From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction

1. Boot Camp

I need to make this clear first off: no matter where you are in your writing career, if you aspire to create literature, if you aspire to be an artist in the medium of language, if you aspire to create narratives of whatever length that arrive at the condition of art — there are fundamental truths about the artistic process to which you must attend.

In the nearly two decades I've been teaching this subject, I have read many thousands of manuscripts from aspiring writers, and virtually all of them — virtually all of them — fail to show an intuitive command of the essentials of the process of fictional art. Because of the creative writing pedagogy in this country, and because of the nature of this art form, and because of the medium you work with, and because of the rigors of artistic vision, and because of youth, and because no one has ever told you these things clearly, the great likelihood is that all of the fiction you've written is mortally flawed in terms of the essentials of process.

This, I think, is why my students have come to call this boot camp: because — and I will do this in as friendly and gentle and encouraging a way as I possibly can — what I have to say to you will indict virtually everything you've written.

It's not going to be an easy message to hear. But I'm going to tell you right up front: before I wrote my first published novel, The Alleys of Eden, I wrote literally a million words of absolute dreck. Five god-awful novels, forty dreadful short stories, and a dozen truly terrible full-length plays. I made all those fatal errors of process I would bet my mortgage you're making now. I want to help you get around that. But you've got to open up and listen to me about this. If you're not prepared to do that, if you're not prepared to open your sensibilities — and, incidentally, your minds — to what I'm going to tell you and to the implications for the work you have done and will do, then it is best that you and I part ways now. There are some folks in this room who will attest to the fact that it's going to be tough, it's going to be nerve-racking, it's going to unsettle you. But I think they will also attest that the rewards are worth it.

You must, to be in here, have the highest aspirations for yourselves as writers — the desire to create works of fiction that will endure, that reflect and articulate the deepest truth about the human condition. If that is your aspiration, then this is where you belong. I will not blow you off. I will take your aspirations seriously, and I will demand that you take them seriously.

I always begin with something the great Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa once said. He said, "To be an artist means never to avert your eyes." To be an artist means never to avert your eyes — this is the absolute essential truth here.

You're going to be, and probably always have been, led to avert your eyes. But turning from that path is what it means to be an artist. You need courage, and that's something I can't teach you. I can teach you that you've got to have it.

What does an artist do?

As an artist, like everyone else on this planet, you encounter the world out there primarily in your bodies, moment to moment through your senses. Everything else derives from that. You are creatures of your senses. All that follows — all the stuff of the mind, all the analysis, all the rationalization, all the abstracting and interpreting — follows upon that point of contact, in the moment, through your senses.

If you live in the moment, through your senses, your first impression certainly will be that at the heart of things is chaos. God knows we had a very clear example of that in September of 2001. You can be sitting on the ninetieth floor of the World Trade Center on a beautiful late summer morning, smelling your Starbucks coffee, glad they brewed Sumatra today, and someone with visions of seventy-two virgins waiting for him in heaven flies a United Airlines jet through your window. That is a paradigm of the human condition.

Artists are intensely aware of the chaos implied by the moment-to-moment sensual experience of human beings on this planet. But they also, paradoxically, have an intuition that behind the chaos there is meaning; behind the flux of moment-to-moment experience there is a deep and abiding order.

The artist shares her intuition of the world's order with the philosophers, the theologians, the scientists, the psychoanalysts — there are lots of people who believe there is order in the universe — but those others embrace the understanding and expression of that order through abstractions, through ideas, through analytical thought. The artist is deeply uncomfortable with those modes of understanding and expression. The theologians have their dogma and the philosophers their theories and the scientists their scientific principles and the psychoanalysts their Jungian or Freudian insights — but to those modes of expression and understanding the artist says, "That doesn't make sense to me. Those are not the terms in which I intuit the world." The artist cannot understand or access her vision of the world in any of those ways. The artist is comfortable only with going back to the way in which the chaos is first encountered — that is, moment to moment through the senses. Then, selecting from that sensual moment-to-moment experience, picking out bits and pieces of it, reshaping it, she recombines it into an object that a reader in turn encounters as if it were experience itself: a record of moment-to-moment sensual experience, an encounter as direct as those we have with life itself. Only in this way, by shaping and ordering experience into an art object, is the artist able to express her deep intuition of order.

There's an interesting precedent for this idea — and what I'm about to observe has no intended religious message. A very influential person in Western and world culture taught almost exclusively in one way: only by parable, by telling stories. "Without a parable he spake not unto them." He asked questions similar to the ones I just suggested artists ask: What is the abiding universal human condition? What is this all about here on planet Earth? And his answer was, There was a guy who owned a vineyard and he had a son. and so forth. He told stories. That's what was clearly recorded in the books written closest to the time in which Jesus of Nazareth lived. Jesus said, emphatically, "He that hath ears to hear, let him hear." He did not say, "He that hath a brain to think, let him think." It's through the ear. By means of a story.

The great jazz trumpeter Miles Davis said, "Man, you don't play what you know, you play what you hear." Davis had very strong political ideas — but he was an artist; he knew that you don't make music from ideas.

Please get out of the habit of saying that you've got an idea for a short story. Art does not come from ideas. Art does not come from the mind. Art comes from the place where you dream. Art comes from your unconscious; it comes from the white-hot center of you.

Does this make sense? Do you understand what I'm saying? If you want to think your way into your fiction, if you think you can analyze your way into a work of art, we're going to be totally at odds philosophically about what art is and where it comes from. But if you have this aspiration and an open sensibility, and if what I'm saying makes sense, then you have to tell your mind to back the hell off. It's another place in yourself entirely where you must look to create a work of art. And I'll wager that virtually everything you've written so far has come from your head.

You know, it's easy to get caught up in the ambition of being a writer. It's easy to get caught up in loving literature and wishing to be the person on the dust jacket. This ambition, as innocent-seeming as it is, can very easily muscle out your deeper, more delicate, more difficult ambitions. It can

muscle them out in favor of: I want to get published, I want to be famous, I want to win a prize. Or even in the terms: I want to be an artist. I said earlier, "If you aspire to create art." Please understand that's different from "I want to be a great artist." And even "I want to create art" is a bit of a dangerous ambition. What I want to nurture in you is the impulse: "I'm ravished by sensual experience. I yearn to take life in. My God! I've got this sense that the world has meaning. Things roil around in my dream space, and I've got to figure out how to make art objects of them." That's really the best ambition, to be hungry for sensual experience in your life. Ravenous. Artists are not intellectuals. We are sensualists. The objects we create are sensual objects, and the way you'll know that you're writing from your head is that you'll look at your story and find it full of abstraction and generalization and summary and analysis and interpretation. These modes of discourse will be prevalent in works that are written from the head. Even if you can by force of will insert some nicely observed sense details into the work, you'll find the work moving toward analysis and description and generalization and abstraction when, in fact, in the work of art the most important moments are the most sensual of all, the most in the moment.

Mies van der Rohe said that God is in the details. Let's substitute: the human condition resides in the details, the sense details.

The primary point of contact for the reader is going to be an emotional one, because emotions reside in the senses. What we do with emotions after that, to protect ourselves in the world, is a different thing; but emotions are experienced in the senses and therefore are best expressed in fiction through the senses.

Emotions are also basically experienced, and therefore expressed in fiction, in five ways. First, we have a sensual reaction inside our body — temperature, heartbeat, muscle reaction, neural change.

Second, there is a sensual response that sends signals outside of our body — posture, gesture, facial expression, tone of voice, and so forth.

Third, we have, as an experience of emotion, flashes of the past. Moments of reference in our past come back to us in our consciousness, not as ideas or analyses about the past, but as little vivid bursts of waking dream; they come back as images, sense impressions.

The fourth way we experience emotion and can therefore express it in fiction is that there are flashes of the future, similar to flashes of the past, but of something that has not yet happened or that may happen, something we desire or fear or otherwise anticipate. Those also come to us as images, like bursts of waking dreams.

And finally — this is important for the fiction writer— we experience what I would call sensual selectivity. At any given moment we, and therefore our characters, are surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of sensual cues. But in that moment only a very small number of those sensual cues will impinge on our consciousness. Now, what makes that selection for us? Well, our emotions do.

