Robert Olen Butler
Robert Olen Butler is an American novelist and author of short stories. His book, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, earned him the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Butler served in the Army during Vietnam and since then written 16 novels, 6 short story collections, and earned a Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts grant, and other accolades.
Published 05/29/17
Published 05/29/17
Howl: What is your writing and editing process like?
Butler: I write every day. Every day. That’s crucial. I polish my sentences and paragraphs frequently, as I go. My daily quota is about 400 words. Process is built on the fact that art doesn’t come from the mind; it comes from the place where you dream. It comes from your unconscious, from what Graham Greene called the compost of your imagination. In the primary and only necessary engagement with it, literature is not meant to be understood by a reader in analytical, thematic, symbolic, theoretical, political, philosophic terms, but, rather, meant to be understood by thrumming to it in an aesthetic way. Consequently, editing for me is a return to passages already written not to analyze them for errors but to thrum to them. When something goes twang instead of thrum, I fix it by going back to the place where it should have come from, my unconscious. Editing—rewriting—is redreaming.
Howl: What advice do you have for budding writers?
Butler: My advice is a corollary to my process. Write every day. Write not from your head but from your unconscious, from your white-hot center. And make sure as creators of narrative that your main characters are built around their yearning. What we deeply strive for is what drives narratives. Plot is simply yearning challenged and thwarted.
Butler: I write every day. Every day. That’s crucial. I polish my sentences and paragraphs frequently, as I go. My daily quota is about 400 words. Process is built on the fact that art doesn’t come from the mind; it comes from the place where you dream. It comes from your unconscious, from what Graham Greene called the compost of your imagination. In the primary and only necessary engagement with it, literature is not meant to be understood by a reader in analytical, thematic, symbolic, theoretical, political, philosophic terms, but, rather, meant to be understood by thrumming to it in an aesthetic way. Consequently, editing for me is a return to passages already written not to analyze them for errors but to thrum to them. When something goes twang instead of thrum, I fix it by going back to the place where it should have come from, my unconscious. Editing—rewriting—is redreaming.
Howl: What advice do you have for budding writers?
Butler: My advice is a corollary to my process. Write every day. Write not from your head but from your unconscious, from your white-hot center. And make sure as creators of narrative that your main characters are built around their yearning. What we deeply strive for is what drives narratives. Plot is simply yearning challenged and thwarted.