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

You can see where I'm going. Greene's compost of the imagination is the same as the dreamspace, the white-hot center of the unconscious. The point he's making is that not only is your mind the enemy, not only is your will, your ra-tional thinking, your analytic thinking the enemy, but your literal memories are also the enemy. How many times have you heard a short story criticized and heard the author say,

That's the way it happened. It can't be unreal because it happened that way.

But a work of art is an organic thing. Every detail must organically resonate with every other detail. If you have an intransigent literal memory — and intransigent is what literal memories are — it sits in the middle of the organic object; it destroys everything around it. Everything in a work must remain malleable, everything must remain negotiable. You need to understand that working from your literal memory will keep you out of your unconscious, out of the zone you must enter.

I'm going to give you some practical suggestions on how to get into your zone or dreamspace. The first of those suggestions is, in fact, more than merely practical; it is rooted in the psychology of creation. Once you are engaged in writing a piece of fiction from your unconscious, it is crucial that you write every day, because the nature of this place where you go is such that it's very difficult to find your way in. It's pure torture. But even though it's terrible getting in, once you're in, if you keep going back every day, though it's still always daunting and difficult and scary, it's not nearly so much so. You may find — this is dangerous, but you may find — that you can take a day off every six or seven days. When you do, you'll be grumpy and out of sorts and things will be uncomfortable, but after a day you can go back in. But you take two days off and you're on very thin ice. If you let three or four days go by it's as if you've never written a word in your entire life. That doorway closes and seals itself up; you don't even know what part of the wall that door's in anymore. I don't care how much

you've written in your life; those defenses are strong and they won't let you go there.

You may not be ready to write yet, but when you're in a project you must write every day. You cannot write just on weekends. You cannot write this week and not next; you can't-wait for the summer to write. You can't skip the summer and wait till the fall. You have to write every day. You cannot do it any other way. Have I said this strongly enough?

There are no excuses not to write. At some point in my life, for various personal reasons, the only opportunity I had to write was on the Long Island Rail Road as I commuted from my home in Long Island to a job as editor-in-chief of a business newspaper in Manhattan. This was before laptop computers. I wrote every word of my first four published novels on my lap, on legal pads, by hand, on the Long Island Rail Road, where the air-conditioning never worked in the summer, and the heat never worked in the winter, and it was always jam-packed, and people were flapping their papers and yakking and killing each other over the wrong bridge bid three seats up in front of me.

But eventually a thing kicked in that psychologists used to call functional fixedness. That is, if you have a certain place and certain objects that you associate only with a certain task, eventually the associational values build up in such a way that when you go to that place and engage those objects, you are instantly completely focused on that task. So getting over the hump of distraction with those railroad trips eventually became an asset, because writing was all I ever did on the train; I did nothing else. And I began to write well. I wrote my first four published novels on that train.

So here's one of those practical suggestions for getting into the zone. Find a place and some objects that you go to and engage only when you're writing fiction. If you have only one space and one computer that you must use for all written things, then change the type font you use for your fiction or the color of your screen.

By the way, I finally got a teaching job that took me off the train. I got my Ph.D. at the "University of Knopf" — that is, I accumulated enough publishing credits to get a university teaching job — and I went to McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana. I was halfway through my fifth novel — it was already under contract to Knopf and my editor loved the first half and I did too — and I had to stop writing to drive my furniture across the country in a U-Haul, finish buying a house, and move in. I stopped writing for eight weeks. And when I returned to the novel, though I knew those characters as well as any real person I've ever known, and though I knew what was going to happen next in the plot, it was utter agony to return to the work. It took eight weeks of daily torture to write another sentence — because I'd stopped writing every day. Also, if you develop functional fixedness to help you, you can't then let it be an excuse not to write. If you are away from the conditions you've established, you must still write every day. For a while I blamed my not writing on the fact that the room wasn't moving. I thought I was going to have to buy a little motor and stick it on my chair to jiggle it. Maybe buy choo-choo sounds for my record player. But of course the real problem was the broken link to my unconscious caused by putting the work aside for a time.

Another practical way to facilitate your entry into your writing zone is to turn yourself into a morning person. If you arrange your life so that you can spend two hours writing — or an hour, given the exigencies of some working lives, but ideally a couple of hours — you make that time sacrosanct at the beginning of the day. If you need coffee, you put your coffee on a timer, you roll out of bed, you grab that cup of coffee, and you are at your computer keyboard only moments from a literal dreamspace.

Finding a way to clear your sensibility of abstract uses of language is important to get into the trance. The problem is that we naturally use language in so many nonsensual ways all through the day. I find it helpful, then, to buffer those hours in which you necessarily use language in those analytical ways from the hours in which you dive into your unconscious and seek language in quite another way. One obvious way to do that is to put your night's sleep in between. You go into your writing space straight from another dream state and go to language before you've had a chance for all those other uses of language to intrude on you. So after you wake up, don't read the newspaper, don't watch CNN; if you have to pee don't pick up the back issue of The New Yorker in the basket nearby. You go to your fiction writing without letting any conceptual language into your head.

I almost always write to music, and that might be helpful to some of you. I've almost never written any fiction without carefully chosen music, usually classical or jazz, almost always without words — I've been known to write to Puccini, though if I understood Italian I probably couldn't. But whatever helps you go into your trance state — whether quiet is right or music helps — in any case, you do need to be visiting your unconscious every day.

The crucial awareness you must keep is this: do not will the work. Do not write until it's coming from your unconscious. If you have the itch to write before inspiration has visited you, spend that time meditating in your unconscious. That said, there is a type of journaling that I could recommend, especially at this stage of your development. Most journaling is counterproductive. Most journals are repositories of great swatches of abstraction and generalization and self-analysis and interpretation and all that bad stuff. Don't do that. But here's a certain kind of journal that might be useful to you: at the end of the day or beginning of the next day, return to some event of the day that evoked an emotion in you. Record that event in the journal. But do this only— only —moment to moment through the senses. Absolutely never name an emotion; never start explaining or analyzing or interpreting an emotion. Record only through those five ways I mentioned that we feel emotions — signals inside the body, signals outside the body, flashes of the past, flashes of the future, sensual selectivity — which are therefore the best ways to express emotions. Such a journal entry will read like a passage in a novel, like the most intense moment-to-moment scene in a novel. And that's all that will be there. Fully developed in the moment.