Henry James said that "landscape is character," and this could well be what he meant. Our personalities, our emotions, are expressed in response to the sensual cues around us. We look at the landscape and what we see out there is our deepest emotional inner selves. This is at the heart of a work of art.

Why is this sensual center of our art so hard for us to get at? Miles Davis, if he were a writer, probably would struggle with the same problems I struggled with and that you're probably struggling with now. It's easy for him to say "you don't play what you know, you play what you hear," because his medium is entirely sensual, inescapably so. The sound that comes out of his horn is irreducibly sensual. Every other art form is irreducibly sensual. Dancers move, composers work with sound, painters with color; even abstract art isn't abstract at all — it's color and form. You stand in front of a Barnett Newman painting, and whatever may have been in his brain about artistic theory, what confronts you is a massive experience of color and a delicate experience of texture.

But you folks have it really difficult. No one in my position in any of the other arts has to say the things I say. Why? Because your medium is language, and language is not innately sensual. Language, in fact, is much more often used in non-sensual ways. Look at the paradox of this evening. I am inveighing against abstraction, generalization, and summary and analysis and interpretation in what terms? Abstract, general, analytical, and interpretive. Am I not? Well, that's the nature of human beings. There are things we have to express in this way.

Now, I've heard no gasps of recognition yet, but let me assume that some of you are thinking, Of course, this makes sense. Oh boy oh boy! If so, you and I are still going to have to be patient, because — you know what? — your understanding is still here in your head, and it's going to take a while to make all this part of your process.

If I had me to talk to me back when, I might not have had to write a million dreadful words. If I'd caught me at the right moment — and in the right spirit — I might have had to write only a quarter of a million — maybe not so many as that if I'd really listened. You might ask, why did he write five terrible novels? How many terrible novels can you write? The answer is that I had no idea how badly I was writing. None. And my ability to continue working through a million words was so rooted in self-deception that I might not have been able to hear this message. So those are the things you may have to sort through, too.

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.

Why is it so tough to get past that? Why does Kurosawa say that the essence of being an artist is that you can't avert your eyes? Why avert them? We still haven't quite made that connection. If the artist sees the chaos of experience and feels

order behind it and creates objects to express that order, surely that is reassuring, right? Well, at some point maybe. But what do you have to do first? And why is it so hard? This is why— and this is why virtually all inexperienced writers end up in their heads instead of the unconscious: because the unconscious is scary as hell. It is hell for many of us.

If I say art doesn't come from the mind, it comes from the place where you dream, you may say, "Well, I wake up screaming in the night. I don't want to go into my dreams, thank you very much. I don't want to go into that white-hot center; I've spent my life staying out of there. That's why I'm sitting in this classroom, why I was able to draw a comb through my hair this morning. Because I haven't gone there, I don't go there. I've got lots of ways of staying out of there." And you know what? You still need those ways twenty-one or twenty-two hours a day. But this is the tough part: for those two hours a day when you write, you cannot flinch. You have to go down into that deepest, darkest, most roiling, white-hot place — it can't be white-hot and dark at the same time, but I don't care — that paradox, live with it — whatever scared the hell out of you down there— and there's plenty — you have to go in there; down into the deepest part of it, and you can't flinch, can't walk away. That's the only way to create a work of art — even though you have plenty of defense mechanisms to keep you out of there, and those defense mechanisms are going to work against you mightily.

I fight this battle every day. Janet fights this battle every day. Every artist in the world fights this battle every day. To go to a scary place that makes some other part of you say: What are you doing1 No. Just no. No. No. Your hands are poised over the keyboard, and that voice says, Look at your fingernails; they need clipping. And when the voice has got you in the bathroom: Look at the toilet; it needs cleaning. And you say, Yes! Anything, anything but to go back and face this stuff.

Not only that. That voice wants to draw you up into your head. And you know what that head has been for you all your life? Everyone in this room, I'm sure, has been significantly smarter in all kinds of ways than the people around you. You've had your own view of things, and you haven't really followed the crowd, because you're a little too smart for that — or way too smart — and you see things in a different way. You're isolated. And in order to get through childhood and puberty and adolescence and young adulthood, broken relationships and a marriage or two, or four — you have identified with your mind. I'm smart, I'm smarter than they are. There's a part of your mind you've been rewarded for all through school, and that is your literal memory. You'll be rewarded for it again in classrooms in this same program. You remember things; you can talk these things back and command details. You know literature. You've always found your self-worth there, and what I'm telling you is that literal memory is your enemy. It's been a large part of your identity all your life, and that part is going to want to drag you down, to destroy the things you create. That's not an easy message to take.

Furthermore, you've got this self-conscious metavoice going all the time. I do, and I'm sure a lot of you do, too. You sit quietly and your metavoice is talking to you in your head. "Well, here I'm sitting," it says. And even, "OK, maybe I shouldn't think so much now. That sounds like it's something I probably should try, to see if I can do that." These words are going through your head, right? This is going on all the time; there's all this analytical garbage running through your mind. This self-conscious metavoice; it's a voice about the voice. It's like talking about my own consciousness.

This is why Catholics and Muslims have repetitive, predetermined prayers, why the Hindus and the Zen Buddhists and the Transcendental Meditationalists have their mantras. Because you repeat these repetitive predetermined prayers enough and they lose their meaning. So these words that have no rational meaning are falling through your mind. And what happens? The analytic flow stops. You prolong the moment of no voice in your head, and it induces a kind of spiritual high. The religions give this to you as a way to live, a way to get in touch with God.

Well, the artist has got to find a way to do something similar, although it cannot be — and this is harder for you— through repetitive, predetermined bits of text. Nevertheless, the only way to create a work of literary art is to stop that voice. Your total attention needs to be on the sensual flow of experience from the unconscious.

One of the ways of understanding your unconscious is by realizing that in order to get into it you have to actually stop that garbagey analytical reflex voice in your head and induce a kind of trance state. Religious trances are quite common. Well, there's a trance state also that the artist must induce in herself in order to create a work of art. You have to let go of that comforting, distancing voice, you have to then descend into that deep dream space of yours, and that will result in a kind of superconcentration.

Psychologists call it the "flow state," being in the flow. Athletes call it being "in the zone."

The athlete's zone and the artist's creative trance have a great deal in common. When I was teaching in Louisiana, a friend of mine was assistant athletic director at LSU. His name was Greg LeFleur, and he was once an excellent tight end for the then St. Louis Cardinals NFL football team. Greg and I at some point came to understand that what he did and what I do have this need for a trancelike state in common.

How did Greg take off at full speed, run twenty-five, thirty yards down the field while behind him his quarterback— I think it was Jim Hart — launched this odd-shaped object into the air — and Greg is running full tilt down the field and two linebackers are converging on him to crush the life out of his body, and Greg glances over his shoulder and throws his body out, extends his hands, and this object settles gently under his fingertips and he holds it even as he falls to the ground and the linebackers fall on top of him. How did he do that?

Well, I tell you how you don't do it and that's by thinking about it. Any athlete will tell you. Jackie Stewart, the great race car driver, said in his autobiography that when you drive a car really fast and really well, you don't have a sensation of speed at all; things slow down around you, you can count the bricks on the wall at the next turn. Baseball players, when they are batting and in a streak, say they can count the stitches on the ball. They are in the zone, and that means they are not thinking at all. They call it muscle memory. But for you, it's not muscle memory; it's dream space, it's sense memory. It is not literal memory, the thing that's made you good at school.

If the athlete begins to send the process into his head, he goes into a slump. He misses the basket, he misses that turn. Lights out. He drops the ball. 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.

Now, there's one big difference between the athlete's zone and the artist's zone. And this is another way of explaining the challenge of Kurosawa's observation. Let's look at Michael Jordan in his later prime — let's say his last season with the Bulls, when they once again won the world championship. 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. The Zone

The great British novelist Graham Greene said that all good novelists have bad memories. What you remember comes out as journalism. What you forget goes into the compost of the imagination. I want you to remember that Graham Greene quotation — though in fact it's a paraphrase because I can't remember the quote — because in a compost heap, things decompose. Your past is full of stories that have been composed in a certain way; that's what memories are. But only when they decompose are you able to recompose them into new works of art.

