Critique Magazine :: On Writing II

Even when he was riding the Long Island commuter train to and from his journalism job, author Robert Olen Butler strove to create arresting literary fiction. Mr. Butler realized that he would have to make a place for writing while he made a living doing something else, usually working wherever he could find a job (steel mill laborer, taxi driver, high school substitute teacher). When he finally was hired to write and edit trade magazines and proclaim himself a writer by profession, his focus remained. He aimed for literary excellence, turning out short story after story and novel after novel. In 1993, Mr. Butler’s dedication to intention and craft was rewarded when he earned one of the United States’ highest literary awards, the coveted Pulitzer Prize, for A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain (1992), a collection of short stories about Vietnamese refugees living in Louisiana.
       A simple request from National Public Radio for a story that could be read on the air opened the floodgates of Mr. Butler’s memory and connected him with the Vietnamese refugee community in Lake Charles, Louisiana. He drew from his keen observations of this group, his own interactions with the Vietnamese people during the Vietnam war, and his theater training to capture fifteen lives in first person narratives. Each voice is so distinct that these stories have been used as theater monologues.
       Mr. Butler’s greatest writing gift is his innate ability to climb inside a character’s head and assume his or her persona. Robert Olen Butler individuates his characters through dialect and vocal cadence, so it is not surprising that he holds an undergraduate degree in theater from Northwestern University and a degree in playwriting from the University of Iowa.
       Mr. Butler’s experiences in Vietnam have colored his work, though they have not been the central themes of his novels or short stories. Like his character Ben in “The Deep Green Sea” (1998), Mr. Butler was not particularly traumatized by the war. Serving as a translator in Army Intelligence, he experienced the war in ways that other soldiers couldn’t; he both spoke the language and understood much of its nuance and its culture. That is most evident in “The Fairy Tale” (a short selection from “A Good Scent”) that pivots on the mis-speaking of a Vietnamese phrase.
       Robert Olen Butler’s early novels Alleys of Eden (1981), Sun Dogs (1982), On Distant Ground (1985), and his more recent Deep Green Sea do deal with the Vietnamese experience in some way. Each also considers Mr. Butler’s continuing interest in a yearning for connection that is usually expressed through the personal interactions (sexual or otherwise) of men and women. That theme are also seen in They Whisper (1994), his explicit work about a man’s sexual history revealed through the imagined voices of the protagonist’s many female partners. Wabash (1987), The Deuce (1989), and his current work, Fair Warning, also explore different ways that people struggle to connect with others. Fair Warning is a parable of the search for love, reflected in the art auction scene where collectors hoard valuable objects and then disconnect from them. As his writing evolves, Mr. Butler continues to model his chosen themes and a continually changing cast of characters, discovering new personas, exploring the quirks of the human condition and its varied attempts at interaction and connection.
       Robert Olen Butler currently teaches creative writing at McNeese State University in Louisiana, giving students a deeper insight into the creative processes involved in literary fiction. Recently, Janie Franz of Critique Magazine asked Mr. Butler to share some of those insights. [Mr. Butler had briefly discussed his new book, Fair Warning before the following questions were pursued.]

Franz: How do you go about writing? Do you write every day?

Franz: What is your discipline? Do you write a specific number of words or pages?

Butler: I tend to write about two hours in the morning. My goal is probably around [there]—and I polish as I go. (I’m not a major draft-get-it-all-down-rough-and-come-back-later person. I do, of course, come back later, but I do work sentences over as I go.) I tend to try to do 400 to 600 words a day. But it depends on the book.

Franz: I would hope that you are constantly working on something since you write every day.

Butler: Oh, yeah.

Franz: I guess this is maybe a silly question but do you use a word processor?

Butler: Oh, yes, of course. Long ago when I was still breaking in, I wrote by hand. In fact, I wrote every word of my four published novels by longhand on my lap on the Long Island Railroad. I commuted to a journalism job to my home on Long Island and back. When computers finally came along, I thought they would be sort of a kind of fancy typewriter for me, and I would continue to write by hand. But I sort of fell in love with them.
And, of course, writing as I do I work sentences over as I go, typewriters were never appropriate for me. But computers are the best of both worlds. I can work the sentences over and yet type them in.

Franz: I do that, too. I went back to school as an older student, a very older student, to get my undergrad degree in anthropology. I kind of switched horses and kept writing on the side. But I would have professors tell me that you have to have at least three drafts. I was standing there saying, “Why?” If I can get it done in one sitting, and then I come back and edit it, look at it again with fresh eyes the next day, isn’t that enough?

Butler: Yes. In fact, some of my sentences have ten or twelve drafts, but not every sentence needs three drafts. Some need more; some less.

Franz: Exactly. If you do it as you go—I don’t know if you are like me or I’m like you, but where it is important to do that because sometimes what flows after one particular word is very important and you have to make sure that the word is right. For instance, you are going along writing a sentence and there are so many shades of meaning for one particular verb. If you get the right one down, the sentence goes in this direction. If you get another one down or you leave it blank, the sentence goes somewhere but it may not be where you want it to go. Do you find that that happens to you?

