In Praise of Robert Olen Butler

On Fiction, Argument, and Writing

Source

To use an image from Butler’s incredible From Where You Dream, I foolishly try to write fiction and philosophy, an attempt both fields often see as equivalent to shoving a shotgun in our mouth while we polish the trigger. I naturally think in words and logical sequence, not images, so when I write fiction, my natural concern is if the logic of the story adds up to an emotional payoff. I cringe when I hear “the journey is more important than the end” — it feels like a copout for the writer who fails to think a story through. I also dislike the common emphasis on description and emotional connection, not because these things don’t matter, but because these concerns often dominate in literary fiction over tragedy, psychology, stories, and ideas. But then I read the thankfully ruthless Robert Olen Butler and realized my long-standing mistakes. Though still error-prone, at least now I feel like my errors are visible.

I

The philosopher, academic, and theorist are generally concerned about the consistency of argument, which here I will call “the consistency of logic.” If the philosopher manages to make one thing follow from the next, addresses all reasonable objections, and the like, the philosopher has achieved at least some degree of “the consistency of logic.” The fiction writer, on the other hand, at least regarding the raw experience of reading, is generally concerned about “the consistency of imagery.” When we read fiction, there is a movie playing in our heads of what is happening; if that movie stops, flashes off and on, or is disjointed, the writer fails to establish “consistency of imagery.” Similarly, the philosopher fails if we aren’t ultimately convinced to think differently or to at least consider different thoughts.

Both the philosopher and fiction writer, in their own ways, must achieve “a consistency of words”: if sentences don’t make sense, if grammar is off, if intelligibility is low, then both fail. But while the philosopher needs only achieve consistency of words and logic, the fiction writer must achieve consistency of words, logic, and imagery. The logical demands of the philosopher are greater than that of the fiction writer, but the fiction writer is uniquely required to exceed in three areas of consistency.¹

Without realizing it, for years, I judged stories on their logical consistency in terms of plot, motive, structure, and if everything added up to a satisfying and interesting ending, and though this was valid, I failed to pay attention to the “consistency of imagery.” I primarily think in words, yet often experience flashes of powerful scenes, interesting voices, and tragic situations that inspired me into fiction.² Still, I mainly think in terms of syllogisms, and adding to the problem, I don’t think in terms of wants but goals (which proves problematic for making engaging characters). Consequently, the fiction I wrote mostly involved characters in problematic situations searching for solutions. Those situations were — at least to me — philosophically interesting, and if the works maintained internal consistency that made these situations possible and justified, then I considered the works successes. However, I failed to ask if I succeeded in creating a sensory experience, if my mental movie flowed together and created emotional connections for readers, and so my stories failed.

Problematically, people who also thought primarily in words liked my stories, which made me think my stories worked. These readers didn’t primarily think in images, so when images didn’t appear in their heads while they read, they didn’t realize something was missing. That or the readers possessed such vivid imaginations that they could fill in my shortcomings. Consequently, they didn’t judge the stories as failing because these “mental movies” were missing, and instead judged them on terms of their plot, depth, and the like. I was led to believe my stories worked, but they did not succeed. A fiction writer is responsible for three levels of consistency, and even if I covered two of them, to fail at one is to fail them all.

II

To help elaborate on what I learned from Butler, consider these two sentences from different versions of my short story, Heroes:

1. Whenever Eve woke up, she was ready to save the world. She leaped out of bed with a big smile on her face, put on her school uniform, and ran downstairs. She was the world’s only hope.

2. Eve threw the wrinkled sheets off her bed with a big smile, whirled into her favorite clothes — a black skirt with a light-blue knitted t-shirt — and skipped every other stair on the way down to the kitchen. She found the cornflake supply depleted. She liked saving the world but not eggs or toast.

When I read number one, I don’t see a movie playing in my head, but since I very rarely envision a movie, this doesn’t naturally strike me as a problem. The logic of number one follows: Eve leaps out of bed before putting on her school uniform, and the grammar works well enough to avoid convolution. Also, I can conclude that Eve believes herself to be special. The sentence seems strong enough, but the first sentence is terrible. Butler made me realize that the sentence starts with an abstraction: “waking up” is a generality, as are “leaping out of bed” and “a big smile.” When I first read Butler, I protested: Why aren’t my sentences specific?