You can see where I'm going. Greene's compost of the imagination is the same as the dreamspace, the white-hot center of the unconscious. The point he's making is that not only is your mind the enemy, not only is your will, your ra-tional thinking, your analytic thinking the enemy, but your literal memories are also the enemy. How many times have you heard a short story criticized and heard the author say,

That's the way it happened. It can't be unreal because it happened that way.

But a work of art is an organic thing. Every detail must organically resonate with every other detail. If you have an intransigent literal memory — and intransigent is what literal memories are — it sits in the middle of the organic object; it destroys everything around it. Everything in a work must remain malleable, everything must remain negotiable. You need to understand that working from your literal memory will keep you out of your unconscious, out of the zone you must enter.

I'm going to give you some practical suggestions on how to get into your zone or dreamspace. The first of those suggestions is, in fact, more than merely practical; it is rooted in the psychology of creation. Once you are engaged in writing a piece of fiction from your unconscious, it is crucial that you write every day, because the nature of this place where you go is such that it's very difficult to find your way in. It's pure torture. But even though it's terrible getting in, once you're in, if you keep going back every day, though it's still always daunting and difficult and scary, it's not nearly so much so. You may find — this is dangerous, but you may find — that you can take a day off every six or seven days. When you do, you'll be grumpy and out of sorts and things will be uncomfortable, but after a day you can go back in. But you take two days off and you're on very thin ice. If you let three or four days go by it's as if you've never written a word in your entire life. That doorway closes and seals itself up; you don't even know what part of the wall that door's in anymore. I don't care how much

you've written in your life; those defenses are strong and they won't let you go there.

You may not be ready to write yet, but when you're in a project you must write every day. You cannot write just on weekends. You cannot write this week and not next; you can't-wait for the summer to write. You can't skip the summer and wait till the fall. You have to write every day. You cannot do it any other way. Have I said this strongly enough?

There are no excuses not to write. At some point in my life, for various personal reasons, the only opportunity I had to write was on the Long Island Rail Road as I commuted from my home in Long Island to a job as editor-in-chief of a business newspaper in Manhattan. This was before laptop computers. I wrote every word of my first four published novels on my lap, on legal pads, by hand, on the Long Island Rail Road, where the air-conditioning never worked in the summer, and the heat never worked in the winter, and it was always jam-packed, and people were flapping their papers and yakking and killing each other over the wrong bridge bid three seats up in front of me.

But eventually a thing kicked in that psychologists used to call functional fixedness. That is, if you have a certain place and certain objects that you associate only with a certain task, eventually the associational values build up in such a way that when you go to that place and engage those objects, you are instantly completely focused on that task. So getting over the hump of distraction with those railroad trips eventually became an asset, because writing was all I ever did on the train; I did nothing else. And I began to write well. I wrote my first four published novels on that train.

So here's one of those practical suggestions for getting into the zone. Find a place and some objects that you go to and engage only when you're writing fiction. If you have only one space and one computer that you must use for all written things, then change the type font you use for your fiction or the color of your screen.

By the way, I finally got a teaching job that took me off the train. I got my Ph.D. at the "University of Knopf" — that is, I accumulated enough publishing credits to get a university teaching job — and I went to McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana. I was halfway through my fifth novel — it was already under contract to Knopf and my editor loved the first half and I did too — and I had to stop writing to drive my furniture across the country in a U-Haul, finish buying a house, and move in. I stopped writing for eight weeks. And when I returned to the novel, though I knew those characters as well as any real person I've ever known, and though I knew what was going to happen next in the plot, it was utter agony to return to the work. It took eight weeks of daily torture to write another sentence — because I'd stopped writing every day. Also, if you develop functional fixedness to help you, you can't then let it be an excuse not to write. If you are away from the conditions you've established, you must still write every day. For a while I blamed my not writing on the fact that the room wasn't moving. I thought I was going to have to buy a little motor and stick it on my chair to jiggle it. Maybe buy choo-choo sounds for my record player. But of course the real problem was the broken link to my unconscious caused by putting the work aside for a time.

Another practical way to facilitate your entry into your writing zone is to turn yourself into a morning person. If you arrange your life so that you can spend two hours writing — or an hour, given the exigencies of some working lives, but ideally a couple of hours — you make that time sacrosanct at the beginning of the day. If you need coffee, you put your coffee on a timer, you roll out of bed, you grab that cup of coffee, and you are at your computer keyboard only moments from a literal dreamspace.

Finding a way to clear your sensibility of abstract uses of language is important to get into the trance. The problem is that we naturally use language in so many nonsensual ways all through the day. I find it helpful, then, to buffer those hours in which you necessarily use language in those analytical ways from the hours in which you dive into your unconscious and seek language in quite another way. One obvious way to do that is to put your night's sleep in between. You go into your writing space straight from another dream state and go to language before you've had a chance for all those other uses of language to intrude on you. So after you wake up, don't read the newspaper, don't watch CNN; if you have to pee don't pick up the back issue of The New Yorker in the basket nearby. You go to your fiction writing without letting any conceptual language into your head.

I almost always write to music, and that might be helpful to some of you. I've almost never written any fiction without carefully chosen music, usually classical or jazz, almost always without words — I've been known to write to Puccini, though if I understood Italian I probably couldn't. But whatever helps you go into your trance state — whether quiet is right or music helps — in any case, you do need to be visiting your unconscious every day.

The crucial awareness you must keep is this: do not will the work. Do not write until it's coming from your unconscious. If you have the itch to write before inspiration has visited you, spend that time meditating in your unconscious. That said, there is a type of journaling that I could recommend, especially at this stage of your development. Most journaling is counterproductive. 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. Such a journal entry will read like a passage in a novel, like the most intense moment-to-moment scene in a novel. And that's all that will be there. Fully developed in the moment.

If you write in your journal every day in this way, and if you spend forty-five minutes or an hour at it, it will be so intensive that you might not get through the whole incident.

That's fine. Just break it off, don't try to summarize or bring it to the end. Next day you might pick it up again. Or not. Go for some other piece of another emotional event. And don't rely so heavily on the sense reactions within your body that when you read this fifteen years from now all you get is "palpitating heart" and "sweating palms" and "blurry vision," which could be reactions to anything. This should be rendered as if it were a scene, with all the external and internal events.

After you've got a couple of weeks' worth of these entries, the entry of two weeks ago will have had a chance to cool off. From then on, each day's journaling should have two parts to it. First, write a new entry. Then, when you've finished, go back and read the journal entry of two weeks ago, and with a marker pen slash through all the examples of abstraction, generalization, summary, analysis, and interpretation you see in the text, leaving only moment-to-moment sense-based events and impressions. No matter how much you intended to write "in the moment," I promise you those old habits will have come back, but the hope is that, over the course of time, the red marks will diminish.

Even if you're doing a sense-based journal, you're going to have serious trouble between your creative projects. This is when you'll understand why the need to write every day runs so deep. When I've finished a work, and some time passes, and I'm working up to something new, I feel that I am utterly wasting my life. I do trivial, ghastly, quotidian stuff; I hate myself; I complain about myself to my wife, and that hatred daily increases. Finally she says to me, "Honey, it's OK, you've now reached total self-loathing; you're about to start writing." She's always right. Soon thereafter, the door opens up to my unconscious, to my new work, and I leap in. And then I write every day and I am scared every day and I am happy every day.

A word about writer's block here. I think writer's block probably suggests that you have an artist's instinct. Bad writers never get blocked. Writers who write from their heads and are comfortable doing that — they always have some garbage to put down. 1 talked last week about the flow of metathink-ing, metaspeaking your mind. That stuffs always there and it's easy to put it on the page. I think most writers who get blocked do so because some important part of them knows that they've got to get to the unconscious. But they're not getting there; they're thinking too much, so there's nothing there. Except it's not quite nothing — you sit there thinking, fussing, and worrying: "Gee, I'm not writing," "I've got to write now and I'm not writing," "Oh my God, I'm not writing," "If I want to be a writer I've got to write and I'm not writing." I think writer's block of that sort is the most common kind among writers who have any talent.

