irrationalize. And that's what you have to do as a writer; you have to irrationalize yourself somehow.

Now, there's one big difference between the athlete's zone and the artist's zone. And this is another way of explaining the challenge of Kurosawa's observation. Let's look at Michael Jordan in his later prime — let's say his last season with the Bulls, when they once again won the world championship. When Michael received a pass at the top of the key in full flight and he left the ground, he defied gravity, floated through the air, let that ball roll off his fingertips and into the basket. Tongue unconsciously extended. When he did that, he had to be in the zone. He could not be thinking about what he was doing. But to make his zone exactly analogous to the art zone, you have to add this: every time he shoots, in order to make a basket Michael Jordan would have to confront, without flinching, the moment when his father's chest was blown apart by the shotgun held by his kidnapper. You know that happened in Michael Jordan's life. Well, Michael would have to confront that in order to make a basket every time. Without flinching. Now his zone is equal to the artist's zone. And now you understand the challenge of being an artist.

The great British novelist Graham Greene said that all good novelists have bad memories. What you remember comes out as journalism. What you forget goes into the compost of the imagination. I want you to remember that Graham Greene quotation — though in fact it's a paraphrase because I can't remember the quote — because in a compost heap, things decompose. Your past is full of stories that have been composed in a certain way; that's what memories are. But only when they decompose are you able to recompose them into new works of art.