Robert Olen Butler’s From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction is the most helpful instructional writing text I’ve ever read.
It chronicles an actual writing workshop Butler taught for MFA candidates at Florida State University in 2002. Butler wore a mic while in class, one of his students transcribed the audio recordings, and Janet Burroway edited the manuscript. It’s structured into three parts: The Lectures, The Workshop, and The Stories.
Butler sees the writer as a literary artist, and as such, emphasizes that art must originate from our unconscious in the form of a creative trance. This art cannot and will not come out of thinking–what he refers to as “generalization, analysis, and abstraction.” He discusses this in detail in his first lecture of the book, “Boot Camp.” He correlates this creative trance as having similarities to the athlete’s zone:
Jackie Stewart, the great race car driver, said in his autobiography that when you drive a car really fast and really well, you don’t have a sensation of speed at all; things slow down around you, you can count the bricks on the wall at the next turn. Baseball players, when they are batting and in a streak, say they can count the stitches on the ball. They are in the zone, and that means they are not thinking at all. They call it muscle memory. But for you, it’s not muscle memory; it’s dream space, it’s sensory memory.
Athletes at all levels experience this, from dancers to runners. Some of my best moments on the golf course have come during stretches like this–and, coincidentally, my best writing, too.
For example, in 2002, while attending a writing workshop at Cal State Long Beach, on the night before one of my stories was due, I sat at my desk in front of my laptop. I already had a story ready, one I had “generalized, analyzed, and abstracted” for weeks. But something happened that evening. I slipped into this trance, and when I snapped out of it, two hours had passed, and I’d completed the first draft of a new story. I thought I had stumbled on some kind of strange mutant ability. Ha! But really, this is the kind of place you want to be in. And, as I’ve learned, it becomes more and more difficult to tap into this place as you continue to grow as a writer.
Butler ends “Boot Camp” on one huge difference between the athlete’s zone and the artist’s zone:
Let’s look at Michael Jordan in his later prime–let’s say his last season with the Bulls, when they once again won the world championship. When Michael received a pass at the top of the key in full flight and he left the ground, he defied gravity, floated through the air, let that ball roll off his fingertips and into the basket. Tongue unconsciously extended. When he did that, he had to be in the zone. He could not be thinking about what he was doing. But to make his zone exactly analogous to the art zone, you have to add this: every time he shoots, in order to make a basket Michael Jordan would have to confront, without flinching, the moment when his father’s chest was blown apart by the shotgun held by his kidnapper. You know that happened in Michael Jordan’s life. Well, Michael would have to confront that in order to make a basket every time. Without flinching. Now his zone is equal to the artist’s zone. And now you understand the challenge of being an artist.
I could go on and on, sharing my other favorite moments from the book, but I don’t want to cheapen the experience for you in any way. Nestled within its pages is a wealth of helpful, writerly advice. I mean, the stuff I just shared came from the first of his lectures!
Whether you are a beginning writer or an experienced one, From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction should be on your reading list. (If you haven’t read it already, of course.)
About a year ago, I emailed Robert Olen Butler to ask for clarification on the process of “dreamstorming,” a process he introduces in one of his later lectures, and he responded back to me quickly with extremely helpful feedback that has only furthered my progress as a writer.
What more can you ask from a book?
That’s all I have for this week. Until next time, write your heart out!