Numerous literary critiques teach writers to be particular — take James Wood, for example — but it wasn’t until I read Butler that I understood by what standard I could judge if a detail was specific enough. “Rye bread” is more specific than “bread,” and so as a fiction writer I thought I passed the test by saying “rye bread.” But I was wrong: “rye bread” was not a sensory experience that had much hope of generating a scene in a mental movie. It was particular, but not moving. Instead of “rye bread,” I needed to write out a sensory pattern, such as “dark brown edges bordering rye meat.” The first was specific but not mentally visible, while the second was specific in sensory details, making a mental image possible.

Philosophers employ the Socratic dialogue to help students realize that people often use terms without knowing what those terms mean: a teacher might ask you for your views on American, and if you say America is about “freedom,” the teacher will then ask you what you mean by “freedom,” and if you say, “Freedom is about doing what you want to do,” the teacher might then ask, “Are you free if you can’t murder?” and so on and so forth until the student’s ideas are broken down to their smallest and most irreducible parts. The first time we suffer a Socratic dialogue, it can be rattling, for it’s not easy to accept that we entertain so many ideas without a clear idea of what they mean. Likewise, it was stunning to me when Butler made me realize I lacked what I’ll call “a Socratic detail dialectic,” meaning that when I used the word “carpet,” I didn’t realize that I used a generality and failed to provide any meaningful details. It seemed like I described something that covered the floor, especially if I said “a wool carpet,” but I was mistakenly generalizing and abstracting.

I don’t naturally think in terms of images, but I can if I must, and when I tried to envision a movie regarding my stories, I realized I couldn’t. The lack of sensory detail made it impossible. This was discouraging, but thanks to Butler, I gained a standard by which to judge if a detail was particular enough and rightly ordered. Unlike other books offering advice on creative writing, Butler provided a logic for determining the right placement and particularization of details — an invaluable difference.

If I couldn’t see a movie in my head while reading the sentence — if the details caused the scene to jump around illogically, if I couldn’t determine a point of view, if I couldn’t “see” what was being described — then either details needed to be reordered or a more particular description provided. Just because I wrote specific details did not mean the particular details flowed together into a scene. If I described toast on a plate and then a car outside the window, there needed to be a descriptive logic for why my story moved from describing toast to a car. “Hard cuts” in movies are jarring and should be used sparingly: good cuts are generally subtle after a prolonged shot. My descriptions were too “hard.”

For years, I heard “show, don’t tell” and believed I followed this advice (which writer doesn’t?), but in failing to form a “mental movie” and establish a sensory pattern and/or logic, I was actually telling descriptions instead of showing what was described. To say “he smiled” is more so telling the reader what a person did, while “her lips curved up” shows a person smiling. I didn’t realize that unless I formed a mental movie, I was telling descriptions, which is to say I wrongly believed that if I described, I couldn’t possibly be telling. Yet in failing to be particular enough and faithful to a sensory pattern, I failed to follow the most basic advice for creative writing while thinking I followed it to a tee.

III

Creating images wasn’t enough: I needed to create moving images. Consider the following versions of the same sentence from my novel To Turn the World:

1. I gradually poured the crackers into her bowl after pulling open the plastic. “Fear is good for ratings.”

2. I pulled open the plastic and poured the crackers into her bowl. “Fear is good for ratings.”

Both sentences sound fine, and the important information is relayed, but notice how in the first sentence the image of “pulling open the plastic” comes after the image of “gradually pouring the crackers into the bowl,” while in the second version, the character rips open the plastic and then pours in the crackers. In the first version, the “camera” is not moving smoothly, because we must temporarily move back and forth in time to understand the events. In the second sentence, the sequence of events that must follow in reality are described the same way sequentially in the sentence, helping the camera run smoothly. The first sentence is disjointed: thinking a sentence is “smooth” because it is grammatically correct or “sounds better” is a mistake I often made.

Consider the following:

1. The screen door out onto the front porch shrilled open after feet pounded down the hall on the other side of the bedroom door. Gunshots. No doubt George fired at woodpeckers after the news fooled him. Amazing what tricked my twin.

