From Where You Dream -- Wednesday Writing

 

From Where You Dream
The Process of Writing Fiction
by Robert Olen Butler
Edited and with and Introduction
by Janet Burroway

This is one of the writing craft books most influential on my craft.  In fact it was Butler who explained the story dreaming concept to me.  I can't claim he taught it to be since I'd been doing a version of it from the beginning which was before my double digit birthdays.  What he taught me was to respect it as the root source of the stories and the power source for their relevance.

He also taught me that for a story teller, daydreaming was the life blood of your work not evidence of laziness.  After I internalized this concept, I never had any further belief in writer's block as anything other than having gotten trapped in my left brain where the editor, critic and task master reside.  Perfectionists all and all full of disdain for daydreaming.  And yet no story and no idea is born in left brain machinations.  All things new and meaningful must incubate in dreamtime.

I have had this book checked out dozens of times from nearly a dozen different libraries over decades.  Now I finally have my own Kindle copy as I just stumbled on a sale while looking for the latest edition of Janet Burroway's Writing Fiction because I found it's Kindle edition on sale last August and bought it and was thinking of writing about it for this post.  So I grabbed this book and both images thinking I would write about both of them since Burroway's contribution to Butler's book is why I picked it up the first time as I'd been borrowing her book from my library for nearly a decade by then.  That was the 2nd edition.

Butler himself refuses to write non-fiction so without Burroway's help this book could never have been.  She recorded a series of his lectures made extemporaneously from a stack of index card cues then transcribed them (or possibly had students transcribe them) and then edited to smooth out the rhetoric, remove repetition and the grammatical glitches of conversational delivery.

It has been several years since I last read this so it is past time for a re-read.

I think I'll save Burroway's book for next Wednesday.  Unless I'm ready to talk about my NaNo project by then.  Right now that's still incubating.  I'm swimming in dreamtime and in spite of little wordcount, feeling as productive as a mother-to-be.

Storytellers must believe that day dreaming is not slacking but the ultimate making of meaning out of chaos.