From Where You Dream

An Interview with Robert Olen Butler:
A Master Writer & Teacher
By Seth Satterlee

From Where You Dream, a compilation of Robert Olen Butler’s lectures on the process of writing, is both challenging and fascinating.  The book starts with the fundamentals of how to write good fiction, teaches the necessary components of a good story, and finishes with

critiques of student material.  From Where You Dream is wonderfully detailed, a treasure for the aspiring author from one of best writers working in English and one of the best teachers of creative writing today.

                   Butler’s style is considered one of the most sensual in contemporary fiction. His ideas and his words flow from sensual stimuli.  No one who has ever read it can forget the memorably sensual description of the experience of having feet x-rayed for shoe size and fit found in his novel, They Whisper.  Butler also is an expert, however, on the sharp line between sensuality in fiction and mere gratuitous pornography.  Butler writes voluptuously about his subjects—taking the reader outside of himself through the power of words to make the reader experience a sound, an environment, an emotion and in the process moves the story of a character’s yearning forward.  The pornographer throws in sex for the sake of sex, with no redeeming value from a literary point of view, passages  which pull the writer back into himself/herself, in a sort of literary masturbation. The book does well to teach sensual description as applied to the furthering of a story and therefore the furthering of the author’s message.

                  This is done well because, from beginning to end, every complicated exercise and concept is thoroughly explained.  The lessons contained, although complex, are, especially for the developing writer, worth learning. They are also, however, valuable for the serious reader who hopes to understand the process of literary creation.

                  My first reaction to the process was to say, “It works for him but there’s no way this would work for me.” Butler’s style of writing is based around the author’s ability to break into his own subconscious images and retrieve complicated descriptive material, letting it flow directly from his subconscious and on to the blank page.

                  Some of the ideas seemed a little far fetched to me at first, but strangely enough, I eventually found the most obscure connections to be the truest to me.  For example, Butler compares writing fiction to sleeping at one point:

                  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.

                  I don’t think I have ever heard a truer statement in my entire life.  Sometimes I have full length movies play in my head while I’m sleeping.  They must be exhilarating because I wake up with intense excitement, wishing I could go back to sleep and recapture the action.  The problem for me—and I suspect most people— is that once I’m awake the story is gone.  This is exactly what Butler is trying to teach us about writing:  when you start “thinking” about the story it is immediately tainted.

                  “Thinking” shows up in fiction a few different ways—generalization, analysis, summarization, abstraction—words that invariably make up Butler’s criticism. You will hear him repeat these four words in some form many times throughout the book. 

His other great focus is on what he calls yearning, a character’s urgent desires at the most elementary level. Almost everything in a story, every device, be it a metaphor, a flashback, or a conversation, should be used to advance the character’s yearning.  Butler’s advice is invaluable, but it does not mean just spacing out and coming up with a masterpiece.  In fact the process is incredibly difficult. “I don’t think there are child prodigies in literature,” he said.  The essence of good writing comes from many experiences, most forgotten, that are lodged in the mind ready to be taken out and placed on a page. Only after experiencing much of the world is one ready to express this with writing.

                   Butler often speaks of writing moment to moment through the senses, letting the mind lead you where it will.  But not until he performs his Anecdote Exercise does it become clear exactly what this means and exactly how hard it is to accomplish. In the drill a student gives him a story, an anecdote of the past and he critiques it as if it were a piece of written fiction. By the end, the student’s work has been rid of all excess summary and generalization. It is amazing how much the students struggled with the drill. It seemed at times that they wouldn’t be capable of saying one word that wasn’t filled with summary. The book ties up well following this exercise with examples of student work written for one of Butler’s classes.  With each student manuscript Butler explains precisely what works, what doesn’t and why. The man is a genius.  Every time he explains what didn’t work in a story or how a passage might have been written more successfully, he is, without fail, absolutely correct. And you—and his students, too, no doubt—are left shaking your head in wonder at the perfect clarity of his vision about creative writing.

                  What I learned from reading the student work and Butler’s critiques is that this style of writing—writing directly from the senses—while a desirable process to follow, is intense, difficult, and probably not a style every writer can master. Butler himself emphasizes that it is necessary to explore a variety of writing processes until you find one with which you can be comfortable and, thus successful. At the same time, Butler laid down a very solid set of guidelines on how to write good fiction.  In closing, one line sticks with me. 

                  It’s easy to get caught up in loving literature and wishing to be the person on the dust jacket.  This ambition, as innocent seeming as it is, can very easily muscle out your deeper, more delicate, more difficult ambitions.

Seth Satterlee, a student at The Univeristy of Chicago, is a New Orleans native. He has been associated with the Faulkner Society in its writing intern program since he was a senior at Country Day School. He was student editor of the Society's literary journal, The Double Dealer in 2005-2006 and wrote this piece for the journal last year.