Robert Olen Butler’s book,
From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction, edited with an
introduction by Janet Burroway, is a must read for any aspiring fiction writer.
I had the good fortune to
have a class with Butler at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival the year in which
he won a Pulitzer Prize for his fiction collection, A Good Scent From A Strange
Mountain, and he was beginning to explore the power of yearning in fiction.
Burroway says that Butler’s “self declared
obsessions have to do with the descent into the dream space of the unconscious,
in order to discover the yearning at the center of every person, and therefore
every character, and with the moment-to-moment sensual experiencing of that
character’s story.”
Burroway summarizes it as, “He
(Butler) proposes fiction as the exploration of the human condition and
yearning as its compass. …He conducts and suggests exercises to achieve
the DREAMSPACE and he offers insights into the nature of voice. Butler is
most eloquent in his discussions on fiction when he describes it as “cinema of
the mind,” to be experienced by the reader (and the writer) as a sensed series
of takes and scenes. Which is to say – the fiction writer as filmmaker provides
a different mental and emotional process. And he has devised a system whereby
revision is undertaken at the level of structure rather than sentence.”
Butler himself says, “Please get out
of the habit of saying that you’ve got an idea for a short story. Art
does not come from ideas. Art does not come from the mind. Art comes from the place
where you dream. Art comes from your unconscious; it comes from the white-hot
center of you.” (Burroway’s Introduction.)
So go and dream your stories
and write them down in the “white-hot center” of your vision of the deepest
yearning of flawed people.
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| Photo Credit - Jan Bowman - April 2013 "Mid-Pacific" |
About Jan Bowman
Jan Bowman’s fiction has appeared in
numerous publications including, Roanoke Review, Big Muddy, The Broadkill Review, Third Wednesday, Minimus, Buffalo
Spree (97), Folio, The Potomac Review, Musings, Potato Eyes and others. Glimmer
Train named a recent story as Honorable Mention in the November 2012 Short
Story Awards for New Writers. Winner of the 2011 Roanoke Review Fiction Award,
her stories have been nominated for Pushcart
Prizes, Best American Short Stories, a Pen/O’Henry award and a recent story
was a finalist in the 2013 Phoebe Fiction Contest; another was a 2012 finalist
in the “So To Speak” Fiction Contest. She is
working on two collections of short stories while shopping for a publisher for
a completed story collection. She has nonfiction publications in Trajectory
and Pen-in-Hand.
She writes a weekly blog of “Reflections” on the writing life
and posts regular interviews with writers and publishers. Learn more at www.janbowmanwriter.com or
visit blog: http://janbowmanwriter.blogspot.com
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