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

Or suppose we set the moment when the mother becomes sick. The mother's female body is still intact, and the daughter doesn't know how to approach her with bad news. Maybe she approaches her, and the mother's horrified — but in any case let the event of the mother getting sick and going to the hospital be in the story. She has an emergency hysterectomy and then the mother and the daughter are on the same plane. The mother always criticizes the daughter about what it means to be a woman — so that strain between them is indeed about what this means, and we dramatize the reality of Becky's fear of confessing her miscarriage.

Then, what happens in the hospital room between mother and daughter where the mother has just had her womb removed? There's a lot that's still to be dreamed here. Maybe in the dreaming you will have had her tell the mother already, and she had a harsh reaction, so that there will be a reconciliation. Or maybe this is when she tells her — even as the mother's devastated— this is something as women we can share because I've lost a child. Suddenly there's a very complex relationship possible, and a complex reaction involved.

Whether we come back to putting the arch in at the end of the story I don't know. I'm sketching out a way in which the stuff that's in the story can be transformed from problem to yearning, and the way that yearning can find its arc; a way that everything can be pulled together, so that mother and daughter together redefine what it means to be a woman. I hate the way I'm talking here. You understand why I'm doing it, right? Feel free to alter or ignore anything I've said. But that's the kind of thing all stories need in order to shine in their best light. There's a lot of good stuff here, Brandy, and I think it'll be a wonderful story. It's just a matter of taking the problems and transforming them toward the dynamic that will make us understand what's at stake.

Jocelyn: You mentioned "metaphorical logic." How does logic come to bear on this, or is there any need for logic?

ROB: Logic itself is being used here in a metaphorical way. I mean that a story has emotional logic; there's a spiritual logic, an aesthetic logic to a work. The universal principle behind any narrative sequence is the yearning. But once the character's desires are driving her forward, then, given that yearning, given that character's ability, her circumstances, the milieu, the kinds of obstacles challenging her, there is a logic of sorts to what goes in and what stays out — what scenes are necessary, inevitable, emotionally logical, and what sense details are the logical choices.

The logic here is not that of rational premises and intellectually perceived results but rather a kind of emotional, psychological, aesthetic, spiritual, metaphorical fitness. If certain conditions exist and they are accessed by the writer through the senses and the dreamspace and perceived by the readers through their senses and their dreamspace, certain things will necessarily follow. That describes the kind of logical form. It's an emotional logic.

Janet: I have heard you, including in these lectures, talk about the way that you picked up images, and I know that when I read you one of my great pleasures is seeing the repetition of motif. There are many other writers' works where I'm not aware of that as a pleasure; mostly I'm reading for the page-turning, wanting to know what's going to happen. As a writer my main pleasure is that other sort, and it comes at the moment when a metaphor or motif clicks into place.

ROB: Let me address the "logic of the metaphor." Metaphor works, of course, at its first level as a vivid intensifier of sensual experience, to enhance sensual access to the creative world. It vivifies the moment. That's its first function. But metaphor then has, like all the other sensual elements in this organically whole object, a pattern behind its content. Whether you think of it as motif from the reader's point of view, or think of it as recomposing, reincorporating things that are already at play in the work, the metaphor's essential pattern needs to intersect or interlock with the pattern echoed microcosmically and macrocosmically in the work. The movement between one metaphor and another is also by its pattern the arc of the character through the book.

My Summer in Vulcan

When I open the door, Paul is standing at the top of the stairs grinning, with one hand behind his back. He looks past me and puts a finger to his lips, pulling his other hand from behind his back, revealing a bouquet of flowers. I notice some red and orange and yellow before he winds his hand behind his back again. He's wearing a blue sports coat though it's hot outside and too-white running shoes. He steps through the doorway.

"Hello, Lilly," he says.

"Sheila's in the living room, playing with the baby," I tell him.

I was getting the baby dressed to go when Sheila, that's my sister, started tickling Gracie and acting goofy. Gracie's the baby; Sheila's her mom. People say Gracie looks more like me.

I sit down at the kitchen table to put my tennis shoes on. They are looking pretty ratty. Last time I talked with my mom I told her I needed a new pair but she hasn't sent the money yet. We'll see. I can hear Paul and Sheila laughing the goofy grown-up-for-babies laugh and then the quiet murmuring sounds they make when they kiss. I bet Sheila hasn't finished putting Gracie's shoes on yet and sure enough, when I walk in, the baby is waving her socked feet around in the air, looking up at Paul and Sheila kissing. Sheila has the bouquet in one hand and walks past me into the kitchen, sighing something about water and avoiding my eyes. Paul looks directly into mine, grinning purposefully. His eyes are a watery blue, like shallow water.

"Isn't she beautiful?" he asks me.

She is. She has long silky brown hair that I used to brush and brush. I thought it would be more like that, staying with her this summer. Today she has her hair pulled back and she's wearing a white sundress with eyelets and daisies embroidered in white from the waist up and with little white buttons all the way up the front. She has always been beautiful. I just shrug.

"And she's got a fine ass."

"Shut up, Paul," my sister warns him from the kitchen over the sound of running water.

I sit on the couch, capturing one of Gracie's feet at a time and screwing the little sneakers down onto each. She captures the first sneakered foot and watches me.

"It's good for her to know about loving. Not like…"

I don't look up but I can hear his voice travel into the kitchen, the words now pitched in their special frequency, his and Sheila's, and indiscernible from this distance.

I wonder if he has just said her husband's name. We never say it on these Tuesday and Thursday afternoons while he's at work and Paul, Sheila's instructor from the community college, comes over. Jack, Sheila's husband, simply ceases to exist for those hours and I wonder what will happen when he becomes real again. I wonder if any of us will cease to exist that same way some day.

I hoist the baby up on my hip and she bats at my cheek. She smells like baby, like fresh bread but powdery. Her hands are sticky but I don't want to stop to wash them.

I'm halfway down the stairs and nearly outside when Paul calls for me to hold up. He gives me five dollars in case I decide I want anything. He squeezes the baby's cheek with one of his square hands. "Be a good girl," he says.

I've only been in Vulcan a few weeks but I've covered every inch of this town, not that there are that many inches of it to cover. It's bigger than where me and my sister grew up — Wolf Pen, West Virginia, which isn't even on a map, or not on one I've ever seen; there's about fifty families, a stoplight, and a gas station, nothing else. Wolf Pen is 136 miles from Vulcan but Sheila acts like it's in another hemisphere. Since she's moved here a year ago she has come home three times, the last time to pick me up and bring me here to help with the baby for the summer.