2. Feet pounded down the hall on the other side of the bedroom door; the screen door out onto the front porch shrilled open. Gunshots. No doubt the news fooled George and he was firing at woodpeckers. Amazing what tricked my twin.

“The screen door out onto the front porch” must be opened after George runs down the hall, but the order of events in the first sentence suggests the door is opened before the sounds in the hall. Yes, with the word “after,” it’s clear the feet-pounding came first, but then that should come first in the sentence: the order of events in “the image of a sentence” should match “the word order of the sentence” itself. Otherwise, the sentence requires a reader to stop and think in order to picture the sentence (which instantly ruins the “moving picture”) versus understand the sentence and its image while reading it. Because of its wording, the first sentence cannot be a “moving image,” only a collection of information, hurting the reading experience. The second sentence, on the other hand, by having the sequence of events match the sequence of the sentence, allows the reader to see what the sentence is about while the sentence is read.

Similarly, thanks to Kennan Grant, I realized that the emotional context of an action or dialogue must come before the action or dialogue, not after. To help explain this point, consider these lines from To Turn the World:

1. Mom was propped up on her white pillows, nearly bald and the bones in her face visible. “Don, the clouds!” Her throat was tight and her eyes wide.

2. Mom was propped up on her white pillows, nearly bald and the bones in her face visible. She shook a boney finger at the television, her throat tight and eyes wide. “Don, the clouds!”

These sentences are similar, and in the first version, we understand that the Mom is stressed after the dialogue. As a result, we must add the emotional context of the dialogue retrospectively, which means we must move backwards in our reading experience, disrupting it. However, in the second version, the emotional context comes before the dialogue (“her throat tight and eyes wide”), and thus we can read into the dialogue aware of the emotion in which the dialogue is spoken. Personally, not that they are always bad, but I try to avoid adverbs and adjectives as much as I can, and instead of saying something like, “She nervously shook a boney finger…,” say instead, “She shook a boney finger at the television, her throat tight and eyes wide,” for the description of the Mom “shows” nervousness.

Good plots build like music: they climb upward toward something that helps readers feel like the book was worth their time. However, good sentence structures flow downhill: for years I mistakenly applied the logic of plot movement to sentence formation. As a result, I placed the emotional context at the end of sentences, causing a choppy reading experience, because the reader needed to think the emotion back into what they just read, as opposed to getting it all on the first read. Good sentences are “front loaded:” they start at the top of a hill that readers glide down versus at the bottom of a hill that readers must climb.

Just because information is relayed clearly does not mean a sentence is written smoothly. Since I don’t naturally think in images, I’ve always erroneously conflated “clarity” with “smoothness.” Now, it’s arguably more important that information is clear versus a sentence be smooth, but even though it’s more important for a house to structurally stand firm than look nice, you will quickly stop caring that a house is “structurally sound” if it is ugly. Yes, the structure needs to be firm for you to have the luxury of hating how it looks, but the house will never feel like a home if its aesthetics are left unaddressed. Similarly, the most informative sentences in the world can be disliked because they are too jagged, displeasing, and jumpy.

As sentences should flow downhill, so should paragraphs. Though there can and should be building plot-elements as a paragraph advances (and chapters, for that matter), there shouldn’t be growing emotional clarity: clarity that comes at the end is like wiping the fog off your glasses after the sunset finishes. It should be clear at the start of a paragraph the emotion being carried through all of the sentences, as each sentence should start with emotional clarity. The reader should generally not have to read an emotion “back onto” a previous sentence from a future sentence: emotion should always advance forward. Plots are matters of information (like hardwood for houses), while sentences are matters of emotion (like paint for homes). If our plot is strong but our sentences weak, the emotional payout of our plot will be weakened if not ruined.

Sentences should flow like waterfalls; plots should build like music. Until Butler and Grant, treating sentences like plots, my sentence structure “climbed” versus “descended,” hurting the reading experience. Writings should descend and flow, while plots should rise and reward.