Writer's block is very similar to insomnia. What happens in insomnia? You lie down, intending to go into your dream-space, literally; into the depths of your unconscious, where you totally lose touch with the outer world. That's what sleep is. But you can't do it. Why? Because you can't turn your mind off. You lie there thinking about things. And if there are images, it's only because you're carefully controlling them. You sometimes have a kind of daydream going on, but you're in charge of it. You're making it happen, and you get upset about this and you think about that and you argue about this, and all the time there's this "Gee, I still am not sleeping, am I?" and, "OK, there's my mother. Gee, I'm thinking about her. I don't want to think about my mother, she makes me mad. What would I say to her if she called right now? I'd tell her.." That's what's going on in your head, right?

What happens when you finally do fall asleep? Suddenly an image comes out of nowhere: a rainy street, a street lamp, a dog barking. Whoa, where did that come from? Nowhere. And at the moment that image comes, if you ask, "Well, where did that come from?" — it's gone; nothing will follow and you've got thirty-five more minutes of being awake.

Those of you who don't have trouble with insomnia, think about how you go to sleep. You lie down and all that garbage just turns off. Suddenly an image comes, and another, and boy, then you're gone. And that's how you write.

It's a funny state. It's not as if you're falling asleep at your computer, but neither are you brainstorming. You're dreamstorming, inviting the images of moment-to-moment experience through your unconscious. It's very much like an intensive daydream, but a daydream that you are and are not controlling. You let it go, but it's coming through language that you're putting on a screen, so there is some intervention on your part, and yet the essence of it — that rainy street and that dog barking and the lamplight — are nothing you're going after consciously. The state of communion with your unconscious — the zone I'm trying to describe — is absolutely essential, absolutely essential to writing well in this art form.

Where does language come into this very-hard-to-describe, mystical sort of place — what I'm calling your unconscious— when you create a work of art? When I talk about the place of language in this process, it's another way to speak of voice. Voice is the embodiment in language of the contents of your unconscious. When you turn off that flow of garbage in your head, you're turning off certain kinds of words — you're turning off abstract and analytical metawords. What then takes their place is a very strong presence of language, but it's almost misleading to call it language because language is so often used in those ways that mean analysis, abstraction. That's why I say voice. The presence of words — which you quickly capture and string together and massage — is intimately bound up with that sensual imagery in your unconscious, which makes up your voice and the voices of your characters.

The line-to-line words come from your unconscious and so does the very form in which you write. You do not know whether you're a novelist or a short story writer. You don't choose ahead of time to be a novelist and then look around in yourself and figure out what novels you've got there. You have a vision of the world and that vision has a natural form; you don't know what will turn out to be the natural form of your vision. You've probably had the experience of writing a short story that just kind of takes off. It's not a very good story, because what you're seeing really wants to be a novel. Or you sit down trying to write a novel and you poop out at about page 40. That happens because you are forcing your vision into a predetermined medium, and that's not the way it should work.

The distinction between the vision that becomes a novel and the vision that becomes a short story is pretty much like this (I'm going to describe these differences metaphorically; I am not advocating a consciousness of your audience): the short story will have you say to the reader, "Look, I don't have much time. So sit down, let me tell you about a moment in this character's life when something took a turn, or something intensified in some significant way." The short story will have, oftentimes, a brief sequence of causally linked events, but ultimately it turns on the moment.

The novel is going to be saying to your reader, "Look, this is going to take some time. Let's go for a long walk, and I want to tell you about all these things that happened in the life of this character in my unconscious; all these things that happened to him, which somehow fit together, are somehow causally linked." In a novel, there will be many revealing moments but ultimately the focus of a novel is on that — I won't call it a chain, because that argues for a certain kind of linear structure, but — that certain configuration of causally linked events. That's the focus of a novel.

Oftentimes I've found that my novels come out of the wedding of two separate visions that seemed to be two different novels, two books that really weren't working and seemed quite different from each other. (I've got a number of potential novels and stories running around in my unconscious at any given meditative moment.)

Let me go back to one of those really god-awful novels that never saw the light of day, my first Vietnam-based novel, called What Lies Near. It was about a guy in military intelligence who visits the holding cell in an interrogation camp for suspected Viet Cong. He goes into a cell vacated by a prisoner who's been tortured and taken somewhere else, and he finds a piece of graffiti written on the wall. The novel I wrote was just straight out of literal memory stuff. As a military intelligence agent, I had gone to an interrogation center run by the ARVNs — the Army of the Republic of Vietnam, which is South Vietnamese — and there was a cell where they kept the Viet Cong prisoners while they tortured them — horribly, as the South Vietnamese often did. I went in the cell and — these are the tropics; it was a hundred degrees and 95 percent humidity outside this windowless space about six feet square, which had an iron door with a little plate kept shut and a stone ledge for sleeping and a hole in the floor — I stepped in and instantly broke into a heavy sweat from the closeness of the air and the foul smells from the hole in the floor, and the walls were stained with lichen, and I was ready to turn and flee.

But — I don't know what made me think of this — I wondered about graffiti. Was there some trace of the people left behind? I looked at the walls, and there were obviously some places that had been scratched — the scratchings then obliterated by the caretakers of the place. Very carefully monitored. There was nothing else to see, and I was about to leave when I noticed a little wooden stand against one wall. I thought, well, if somebody wanted to put some graffiti where it would survive scrutiny, he'd put it behind that. So I pulled that stand away from the wall and suddenly heard the frantic rustle of brittle little feet, and dozens of three-inch cockroaches scattered from behind this thing — just that last turn of the horror of the place: these people are kept in darkness with roaches crawling all over, waiting to be tortured — and, sure enough, there was a piece of graffiti scratched into the wall behind the wooden stand.

It read, "Ve siuh la khoe," which means, "Hygiene is healthful."

Suddenly I was in the presence of this remarkable mind. To have that kind of irony, that kind of detachment!

Well, I wrote the terrible novel called What Lies Near, in which the agent finds this graffiti and then spends the rest of the novel trying to track down the guy who wrote it. I myself didn't try to track him down; the novel was driven by what had happened there, in that cell, and I was just sort of tunnel' visioned onto it. It was slavish to what really happened, and that was not enough to sustain a novel. It was not a novel.

In 1983, ten years after the failure of What Lies Near, I had found my way into my unconscious and just published Countrymen of Bones. I began my fourth novel and moved from the fine but rather obscure independent company, Horizon Press, to Knopf. In those ten years, I'd had another notion for a novel — let's face it, it was an idea; that's why it was not going anywhere — based on the fact that my son had been born and looked just like me — a little externalization of self. I wrote an awful short story about it — but one that led me to consider how American army men went to Vietnam for a year: you drop into war, and they pluck you out again. There were legions of Vietnamese women in the gray area between prostitute and aspiring girlfriend, and they didn't understand birth control or didn't give a damn, so there were a lot of children born of fleeting connections—"children of the dust." There were men who lived for thirty years in America not knowing that they had a child, now an adult somewhere in the world. They would go to their graves probably not giving it a thought, and certainly not knowing that they had a part of themselves in the world. Still, that's not enough for a novel. And it was a bad short story.

Actually twelve years had passed since I was in Vietnam — and now two separate things that had gotten me to meditate there, the prisoner and the child, suddenly came together in my unconscious. Only when those things converged was there the fullness of a novel. On Distant Ground is about an army intelligence captain being tried in a court martial for having tracked down and set free a Viet Cong prisoner — prompted to do so by seeing graffiti written on a wall. His yearning is for a connection with the other, and this yearning has been intensified by a son who looks just like him, though he is a man of inherent emotional distance and aloofness toward everyone around him including his wife. During the trial he becomes obsessed with the memory of a Vietnamese woman who mysteriously broke off their affair, and he wonders if he may be one of those people unknowingly with a child in Vietnam. He goes back — he's on bail — to Saigon. The city falls while he's there, and he's trapped in Communist Vietnam, looking for a child who may not exist.

