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

Sometime in the early 1980s, the playwright Maria Irene Fornes came to Florida State University to conduct a series of workshops. I had already been teaching writing for a decade and had published a book on Writing Fiction, and I was disconcerted, not to say traumatized, by her methods. She had us do calisthenics, pair up and draw portraits of each other, imagine the insides of our stomachs and set play scenes there. At the end of the last session, I told her, "I've spent twenty years understanding my process, and you're asking me to change it entirely."

Fornes bounced her palms at the air. "You must always keep changing your process!" she declared. "Because there are two of you, one who wants to write and one who doesn't. The one who wants to write has to keep fooling the one who doesn't."

I have taken her advice to heart and have tried to keep changing — expanding, twisting, tricking — my writing process, but the truth is that only two teachers have radically changed it for me. One was Fornes, and the other is Robert Olen Butler, who joined the FSU faculty in 2000 as Eppes Professor of Creative Writing. Butler's method is largely lecture — his students do not draw, dance, or gather in small groups — yet his teaching, like Fornes's, offers a door into the unconscious where fiction lies.

Butler's background is in theater — he trained in both acting and oral interpretation and began his professional career as an actor — and what he often calls "method writing" owes much to the director Konstantin Stanislavsky of the Moscow Art Theatre, who revolutionized dramatic practice for the twentieth century and, in effect, made possible the emotional realism of film. The so-called Stanislavsky Method rests on two principles: that the actor's body is an instrument that must be supple, strong, and prepared; and that craft is always secondary to the truth of emotional connection. Both of these principles have their counterpart in Butler's teaching of the fictional process. In place of the body, it is the imagination that must be a strong and supple instrument, ready to lead the reader through moment-by-moment sensual experience. And it is in the realm of the unconscious rather than that of technique or intellect that the writer seeks fictional truth.

I attended Butler's graduate fiction course in the fall of 2001, took copious notes, began applying his advice to my own work, and proposed — because he will not set non-fictional pen to paper — that I would get the lectures out in the world. In the fall of 2002 I attended again while Butler wore a minirecorder to tape his talks. These were (impeccably) transcribed by graduate writer Nikki Louis, and then I set to work to edit them. The lectures are delivered extempore from five three-by-five cards from which Butler picks almost at random. Consequently, in the editing I have cut and shuffled, sometimes incorporating the answer to a student question where it fits into the body of the text. I've tried to snip the ravelings, expunge the repetitions, and sift out the er-uh factor of impromptu speech while leaving the informality and energy intact. It's a task closer to proofreading than to translating, but involving a little of both.

As Butler frequently points out, his lectures are necessarily the inverse of his advice; he generalizes, analyzes, and abstracts as a way of inveighing against generalization, analysis, and abstraction. His self-declared obsessions have to do with the descent into the dreamspace of the unconscious in order to discover the yearning that is at the center of every person and therefore of every character, and with the moment-to-moment sensual experiencing of that character's story. He proposes fiction as the exploration of the human condition and yearning as its compass. He conducts exercises to achieve the dreamspace. He offers insights into the nature of voice. He is eloquent on fiction as a "cinema of the mind," to be experienced by the reader as a sensual series of takes and scenes. And he has devised a system whereby revision is undertaken at the level of structure rather than sentence.

Many practitioners and teachers of writing (myself included) have preached freewriting, clustering, drafting, and generally "making clay" — getting any words whatsoever on the page, in order to have material to work with. Butler's writing "zone" is instead a place of meditation on the sense experience of the characters, requiring both patience and a depth of concentration that must be surrendered to and cannot be willed.

Yet over and over again, in modes practical and inspiring, Butler's perspective has helped me to my own best writing. In

a 1978 journal that turned up as part of Janet Sternburg's anthology, The Writer on Her Work, I complained that "the grind, the shit, of fiction, is the need to shape and construct. Letters flow from me. I always intend to let a novel do the same; every time 1 promise myself that I'll do a quick imperfect draft. But I can't do so. These three days have yielded six pages, plus an opening about opening The Opening that I scrapped entirely. And that are imperfect by a long shot yet. Decisions have to be made in them — about character, the focus of the reader's anticipation, tone — that make it impossible to proceed until the decisions are made." Butler's "dangerous system" of novel construction addresses precisely this perennial problem of the draft writer and offers a way out. It allows the simultaneous emergence of structure, character, and motif. The system is primarily intended for the novel, but I have found it, for both short stories and plays, a way to bypass the gnarled intellectual process that had marred my "plotting."

Because in the pursuit of sensual truth Butler so often dismisses concept and abstraction, it's a pleasurable paradox to find in these lectures thoughtful and original perspectives on ideas that touch science, psychology, and other arts. The "five ways of experiencing emotion" outlined in chapter one— about which Butler has been casually holding forth for nearly twenty years — correspond directly to the neural research analyzed in Antonio Damasio's 1999 The Feeling of What Happens. His discussion of the writer in search of his form describes the struggle in Gabriel Josipovici's classic essay on Nathaniel Hawthorne in The World and the Book. His analysis of Dickens as moviemaker illustrates and elaborates D. W. Griffith's perception on that subject.

I have to say that, as with Fornes, my initial resistance to Butler's message was strong. His central obsessions lead him toward words about which I am preternaturally squeamish— like dream and unconscious and trance and yearning and white-hot center and art object —whereas I have been known to describe myself as a contriver, which would certainly make him squirm. I am fascinated by the intricacies of craft, which Butler assures me are a distraction. I have a crusading high regard for intellect, whereas he insists that as a fiction writer I must not "think."

In the teaching continuum from therapist to maestro, Butler is definitely in the camp of the maestro. I once assigned a graduate class Annie Dillard's The Writing Life —a book I love — and one of the students said, "It's so effing high-minded it makes me want to go to the Kmart." Butler is effing high-minded. He is an enthusiast, demanding and prescriptive. But his lectures also exhilarate. They respect your reach.

JB