IV

I operate Frozen Glory Photography, and though I don’t usually think in images, I “see” scenes daily. Perhaps in seeing imagery, my mind doesn’t feel a need to imagine images, and vice-versa? Hard to say, but because I could look out into the world and witness scenes, there seemed little need for heavy description in writing. After all, couldn’t other people see in scenes too? Why did they need images in writing if they could just look up from the book?

I felt no need to tell readers what a cup looked like (hadn’t they seen one before?), and I didn’t need to describe New York (who hadn’t watched the news?). Just by writing the term “New York,” I felt it was enough to summon inside of readers a vivid and moving setting. Additionally, I personally read a sentence like, “He walked to the mailbox,” as if it were a premise in the “argument” of a paragraph: if the character was outside and dressed, it was indeed possible for the character to walk to the mailbox, and thus the story committed no error. I didn’t think about if I could “see” the character walking to the mailbox, for I “knew” the character did: the information was relayed successfully. I knew what the word “walked” meant, so I knew what the sentence was saying, and proceeded on to the next. If the logic was consistent, I considered the writing successful. I also rationalized the use of general sentences (like “He walked”) by telling myself that people didn’t like to read and that writing more descriptive sentences would cause my works to be much longer, hurting their chances of being read. My error was failing to appreciate that if people couldn’t imagine a story in their heads, they wouldn’t even read shorter works: a balance needed to be struck between length and “pulling the reader in.”

For me, the logical concerns of a story eclipsed descriptive concerns; furthermore, I only wanted to use description if there was a reason for a given description: particularity, in my mind, had to be justified. If I described a cup as red, there had to be a reason it was red instead of blue; if there was no reason for the cup to be a certain color, then for me the cup was unjustified to be described as anything more than a general “cup.” “A red cup” required symbolic, philosophical, etc. justification, while “a cup” only needed to be justified by the characters in the story needing a cup to do x, y, or z. I considered this careful writing, and since I didn’t think in images, the lack of a mental movie when describing a general “cup” didn’t strike me as problematical. In fact, my logic for why the cup was only “a general cup” versus “a cup of a particular color” struck me as smart and careful.

Now, I do think artists should be more thoughtful about why they describe “x restaurant” versus “y restaurant” — stories aren’t often justified symbolically, philosophically, etc. enough — but I was personally taking this concern to such an extreme that it became impossible for readers to see a “mental movie” of what I wrote. There cannot be a sensory pattern where generalities prevail, and thanks to Butler, I know that now. Better yet, the beauty of Butler is that he does provide me with a justification for x description versus y: I can ask myself, “Does x detail help form a sensory pattern or not? Does it help “the camera shot” maintain smoothness?” Butler’s method addresses my obsessive need for justification. Yes, I still think writers must balance a tension between “details for meaning” and “details for a moving scene,” and figure out ways to “signal” which details are which without infringing on the emotional experience, but I was out of balance.

In real life, cups just “are” a given color: the reason for the color is indivisible from a cup’s “is-ness.” Cups wouldn’t exist if they didn’t have color, and though I knew this, since a story to me was a collection of conscious choices by the writer, there needed to be a reason the narrator took the time to describe the color of a cup versus just point out a (general) “cup.” Additionally, since I didn’t know I was missing a “mental movie” when I read stories, all that concerned me was if the writer had a logic for being particularly descriptive here and not there. I resist realism in fiction, for the question that always bothers me is “Whose realism?” In that line of thought, I still believe that trying to describe everything in a room is meaningless, a waste of time, and even hubris, for no one can describe everything (except maybe Proust). But though I don’t believe I am wrong in my concerns about realism (see “The Trance of Believability” by O.G. Rose for more), I went too far and failed to recognize the importance of a “sensory pattern,” without which readers couldn’t undergo an emotional experience. And if there’s no emotion, why not just read philosophy?