To choose the novel or short story form without it being driven by a vision from your unconscious is a big mistake. If you are to propel your work without some willed preconception, then nothing must be preconceived, including the form, the content, and especially memories of the events of your life that produced the inspiration. You will get legitimate artistic

inspiration from your unconscious, and often part of you will know where it came from. But then you have to resist going hack, finding all the old notes, and working out what really happened in the past.

Be alert to the fact that you must achieve a trancelike state in order to write from your unconscious. You'll also have to know what to look for in the stuff that's coming off of the tips of your fingers. You can see the bad stuff going up on the screen; you know where it's coming from. You don't just let yourself get away with it.

And, of course, writing is also rewriting. I need to say a final word now on the question of editing and rewriting: you might say to yourself, OK, that's fine, all that white-hot-center stuff spilling out in the composition, but when I go back to edit and revise, how do the dreams fit in there? Or do they?

They absolutely do. What you need to do now is to think of yourself as a reader encountering a strange work. You've got to understand your own memory and figure out what it takes for you to forget what you have written, sufficiently that you can revisit it as reader. That's the key to editing yourself. This is where having a bad memory will serve you well. If you reread your work without having forgotten it, you'll be analyzing your own work in all those lit-crit ways. I'm lucky. I literally forget my sentences after I've written them. I will write a sentence; I'll write another; I'll go back and read the previous sentence, and I won't know where the hell it came from.

I'll have more to say about reading a little later, but the essence is this: 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. Like the string of a stringed instrument you vibrate inside, a harmonic is set up. So to edit your work, you go back and thrum to it. And you go thrum, thrum, thrum, twang! And when you go twang! as a reader, mark that passage. And you thrum on and twang on and thrum and twang and thrum and twang. Then you go back to the twangs and instead of looking at the twangy spots and analyzing them in lit-crit ways, instead of consciously and wilfully applying what you understand with your mind about craft and techniques, you redream those passages.

Rewriting is redreaming. Rewriting is redreaming till it all thrums.

Let me return to Graham Greene. The compost heap of the novelist, the repository that exists apart from literal memory, apart from the conscious mind, is mostly made up of direct, sensual life experience. But it is also the proper place for all the fiction craft and technique that you properly and necessarily consciously learned. It is also the proper place for all the wonderful fiction you've read. All of these things must first be forgotten — at least while you are in your creative trance — before they can be authentically engaged in the creation of a work of art.

3. Yearning

What I'm going to talk about tonight is an essential of fiction as an art form — as essential as color is to painting and movement is to dance and sound is to music.

I would say that of the three fundamentals of fiction, there are two that aspiring writers never miss: first, that fiction is about human beings; second, that it's about human emotion. Even when fiction writers are writing from their heads, abstracting and analyzing, they're mostly analyzing emotions; so even if they're not getting at the essence of emotion, they're trying to.

But the third element, which is missing from virtually every student manuscript I've seen, has to do with the phenomenon of desire.

Fiction is a temporal art form. Fiction exists in time. Poems by contrast are very condensed objects, virtually exempt from time. A poem may capture a fleeting momentary impulse; and the length of a line is usually a part of its essential form,

so the poem is also an object on the page. But as soon as you let the line run on and you turn the page, you are upon a time, inevitably. And, as any Buddhist will tell you, you cannot exist as a human being on this planet for thirty seconds without desiring something.

My favorite word in this regard — a word you will hear often when we discuss your manuscripts — is yearning. We yearn. We are the yearning creatures of this planet. There are superficial yearnings, and there are truly deep ones always pulsing beneath, but every second we yearn for something. And fiction, inescapably, is the art form of human yearning.

Yearning is always part of fictional character. In fact, one way to understand plot is that it represents the dynamics of desire. It's the dynamics of desire that is at the heart of narrative and plot.

Those failed manuscripts of students and aspiring writers — many of them showing a lot of talent — contained characters with problems, attitudes, opinions, sensibility, voice, personality — all of those things, and often a wonderfully evoked milieu to boot. But none of those things automatically carries with it yearning. The dynamics of desire can be utterly missing from a story that is rich with all of those things.

James Joyce appropriated from the Catholic church the term epiphany. An epiphany literally means "a shining forth." He brought that concept to bear on the moment in a work of art when something shines forth in its essence. That, he said, is the epiphany in a story or novel.

What I would suggest is that there are two epiphanies in any good work of fiction. Joyce's is the second, the one often called the climax or crisis of a story. The first epiphany comes very near the beginning, where the sensual details accumulate around a moment in which the deepest yearning of the main character shines forth. The reader responds in a deep visceral way to that first epiphany — and that's the epiphany missing from virtually every student manuscript I've read.

It is an element also, of course, missing from much published fiction. Various stories you read may leave you a little cold, distanced — you may admire, maybe you have a kind of "smart" reaction — but nothing resonates in the marrow of your bones, and the reason is that the character's yearning is not manifest.

This lack is interesting, because writers who aspire to a different kind of fiction — entertainment fiction, let's call it, genre fiction — have never forgotten this necessity of the character's yearning. Maybe that's why they're selling books and we're not — because you cannot find a book on the bestseller list without a central character who clearly wants something, is driving for something, has a clear objective: I want to solve the crime. I want to kill the monster. I want to go to bed with that woman or that man. I want to win the war. You name the genre. Every story has a character full of desire.

The difference between the desires expressed in entertainment fiction and literary fiction is only a difference of level. Instead of: I want a man, a woman, wealth, power, or to solve a mystery or to drive a stake through a vampire's heart, a literary desire is on the order of: I yearn for self, I yearn for an identity, I yearn for a place in the universe, I yearn to connect to the other. But that there must be yearning the genre writers never forget. We do.

Desire is the driving force behind plot. The character yearns, the character does something in pursuit of that yearning, and some force or other will block the attempt to fulfill that yearning. The character will respond to the force in some way, go round or through or over or under it, and continue the pursuit. This dynamic beneath the story is plot: the attempt to fulfill the yearning and the world's attempt to thwart that.

Most of the time, good fiction comes out of an inspiration that includes an intuition of yearning. In your unconscious, in your dreamspace, a character presents herself to you. She is a product of your own deepest white-hot center, but she is an other. When she presents herself, there will probably be a place involved, or an external circumstance, perhaps even a moment in our history — a crash, a war, the death of a mother — not your mother, understand, but the death of this character's mother. There will probably be an event that comes to you somehow, which summons her up. This character is summoned into your unconscious. You recognize her there, those luminous events and places surround her; but however vivid she seems to you, you may not yet be ready to write her story if the yearning is not there. For me, the thing that triggers the moment in my unconscious when a character is ready to speak or be spoken of, ready to be a story, is a flash of intuition about that character's yearning. What is it at her deepest level that she yearns for?

Until a character with yearning has emerged from your unconscious, I don't encourage you to write. Again, I emphasize intuition. It's not that you come to some intellectual understanding. It's an intuition of her wanting, a sense of her desiring. And then you're ready to write.

But perhaps you have a character pressing himself upon you and you don't feel that intuitive connection to his yearning. Try to wait for it. But if it's just not coming, you can begin to write in the way you have done in most of your manuscripts so far — moving around in the problems of the character, trying on the voice of a narrator, exploring the character's attitudes and opinions and reactions. However, it is crucial you understand that this isn't the work of art you've commenced to create. It is a kind of line-to-line rumination. A working exercise. You must realize that all you're doing here is keeping your eyes and ears open for that whiff of true, dynamic yearning in your character. At the moment you get that whiff, you stop writing this thing and put it away and never look at it again. You'll hear these words again from me in a later context. It's equally important here. Once you have that link to your character's yearning, only then does the real work of literary fiction begin.

So then you need to reenter your character's world afresh and dream your way into whatever it is that might upset the equilibrium of that world. You will seek what is called the "inciting incident." Things are in balance in the world of this character, and then the equilibrium is upset by the inciting incident. This does not necessarily have to occur within the story; it often doesn't. But somehow the world of the character becomes unbalanced, and this challenges whatever it is the character deeply yearns for. And this is how things begin.

