"The House of Fiction is Very Large and Has Many Rooms" -- Robert Olen Butler
Apr
14
by Hayley
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| Author photo from: http://www.english.ohiou.edu/cw/litfest/ |
Butler says he wrote 12 plays, 44 short stories, and 5 novels before "finally writing well."
"Sometimes the worst thing that can happen to you is to get published as an undergrad." I get it, but I don't agree.
"What you write needs to be fundamentally grounded in the idea that art does not come from the mind. It comes from the place where you dream, from your unconscious, from your white-hot center." Ok, but what if you're sleep-deprived? Seriously though, I agree that my best work stems from somewhere inside that I don't have to think about too much. The best images in my poems are gifts from my unconscious mind. But it's my mind, I believe, that figures out how to put these images to good use.
"THRUM"
"No one who wrote well ever wrote drunk."
"Fiction is the art form of human yearning. Plot is yearning challenged and thwarted." Nice, Butler. Nice. I will quote this in my literature courses when I am committing the "fault" of literature professors everywhere by asking, "What does the story mean?"
2 comments:
Tell him, Hayley! Seriously though, I understood where he was coming from with some of it but a lot of it sounded like it was pompous B.S. that he thought of after he got to the point in his career that he could say it and people would agree because of his name. And I do things like Campbell talked about where I will write a little bit and it isn't coming out how I want so I fold it up and put in my drawer and someday I find it again and give it the attention and thought that it deserved or needed. It seems wasteful to just throw away your ideas, if it was good enough that it inspired you to attempt writing about it the first time, chances are, it is a good enough idea to come back to and finish. And he texted through Dean Young's lecture... but his reading was really enjoyable so I suppose he is partially forgiven.
Partially...I disagree. If none of his students have produced anything that he can be proud of or acknowledge...they should try a different prof. I will say Butler is a great writer, and I very much enjoyed his readings the last night. But, I would never throw away something I worked hard to write, perhaps that is why I am not in his position, though.
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