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

If you write in your journal every day in this way, and if you spend forty-five minutes or an hour at it, it will be so intensive that you might not get through the whole incident.

That's fine. Just break it off, don't try to summarize or bring it to the end. Next day you might pick it up again. Or not. Go for some other piece of another emotional event. And don't rely so heavily on the sense reactions within your body that when you read this fifteen years from now all you get is "palpitating heart" and "sweating palms" and "blurry vision," which could be reactions to anything. This should be rendered as if it were a scene, with all the external and internal events.

After you've got a couple of weeks' worth of these entries, the entry of two weeks ago will have had a chance to cool off. From then on, each day's journaling should have two parts to it. First, write a new entry. Then, when you've finished, go back and read the journal entry of two weeks ago, and with a marker pen slash through all the examples of abstraction, generalization, summary, analysis, and interpretation you see in the text, leaving only moment-to-moment sense-based events and impressions. No matter how much you intended to write "in the moment," I promise you those old habits will have come back, but the hope is that, over the course of time, the red marks will diminish.

Even if you're doing a sense-based journal, you're going to have serious trouble between your creative projects. This is when you'll understand why the need to write every day runs so deep. When I've finished a work, and some time passes, and I'm working up to something new, I feel that I am utterly wasting my life. I do trivial, ghastly, quotidian stuff; I hate myself; I complain about myself to my wife, and that hatred daily increases. Finally she says to me, "Honey, it's OK, you've now reached total self-loathing; you're about to start writing." She's always right. Soon thereafter, the door opens up to my unconscious, to my new work, and I leap in. And then I write every day and I am scared every day and I am happy every day.

A word about writer's block here. I think writer's block probably suggests that you have an artist's instinct. Bad writers never get blocked. Writers who write from their heads and are comfortable doing that — they always have some garbage to put down. 1 talked last week about the flow of metathink-ing, metaspeaking your mind. That stuffs always there and it's easy to put it on the page. I think most writers who get blocked do so because some important part of them knows that they've got to get to the unconscious. But they're not getting there; they're thinking too much, so there's nothing there. Except it's not quite nothing — you sit there thinking, fussing, and worrying: "Gee, I'm not writing," "I've got to write now and I'm not writing," "Oh my God, I'm not writing," "If I want to be a writer I've got to write and I'm not writing." I think writer's block of that sort is the most common kind among writers who have any talent.

Writer's block is very similar to insomnia. What happens in insomnia? You lie down, intending to go into your dream-space, literally; into the depths of your unconscious, where you totally lose touch with the outer world. That's what sleep is. But you can't do it. Why? Because you can't turn your mind off. You lie there thinking about things. And if there are images, it's only because you're carefully controlling them. You sometimes have a kind of daydream going on, but you're in charge of it. You're making it happen, and you get upset about this and you think about that and you argue about this, and all the time there's this "Gee, I still am not sleeping, am I?" and, "OK, there's my mother. Gee, I'm thinking about her. I don't want to think about my mother, she makes me mad. What would I say to her if she called right now? I'd tell her.." That's what's going on in your head, right?

What happens when you finally do fall asleep? Suddenly an image comes out of nowhere: a rainy street, a street lamp, a dog barking. Whoa, where did that come from? Nowhere. And at the moment that image comes, if you ask, "Well, where did that come from?" — it's gone; nothing will follow and you've got thirty-five more minutes of being awake.

Those of you who don't have trouble with insomnia, think about how you go to sleep. You lie down and all that garbage just turns off. Suddenly an image comes, and another, and boy, then you're gone. And that's how you write.

It's a funny state. It's not as if you're falling asleep at your computer, but neither are you brainstorming. You're dreamstorming, inviting the images of moment-to-moment experience through your unconscious. It's very much like an intensive daydream, but a daydream that you are and are not controlling. You let it go, but it's coming through language that you're putting on a screen, so there is some intervention on your part, and yet the essence of it — that rainy street and that dog barking and the lamplight — are nothing you're going after consciously. The state of communion with your unconscious — the zone I'm trying to describe — is absolutely essential, absolutely essential to writing well in this art form.

Where does language come into this very-hard-to-describe, mystical sort of place — what I'm calling your unconscious— when you create a work of art? When I talk about the place of language in this process, it's another way to speak of voice. Voice is the embodiment in language of the contents of your unconscious. When you turn off that flow of garbage in your head, you're turning off certain kinds of words — you're turning off abstract and analytical metawords. What then takes their place is a very strong presence of language, but it's almost misleading to call it language because language is so often used in those ways that mean analysis, abstraction. That's why I say voice. The presence of words — which you quickly capture and string together and massage — is intimately bound up with that sensual imagery in your unconscious, which makes up your voice and the voices of your characters.

The line-to-line words come from your unconscious and so does the very form in which you write. You do not know whether you're a novelist or a short story writer. You don't choose ahead of time to be a novelist and then look around in yourself and figure out what novels you've got there. You have a vision of the world and that vision has a natural form; you don't know what will turn out to be the natural form of your vision. You've probably had the experience of writing a short story that just kind of takes off. It's not a very good story, because what you're seeing really wants to be a novel. Or you sit down trying to write a novel and you poop out at about page 40. That happens because you are forcing your vision into a predetermined medium, and that's not the way it should work.

The distinction between the vision that becomes a novel and the vision that becomes a short story is pretty much like this (I'm going to describe these differences metaphorically; I am not advocating a consciousness of your audience): the short story will have you say to the reader, "Look, I don't have much time. So sit down, let me tell you about a moment in this character's life when something took a turn, or something intensified in some significant way." The short story will have, oftentimes, a brief sequence of causally linked events, but ultimately it turns on the moment.

The novel is going to be saying to your reader, "Look, this is going to take some time. Let's go for a long walk, and I want to tell you about all these things that happened in the life of this character in my unconscious; all these things that happened to him, which somehow fit together, are somehow causally linked." In a novel, there will be many revealing moments but ultimately the focus of a novel is on that — I won't call it a chain, because that argues for a certain kind of linear structure, but — that certain configuration of causally linked events. That's the focus of a novel.