Following the "inciting incident" is the "point of attack" — these terms are commonly used in connection with plot, but I think it's important to remind you about them in regard to yearning. Both can occur at the same moment, but because the inciting incident may well have happened prior to the beginning of the story, there may equally be a separate point of attack. To use a dramatic analogy: in Hamlet, the inciting incident is the murder of Hamlet's father, which has occurred well before the rising of the curtain. The point of attack is the appearance of the father's ghost to Hamlet.

Point of attack, which introduces the conflict — the particular manifestation of a character's yearning — is an important notion because when you write a story you need to make sure that something is at stake. It doesn't need to be an external thing; it must have inner magnitude, though. Your character's yearning is deep and important; you need to treat it with respect.

Conflict can be internal or external. An external conflict pits the character against the natural world, or society, or other characters. The internal conflict exists between or among various aspects of the character's own self. I think it's rare that a literary work touches the deepest realms of human experience without presenting some sort of internal conflict. Often in the most exciting literary works, an internal conflict runs parallel to, or resonates through, some larger conflict in the external world. That interaction between the inner and the outer is a unique provenance of narrative. No other art form can really grasp the interaction between the external world and the internal world as fiction can.

Let's deal again for a moment with the distinction between literature and nonliterature. I talked about what it means to be an artist, why people become artists, what the sensibility of an artist is, where you have to look in yourself to be an artist; and I have even, in terms of yearning, complimented our nonartist writer colleagues. But I think it's important to make a couple of distinctions regarding attention to the moment-by-moment sensual flow of experience, which I claim as necessary to art in fiction.

Nonart, genre writing, entertainment writing, is typically filled with abstraction, generalization, summary, analysis, and interpretation. I ran across a book a few months ago in a Borders somewhere, called The Romance Writer's Phrase Book, in which you could look up an emotion and find fifty punchy phrases to describe it. Passion, for instance: "Her heart beat wild with passion." I pulled out that example because it's somewhat deceptive. There does seem to be a sense impression there. We talked about the five ways we can feel emotions through our senses; one of them is a sensual reaction within your body. Isn't the wildly beating heart such a thing?

Yes, strictly speaking, it is. We had a faculty meeting today in the commons room on the ground floor of this building, and when I came out there was a great crowd around the elevator, and I was with Rip Lhamon, who's in seriously good shape. He said, "Too many people, let's walk." Not wanting to seem a wimp, I said, "Sure," and we walked up five floors. My heart was beating wildly by the end of this climb. It was not from passion.

That particular internal sense impression is so easy, so widely applicable, as to have the impact of an abstraction. "My heart was beating wildly"; we don't know what that's all about. Well, "with passion." Now, passion is an abstraction — you know, you're feeling "passion"; you have an intellectual response to that.

Let's go back to the romance novel example — believe me, men have their literary equivalents — and say that within a half-mile radius of this room tonight, there is a woman sitting in her study or in her kitchen, and her own heart is beating wildly in empathy. She is weeping, she is growing ardent— that's an abstraction, but that's what we're talking right now— over such sentences as "Her heart beat wild with passion." Does that not prove that this is literature? How is that not art if it can induce that kind of reaction in a reader?

It is not art, because her emotional response is a result of her filling in the blanks left by that abstraction. The direct, visceral response to the text results from her filling in from her own fantasies, her own past, and her own aspirations. 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. The moment-to-moment, fresh, organically connected sense impressions of the work of art will draw the reader into it. In the emotional reaction to a work of art, you do not fill in from yourself; you leave yourself. You enter into the character and into the character's sensibility and psychology and spirit and world. It's the difference between masturbation and making love. The former is a self-referential experience; you have, on the surface, a similar response, but it's a closed loop. In making love, you leave yourself and enter into the other; that is the experience between two people who are connecting in deeper ways. And that's the experience of literature.

I am talking here about the reader's experience, but we understand that what the writer puts on the page produces that experience. This is another important difference between the creation of a fictional work of art and a work of entertainment. The evidence is in the text. Nonartists — and I would include not only entertainment writers, by the way, but didactic writers as well; not only Stephen King but, let's say, Jean-Paul Sartre as a novelist — before they write a single word, the nonartists know exactly the effect they wish to have on their readers, whether emotional or intellectual. Stephen King wants to scare the hell out of you. Jean-Paul Sartre wants, well, to scare the hell out of you, but also to convince you of the cosmic verities inherent in the existentialist worldview. These writers know these effects ahead of time and so they construct an object to produce them.

But the artist does not know. She doesn't know what she knows about the world until she creates the object. For the artist, the writing of a work of art is as much an act of exploration as it is expression, an exploration of images, of moment-to-moment sensual experience. And this exploration comes from the nature of art and the nature of the artistic process as I've been trying to describe it to you.

Since I have been insisting on the dangers of abstraction, I'm going to offer you a potentially very dangerous paradox. I'm going to give you a loaded gun and tell you to stick it into your mouth. You hear me talking about the antiartistic modes of discourse: generalization, interpretation, and so forth. If you read a fairy tale it's always flat and disappointing and full of summary, yet all of us have had intense, memorable experiences of them. A fairy tale is not really meant to be read on the page, and your memory of that kind of story originates, let's say — let's not talk about Florida, but up north — on a cold winter night, fresh out of a hot bath, snuggled into the covers — got them up to your ears — the wind is blowing outside you can hear it in the eaves of the house — your mother is sitting at your elbow, the lamp is low, and she's reading this fairy tale to you, and the voice goes up and down. Your toes are warm now and it's a ravishing experience. It's those other elements that make for the moment-to-moment sensual experience of that kind of storytelling.

A similar experience can potentially occur in a work of literary art, because the narrator sits in your sensibility as a character. The voice of that character can offer the reader a sensual moment-to-moment experience. For a later session you all will have read my short story "Open Arms" [see appendix]. In the first sentence, the narrator says, "I have no hatred in me." Well, hatred is an abstraction, and it's a bit of an analysis. But the next sentence is "I'm almost certain of that." With that "almost" we have a context in which we hear something different from what he's saying. Dramatic irony is now at work. We have a place to stand that allows us to interpret differently from the way he interprets. His abstraction doesn't engage our minds; it engages us in the response to his personality, which is a sensual response.

You will find many voices, even in extended passages, that use some abstraction or analysis in literary fiction, but you will never find those modes of discourse used for surface effects or surface information. They have to do with the sensual presence of voice. This is especially true of first person narrators, but each third person voice also is absolutely distinctive. All writing, in fact, has a narrative persona — your cereal box this morning had a personality. All writing has within it a persona identifiable by diction, vocabulary, syntax. You don't analyze it. You respond to it directly.

You understand why this is a dangerous notion for you, when you're still trying to find your way into your unconscious and trying not to avert your eyes? The little voice that has failed to get you to cut your nails instead of writing, or clean the toilet instead of writing, or read a good book instead of writing — that little voice is going to seize on this paradox and say, "Oh well, my character can explain that; it's just his character." Very dangerous.

I want now to give you some examples from literature of this slippery, evasive, most important thing called yearning. I'm going to read four passages from four diverse works by four wonderful writers and then look at them in terms of yearning.

The first piece is the opening of Janet Burroway's novel, Cutting Stone, a novel set back early in the twentieth century. Eleanor, our point-of-view character, and her husband, Laurel, are on a train heading west. He has tuberculosis. They're going to Arizona for his health; he's taken a job there as a bank manager. Notice that the yearning is not addressed here explicitly, but the first epiphany happens very early.

Outside the club car window, flat desert nothing as far as the eye could see; endless stubble in level light. They were still two days short of Arizona. Eleanor sipped an early aperitif, perspiring jagged rings on the armholes of her pongee suit. Laurel was skimming a Commerce Chronicle, occasionally coughing a discreet, dry cough. He had taken off his jacket, self-deprecating, murmuring, "When in Rome…" and in pin-striped vest and four-in-hand he looked crisp, compact.

Under the rhythmic chug of the train ran a thinner sound, a continuous screech of metal on metal that put Eleanor in mind of rending silk. She felt this image through her abdomen as if the track were a single tear all the way back to Maryland. A copy ofHouse Beautiful lay in her lap, and she read, "No nation has studied homebuilding so persistently and long as the English, and consequently none has arrived at anything like such general excellence."

