From Where You Dream Quotes

“there are two of you, one who wants to write and one who doesn’t. The one who wants to write has to keep fooling the one who doesn’t.”
― Robert Olen Butler, From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction

“Most journals are repositories of great swatches of abstraction and generalization and self-analysis and interpretation and all that bad stuff. Don’t do that. But here’s a certain kind of journal that might be useful to you: at the end of the day or beginning of the next day, return to some event of the day that evoked an emotion in you. Record that event in the journal. But do this only—only—moment to moment through the senses. Absolutely never name an emotion; never start explaining or analyzing or interpreting an emotion. Record only through those five ways I mentioned that we feel emotions—signals inside the body, signals outside the body, flashes of the past, flashes of the future, sensual selectivity—which are therefore the best ways to express emotions.”
― Robert Olen Butler, From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction

“fiction writers are the writer-directors of the cinema of inner consciousness,”
― Robert Olen Butler, From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction

“When Michael received a pass at the top of the key in full flight and he left the ground, he defied gravity, floated through the air, let that ball roll off his fingertips and into the basket. Tongue unconsciously extended. When he did that, he had to be in the zone. He could not be thinking about what he was doing. But to make his zone exactly analogous to the art zone, you have to add this: every time he shoots, in order to make a basket Michael Jordan would have to confront, without flinching, the moment when his father’s chest was blown apart by the shotgun held by his kidnapper. You know that happened in Michael Jordan’s life. Well, Michael would have to confront that in order to make a basket every time. Without flinching. Now his zone is equal to the artist’s zone. And now you understand the challenge of being an artist. 2”
― Robert Olen Butler, From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction

“I think, by the way, that’s why athletes are so superstitious. Because if you believe that your current batting streak depends on wearing a pair of dirty socks, you’re less likely to think it has to do with your technique. If it’s technique, you think about it. If it’s your socks, it’s not rational. What superstitions do for the athlete is to irrationalize. And that’s what you have to do as a writer; you have to irrationalize yourself somehow.”
― Robert Olen Butler, From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction

“I once assigned a graduate class Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life—a book I love—and one of the students said, “It’s so effing high-minded it makes me want to go to the Kmart.”
― Robert Olen Butler, From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction

“The special problem here is that the artistic medium of fiction writers—language—is not innately sensual. The medium is unforgiving whenever we look for it in our minds. Some visual artists do a lot of conceptualizing and still end up creating terrific works of art. They are able to do so because once they get out there in front of their canvases or their blocks of granite, they have to leave those ideas behind. The medium itself won’t let them think. Literature—language, fiction—does not as a medium force you to leave your ideas behind. And if you think it into being, if you will a story into being, by God, it’s going to show.”
― Robert Olen Butler, From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction

“the primary and only necessary way of experiencing a work of literary art is not by “understanding” it in analytical terms; it is by thrumming to the work of art.”
― Robert Olen Butler, From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction