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“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 comes from the place where you dream … your unconscious … the white-hot center of you.” (13)

A while ago, I read Robert Olen Butler’s From Where You Dream. I appreciated this book mainly for two reasons: its trust in the unconscious processes that produce art, and its specific advice for learning to listen to and draw out those processes into writing.

The book is composed of three parts. In the first, we get a “compiled transcription” of the lectures Butler gives in his creative writing course. Here, he lays out his understanding of and approach to writing. The second part is a transcription of his approach to writing workshops and excercises. The third is a collection of short stories that are referenced in the other two sections.

Many of his statements challenge conventional wisdom, but I found myself getting excited by these challenges because they felt more authentic than the more formulaic writing-advice texts. For example:

“Until a character with yearning has emerged from your unconscious, I don’t encourage you to write.” (42)

I often feel guilty about not writing enough. However, when I sit there and nothing will come, the frustration is enough to put me off the whole business forever. Butler’s not saying “don’t write,” though. His point is that, until you are writing from the unconscious, you won’t be writing anything of much value. Or, in his words:

“There is no intellect in this world powerful enough to create a great work of novelistic art. Only the unconcscious can fit together the stuff of fiction; the conscious mind cannot.” (85)

So the solution is to find your way into your unconscious, or to draw your unconscious out. How do you do that? By paying attention to the scenes and images your unconscious mind is offering up and diving into them on the sensual, concrete level, without concerning yourself at first with making conscious sense of it all, giving your unconscious mind time to get all the images out before the conscious mind starts boxing, labeling, and ordering them.

“Voice is the embodiment in language of the contents of your unconscious.” (32)

Another quote that was a great relief to me: “All good novelists have bad memories.” (23) I have always had a horrible memory for details. What sticks with me are emotional impressions and a few sensations and/or images. I’ve always thought that automatically disqualified me from ever attaining “great writing,” but perhaps there’s hope for me yet.

Overall, the lectures are engaging and fresh–not the tired repetition of platitudes found in many texts on writing. The two major exercises he suggests are also immediately useful and feel like authentic work (rather than worksheet-like drills). It sits beside Gardner’s The Art of Fiction and Lamott’s Bird by Bird.

[In case you're wondering, the exercises are: capturing scenes and sensory images from the unconscious, then writing from those (87-95); and the "anecdote exercise," which focuses on moving moment-by-moment through a scene at the sensory-detail level (Ch. 8-9). Of course, that's a horribly abbreviated explanation missing the background of the lectures and the detail with which he describes the exercises.]