This sentence had nothing to do with her and could not logically be met with grief. But the raw lot of her unbuilt house rose in her mind, overgrown with lush creeper, a stand of oak. She had spent the better part of a year imagining, then sketching, a facade in that little Baltimore wilderness, and a layout she knew so well that she could walk it out on the ground.

She was losing everything. Everything in memory and all that never was to be; and things the more poignant because she hadn't noticed that she cared for them. The wood planes in Daddy's warehouse, her hand

patting along the shelf as she told over their names by heart: plow, bull nose, dado, beading, rabbet, slitting. Who ever would have thought she'd grieve for the planes?

"Outside the club car window, flat desert nothing as far as the eye can see; endless stubble in level light." This is our first image. We have not yet placed the point of view, although we will shortly see that this is Eleanor's perception and see the landscape as revealing character. What's missing there? First of all, there's no home, no house, there's no place to live here, and — interestingly — there's no verb. Very quickly, the yearning for a place in the world becomes clear. In a world where there is no place, there is no life, and so the very part of speech which signifies life and movement is missing from the first image in the book. A pseudosentence — even, ironically, a semicolon, as though there were sentences on either side, but it's grammatical nonsense — displays the fact that there's no verb, no life. I talked to you about the organic nature of art, everything echoing everything else. This is a wonderful example of that.

"They were still two days short of Arizona. Eleanor sipped an early aperitif, perspiring jagged rings on the armholes of her pongee suit." A silk suit, pongee silk. And what we now see is this arid place, and a woman out of place, displaced, but in the reflexes of a life that is about to change. Sipping "an aperitif." I dare say the word had never been spoken in Arizona in 1914. Laurel "skimming a Commerce Chronicle" — again, it's as if they were sitting in their parlor, whereas in fact they're being carried far away from the life of their past. And Eleanor is conscious of that. We're in her point of view, so we under-stand that she's aware of the jagged rings of sweat. Laurel's first comment is "When in Rome" — a facile patrician use of a cliche, just because he's taking off his coat. He's still dressed in his pinstriped vest and four-in-hand!

We hear the train running, and the very movement of the thing carrying her away suggests — what? — the rending of silk. Silk already represents the life that she's lived, and it's being rent apart, and then she's all the way back to Maryland. It's House Beautiful! she reads, talking of homebuilding in England and, meanwhile, the desert is all around them. We find that she has an unbuilt house — and this is where the epiphany of yearning is strongest. Because her grief is not just for aperitifs and silk dresses. In fact her potential is separate from her privilege — and where is that potential found? In the intense memory of something very concrete, very sensual, very specific: her father's wood planes. And then comes that wonderful verb, her hand patting along the shelf, touching these planes and knowing the rich, various names of them. As we see that potential for something of the hands, of building something new, we see that potential in her. She grieves not for her parlor and her silk dresses, but for the planes — and that's where the yearning comes through clearest. If you combine that moment with the devastating desert image in the beginning, her yearning suggests, ironically, her potential for the rougher parts of life and the challenge to come.

There's nothing analytic here about yearning; it is manifest in every detail. I yearn not only for a literal home but also for a place in the world—a lack reflected in the empty landscape.

The yearning finds its way, in a certain kind of irony, into her memories. The sounds of the train metaphorically echo the rending of her old life. The dynamic is working on all those levels at once, all reflecting the same yearning.

Here's the opening of a short story, "Brownsville," from a book called Blues and Trouble by Tom Piazza. Again, the yearning comes out of beautiful moment-to-moment sensual details, all fit organically together.

I've been trying to get to Brownsville, Texas, for weeks. Right now it's a hundred degrees in New Orleans and the gays are running down Chartres Street with no shirts on, trying to stay young. I'm not running anymore. When I get to Brownsville I'm going to sit down in the middle of the street, and that will be the end of the line.

Ten in the morning and they're playing a Schubert piano trio on the tape and the breeze is blowing in from the street and I'm sobbing into a napkin. "L. G.," she used to say, "you think I'm a mess? You're a mess, too, L. G." That was a consolation to her.

The walls in this cafe have been stained by patches of seeping water that will never dry, and the plaster has fallen away in swatches that look like countries nobody's ever heard of. Pictures of Napoleon are all over the place: Napoleon blowing it at Waterloo, Napoleon holding his dick on St. Helena, Napoleon sitting in some subtropical cafe thinking about the past, getting drunk, plotting revenge.

I picture Brownsville as a place under a merciless sun, where one-eyed dogs stand in the middle of dusty, empty streets staring at you and hot breeze blows inside your shirt and there's nowhere to go. It's always noon, and there are no explanations required. I'm going to Brownsville exactly because I've got no reason to go there. Anybody asks me why Brownsville — there's no fucking answer. That's why I'm going there.

Last night I slept with a woman who had hair down to her ankles and a shotgun in her bathtub and all the mirrors in her room rattled when she laughed. She was good to me; I'll never say a bad word about her. There's always a history, though; her daughter was sleeping on a blanket in the dining room. It would have been perfect except for that.

The past keeps rising up here; the water table is too high. All around the Quarter groups of tourists float like clumps of sewage.

"I've been trying to get to Brownsville, Texas, for weeks. Right now it's a hundred degrees in New Orleans." This goal of getting to Brownsville provides a dynamic from the beginning. He says the gays are trying to stay young, but "I'm not running anymore." Hmmm — he's not running but he's trying to get to Brownsville; is there some sort of contradiction there? He feels he's getting old, nothing has seemed to work for him. He has a failed past, like Napoleon, whose history certainly contained a huge and final failure. His immediate failure is this breakup with someone — who used to say that he's a mess.

Well, he's a mess. And notice the walls of the cafe:.. silhouettes of "countries nobody's ever heard of." His life is as meaningless as that; nobody's heard of him, and he's going someplace anonymous, where you don't have to explain anything, because he has no explanations. His own past is likened to Napoleon—"blowing it at Waterloo.. holding his dick on St. Helena. sitting in some subtropical cafe," which is where our narrator is sitting at the moment, getting drunk. Napoleon was plotting his revenge. In this, he's different from our narrator, who isn't "running anymore." But we know that Napoleon's revenge never came, don't we? He's critical of Napoleon for this. He thinks he wants to go to a place where it's always noon, no explanations are required, you just sit in a hot breeze under the sun. That's what he thinks he wants, but — a lot of modern fiction works with dramatic irony — we know more than the narrator does.

Then, we move to a woman he slept with last night, and what wonderful details he has of her: hair down to her ankles, shotgun in her bathtub, the mirrors in her room rattling when she laughs. "She was always good to me." What is it that makes the whole imperfect? Her child sleeping in the other room— which is what? Her past. The tension lies between here I am and the past is fucked, just like the water table that keeps rising in this town that has too much past.

What is his yearning? The dramatic irony here is that he seems to be yearning to disconnect from his failed past. But he's sobbing into his napkin; he slept with this woman just last night, and everything was fine except for this goddamned past. If he could just be in the present. In fact, he yearns to connect. The yearning for disconnection is really an emotional inverse; this is why he's chosen Brownsville, where it is always "noon." He's not so close to wanting oblivion as he would have himself believe.

Here's another opening passage, this one from "The Bog Man," a short story from Wilderness Tips by Margaret Atwood.

Julie broke up with Connor in the middle of a swamp.

Julie silently revises: not exactly in the middle, not knee-deep in rotting leaves and dubious brown water. More or less on the edge; sort of within striking distance. Well, in an inn, to be precise. Well, not even an inn. A room in a pub. What was available.

And not in a swamp anyway. In a bog. Swamp is when the water goes in one end and out the other, bog is when it goes in and stays in. How many times did Connor have to explain the difference? Quite a few. But Julie prefers the sound of the word swamp. It is mistier, more haunted. Bog is a slang word for toilet, and when you hear bog you know the toilet will be a battered and smelly one, and that there will be no toilet paper.

So Julie always says: I broke up with Connor in the middle of a swamp.