Butler: Yes. I put it a different way. A work of art is organic. Every chain resonates into everything else. If that is so, then I don’t know what my next sentence is going to be until this sentence is as close as I can get it to right. Because the choices you make in the next sentence are going to be profoundly contingent upon the choices in this one. And so if I make approximations in this sentence, the next sentence is going to have even worse approximations because it’s not only within its own demands of its own sentence. It is also working against the approximated previous sentence, so on and so forth. That’s, to me, why I think I’m compelled to work each sentence over as thoroughly as I can before going on to the next one.

Franz: I understand exactly where you are coming from with that. All of it builds toward this whole piece that you sort of have an idea where it’s going. Do you have an outline extensively or do you start with a scene you are working on?

Butler: No, but in recent years particularly, I’ve outlined. I’ve never outlined. Outlining is sort of antithetical to process of working.

Butler: Because what I have to teach my students ... I’ve been teaching seventeen years now ... is that art does not come from your head. It does not come from the analytical faculties. Art comes from the place where you dream. And the fact is an outline is inevitably going to come from your head. You’re going to will it into being. You’re going to analyze it and plan it into being. And that, as I say, is the opposite of the true artistic process.

Franz: That makes sense, because I do a lot of journalism where you’re telling a story, and there’s a format for that. Even with magazine journalism, it may be a bit more creative.

Butler: Absolutely, it’s written like that. It certainly is.

Franz: Oh yes, you have to sit there—now the creative part, the real creative part, is getting that hook. Once I can get the hook in, then I have a little framework to hang it on, then it goes from there with notes and interviews and research and everything else. Then you throw in whatever little embellishments that you add to it. But then again, you’re right, it’s very linear, very analytical. It doesn’t approach what you’re trying to do, creating someone’s story or telling profound about life through the interactions of your characters with other folks or with what Life places in front of them ....
What advice would you give to young writers, besides your students? We’re talking of those who are really bitten by the writing bug, who have some talent, and have some drive. What would you tell them?

Butler: Well, if they aspire to create literature, I’d tell them the thing I just mentioned to you; that is, remember that art doesn’t come from your head. It doesn’t come from your analytical faculties. It comes from the place where you dream. That’s where you have to go in order to create art. And I’d also remind them that to be an artist, you can’t be a dilettante writer. You can’t write on weekends, or this week and not the next, or wait for the summer. You have to write every day. ... Those are a couple of thing, quick things.

Franz: The word dream triggered something. When you said previously that you incubated an idea about Fair Warning—

Butler: I didn’t incubate it. Oh, I see what you said....

Franz: You said you had kind of slept on it, then it came fully into what you needed to do.

Butler: Sure, sure. I see what you’re saying.

Franz: Do you find that you have to sit with something for awhile to work out problems with characters or to get a vision for a new work? I have a friend who writes. Before he writes, he’ll sort out some ideas he wants and then he’ll go sit by his pool for a couple of hours, half drowsy. When he stirs, he’s got it all figured out. He’s not necessarily thinking about what he’s writing. It’s just there. Rather like Rollo May saying, if you’re working on a real stickler of a problem creatively, go to bed and the next morning the solution is there. Do you find that that’s true for yourself?

Butler: Yeah, absolute. If in fact, as I suggest, art comes from the place you dream, that sort of thing–the formation of your dreams works beyond your conscious control. So, of course, you have to wait upon that. And, indeed, if you don’t wait on that, then you end up forcing, forcing the work. And that’s one of the things that draws you into your head and makes the work come from the wrong place.

Franz: I really learned a lot in a very short time. I really appreciate you taking a few minutes to speak about your work and to talk about the process of writing.

Butler: One other thing if you are interested in process, and if your readers are interested in process, I did a project on the internet last year. I went on the internet on October 30 and I did seventeen webcasts over seventeen evenings, two hours each. On the webcast, I wrote a short story absolutely from scratch real time so you could see the broad—what you mostly saw was my word processor. You watched every comma stroke in the creation of a story. You watched all of the lousy, rotten, awkward sentences that were reshaped and reformed. From start to finish, you saw in those thirty-four hours the creation of a story in webcasts.
People who watched it live, emailed questions to me. I had graduate students who would sort through the questions while I was working. And then the last half hour of each of those two hours, I answered questions about process. So, there’s a lot of information of the sort that we’ve just touched on at this website. Those webcasts are permanently archived there. Anyone can go and view them. The website is www.fsu.edu/butler You can go there, anybody, any of your readers can go there and watch in seventeen sessions, thirty-four hours, of observing a writer’s creative process moment to moment in full detail. This is the first time this has every happened in the history of literature.

Franz: I bet it has. I’m glad you told me about that because I’ll definitely want to look at it myself, and I’ll point our readers to it because it will be very interesting for them to look at. That you very much, Mr. Bulter.