A writer friend tipped me off to a book on the writing process by Pulitzer Prize winning author Robert Olen Butler. From Where You Dream compiles a series of lectures Butler gave to graduate writing students in the fall of 2001. Though aimed at fiction writers, his lectures offer guidance to any writer seeking to increase vividness and deepen meaning, any writer who desires to create art.
I always begin with something the great Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa once said. He said, “To be an artist means never to avert your eyes.” To be an artist means never to avert your eyes—this is the absolute essential truth here. . . .
. . . Artists are intensely aware of the chaos implied by the moment-to-moment sensual experience of human beings on this planet. But they also, paradoxically, have an intuition that behind the chaos there is meaning: behind the flux of moment-to-moment experience there is a deep and abiding order.
In From Where You Dream, Butler encourages, guides and cajoles his graduate students to search for the details that accumulate around a moment in which “the deepest yearning of the main character shines forth. “ He takes his students through exercises that require them to experience the world with sensuality and openness, that create pathways to unexpected meaning.
There are many things to worry about in non-fiction writing: accuracy of details and quotes, structure and voice, grammar and punctuation, finding the arc and finding a market. Often, these concerns make me feel constricted and it shows in my writing. Recently, I reread Butler’s book and found myself wondering if perhaps even in non-fiction, the greatest truths come From Where You Dream.
No comments:
Post a Comment