V

Butler warns that if we let our readers “fill in” the blanks in our story, we are not making art: in regard to a woman crying over a cheap romance novel, Butler claims the romance novel ‘is not art, because her emotional response is a result of her filling in the blanks left by […] abstraction.’³ Problematically, I used to think letting readers “fill in blanks” of a story helped them make the story “theirs” and that this increased emotional connection. Since I didn’t form a mental movie in my head but knew others did, I wanted to give readers freedom to see “their own movie,” not just mine: the lack of detail to me was justified as making “space” for artistic, emotional, and individual experience. The work of William Empson influenced me, and using his work wrongly, I justified an “ambiguity of detail.” Foolishly, I ‘redeem[ed] [my method]’: there was no “sensory pattern” or “mental movie,” but I thought this was acceptable because I didn’t know what I was missing and because I figured my “logical consistency” was strong.⁴

‘Abstract, summarizing, generalizing, and analytic language will induce the reader to fill in the blanks and thereby distance her from the work and the characters’ — Butler warns — yet I used these very tools believing that I increased intimacy between the reader and the work.⁵ But we must judge a tree by its fruit — not by a single apple, but by a few harvests — and the truth of the matter was that my work failed to strike readers like I wanted. I agreed with Butler that emotional connection was more important than technique but continued to use techniques that hindered emotional connection, believing I enhanced it.

When descriptions and language ‘do[] not connect in [their] sensual pattern to anything going on in the story […] passages are like little stage directions.’⁶ Fiction is not drama and must be written differently, for drama is ultimately visual (it occupies a space between film and literature), while ‘the artistic medium of fiction writers — language — is not innately sensual.’⁷ The writer of plays does not need to concern his or her self with maintaining “a sensory pattern” but rather a consistency of state directions, character locations, etc., for ultimately the experience of a play is not abstract. And yet I thought it would be interesting to write fiction that was more dramatic in its writing style.⁸ The mistakes I made were extraordinary, which took the extraordinary work of Robert Olen Butler to correct. For that gift, this essay is meant to praise him.

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Notes

¹This demand is unique among all the arts: if a dancer fails, you still see the dancer; if a film fails, the film doesn’t turn off. But if the fiction writer fails, you don’t see a movie in your head: you see meaningless words on a page. Yes, the dancer must be concerned with the consistency of the dance and its logic, but the dancer need not fear that if a step is missed, the audience will go blind. The audience may not like what they see, but they will see something. The fiction writer, however, in dealing with abstractions to create sensory experiences, risks his or her reader seeing nothing at all. The musician does not worry if his or her music will be heard, only if the music is liked. The writer must worry if the story is both seen and liked: the writer could have a story that would be liked if it were seen, a story that is liked but not seen, or a story that is seen but not liked. Worse yet, it becomes very difficult for the writer to judge if his or her story is “visible,” precisely because the writer likely has a movie in his or her head of what he or she is trying to express. This movie based on inspiration can blind the writer from identifying if the words on the page convey that movie to others.

²I started writing science fiction in sixth grade, a series called The Sword of Tribulation. I didn’t attempt fiction until a UVa fiction professor looked at me like I was crazy for submitting the science fiction work in hopes of being admitted to her class (it never dawned on me that there was a stark difference between fiction and science fiction). For some reason, it was easier to create a movie in my head writing science fiction compared to literary fiction, perhaps because in science fiction I knew I had to create the whole world, because it didn’t exist, while in fiction I felt the world building wasn’t necessary, seeing as we exist in that world. Also, literary fiction suggested plot and entertainment weren’t as important as meaning and idea, so I gradually stopped seeing movies in my head and failed to realize I stopped seeing them.

³Butler, Robert Olen. From Where You Dream. New York, NY: Grove Press, 2005: 46.

⁴Butler, Robert Olen. From Where You Dream. New York, NY: Grove Press, 2005: 38.

⁵Butler, Robert Olen. From Where You Dream. New York, NY: Grove Press, 2005: 46.

⁶Butler, Robert Olen. From Where You Dream. New York, NY: Grove Press, 2005: 133.

⁷Butler, Robert Olen. From Where You Dream. New York, NY: Grove Press, 2005: 17.

⁸As a lack of “thinking in images” might be problematic, I wonder if a strong imagination is also problematic, for from the word “walk” you can easily see and imagine an entire scene: you need very little to see everything. I wonder this because generally my writing before Butler was successful with creative types, which makes me think that from the little I provided, they were still able to “fill in the blanks.” I used this as evidence that I was a “writer for artists,” but I now see I was only rationalizing.

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