There are other things she revises as well. She revises Connor. She revises herself. Connor's wife stays approximately the same, but she was an invention of Julie's in the first place, since Julie never met her. Sometimes she used to wonder whether the wife really existed at all, or was just a fiction of Connor's, useful for keeping Julie at arm's length. But, no, the wife existed all right. She was solid, and she became more solid as time went on.

Connor mentioned the wife, and the three children, and the dog, fairly soon after he and Julie met. Well, not met. Slept together. It was almost the same thing.

Julie supposes, now, that he didn't want to scare her off by bringing up the subject too soon. She herself was only twenty, and too naive to even think of looking for clues, such as the white circle on the ring finger. By the time he did get round to making a sheepish avowal or confession, Julie was in no position to be scared off. She was already lying in a motel room, wound loosely in a sheet. She was too tired to be scared off and also too amazed, and also too grateful. Connor was not her first lover but he was her first grown-up one, he was the first who did not treat sex as some kind of panty raid. He took her body seriously, which impressed her to no end.

Understand that in everything I'm reading you, there's an organic coherence among the details, built around a character with a dynamic yearning. Julie's yearning begins to manifest itself how? — by revising everything. Everything is qualified. She makes a statement, revises it, backs out of it, deromanticizes it. But then returns to it. At once, we see this inner conflict going on. She wants to uplift, to rewrite romantically; then she wants to debunk, to go back and see things with brutal clarity. And this process keeps repeating. More or less. Sort of. To be precise.

Well, not even. What was available. Well, not met. Slept together. Ultimately, there's a moment when we learn what has kept her with that married man: he took her body seriously.

The point of revision is to find meaning. You revise to clarify the meaning of something. You understand, I'm doing this terrible artificial thing, to be forgotten instantly, giving you a little analytical summary to show what's going on here in the moment. The moment is the point: her attachment to Connor comes from the moment she knew that he took her body seriously. The yearning is to find meaning and appropriate relevance in her life.

The last example is from James Joyce's story, "The Sisters," from Dubliners.

There was no hope for him this time: it was the third stroke. Night after night I had passed the house (it was vacation time) and studied the lighted square of window: and night after night I had found it lighted in the same way, faintly and evenly. If he was dead, I thought, I would see the reflection of candles on the darkened blind, for I knew that two candles must be set at the head of a corpse. He had often said to me, "I am not long for this world," and I had thought the words idle. Now I knew they were true. Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis. It had always sounded strangely in my ears, like the word gnomon in the Euclid and the word simony in the Catechism. But now it sounded to me like the name of some maleficent and sinful being. It filled me with fear, and

yet I longed to be nearer to it and to look upon its deadly work.

At home he learns of the old man's death:

"Well, so your old friend is gone, you'll be sorry to hear."

"Who?" said I.

"Father Flynn."

"Is he dead?"

"Mr. Cotter here has just told us. He was passing by the house."

I knew that I was under observation, so I continued eating as if the news had not interested me. My uncle explained to old Cotter.

"The youngster and he were great friends. The old chap taught him a great deal, mind you; and they say he had a great wish for him."

"God have mercy on his soul," said my aunt piously.

Old Cotter looked at me for a while. I felt that his little beady black eyes were examining me, but I would not satisfy him by looking up from the plate. He returned to his pipe and finally spat rudely into the grate.

"I wouldn't like children of mine," he said, "to have too much to say to a man like that."

"How do you mean, Mr. Cotter?" asked my aunt.

"What I mean is," said old Cotter, "it's bad for children. My idea is: let a young lad run about and play

with young lads of his own age and not be. am I right,

Jack?"

It seems to me evident from the very first sentences what this young man's yearning is. A man is dying, and our narrator has carefully watched the process "night after night." The passion, the yearning, is in that phrase instantly. It's vacation time, and this time the old man has suffered "the third stroke," and our narrator is still walking past that window, studying the lighted square of the window "night after night." Of course, the deep connection the dying man has with our narrator is immediately clear as well. "He had often said to me, 'I am not long for this world,' and I had thought the words idle." The suggestion of an ongoing relationship — that the dying man had been his adviser and confidant, and even that the narrator had taken his words with a grain of salt — all represents a kind of intimacy between them. The impact of this man's process of dying is clear, too, in the words our narrator repeats to himself. The deep connection, as it turns out, between the narrator and this priest, and the institution and worldview with its mysteries that the priest represents, is reflected in our narrator's focus on the words that he says softly to himself, not only in the "paralysis" that the man of God now suffers, but in the definition of gnomon, which is "an interpreter, a pointer," and simony, which is the buying and selling of religious pardons. These words take on a kind of personality, as he says that the words sounded to him like "some maleficent and sinful being."

When the narrator gets home, he keeps his own counsel and is very quiet, but he is critical of the adults that surround him, his aunt and uncle and old Cotter. The adults contend that you can learn too much; that you really need not pay attention to the dark and serious things of the world; that, as Cotter says, education is bad for children because their minds are so impressionable. All of this adds up organically, and deepens our understanding of the boy whose hunger for learning, and knowledge of the darkness and the seriousness of the world, whose very impressionability leads us to identify with him.

I caution you once again to understand that this is a secondary and artificial way of responding to literature, and that this philosophical articulation of these characters' yearning runs counter to the ways in which we are meant to and do respond to them in a story. But here our narrator yearns for the truth. He's going night after night past the window, reading the implications of what sort of candles are lit and working through the mysteries of religion in terms of where this man may be headed when he dies. The narrator yearns to face the dark things honestly. He's doing so in a world commanded by adults who would keep him ignorant, who would prevent him from knowing, much less speaking, the truth. And this yearning is inherent in every detail of image, of voice, moment by moment in the narrator's experience.

4. Cinema of the Mind

Fiction technique and film technique have a great deal in common. We're not talking here tonight about how to translate a book to the screen or how a film could be transformed into a novel, but about deep and essential common ground.

The great D. W. Griffith (I say great in the sense of moviemaker; he was a loathsome human being) — who did those massive silent screen epics in the teens of the last century, Intolerance and The Birth of a Nation—was rightly credited with inventing modern film technique. Griffith himself credited one man with teaching him everything he knew about film, and that was Charles Dickens. Of course, Dickens died several decades before film was invented, but what Griffith learned from him about this new art form of the twentieth century goes to the heart of the experience of reading literature.

Pause for a moment and consider what goes on within you when you read a wonderful work of fiction. The experience

is, in fact, a kind of cinema of the inner consciousness. When you read a work of literature, the characters and the setting and the actions are evoked as images, as a kind of dream in your consciousness, are they not? The primary senses — sight and sound — prevail, just as in the cinema, but in addition to seeing and hearing, you experience taste and smell, you can feel things on your skin as the narrative moves through your consciousness. This is omnisensual cinema. Consequently, it makes sense that the techniques of literature are those we understand to be filmic.

All of the techniques that filmmakers employ, and which you understand intuitively as filmgoers, have direct analogies in fiction. And because fiction writers are the writer-directors of the cinema of inner consciousness, you will need to develop the techniques of film as well. I want to deal with some of those techniques tonight, because I think they can help you overcome some of the problems I've been describing in the past few weeks: the impulse for abstraction and analysis, for summary and generalization, problems of rhythm and transition— how to get from one scene to another or one image to another or one sentence to another — how to put all the parts together, where to place your own personal focus when you're in your own creative trance.

I inveigh against abstraction in these works called novels and stories. Consider how Jack Nicholson as a crotchety old bachelor in a movie looks at Helen Hunt. We see his face on the screen; he lifts an eyebrow; his lip curls. If the screen suddenly went blank and the word "wryly" came up, or "sarcasm," or "contempt," how would you react? You can imagine: with great discomfort. For readers who know how to read, abstraction, generalization, analysis, and interpretation have the same deleterious effect.

Let's turn to a few basic film concepts, most of which will be familiar to you, and then let's look at some literature together and see how it is that writers have always been filmmakers.

The shot is the basic building block of film. From your point of view as spectator, the shot is a unit of uninterrupted flow of imagery. From the moment that image begins to whenever that image is interrupted, by whatever — that is the shot. That is the basis of every film.

Then there are a number of transitional devices for getting from one shot to another. By far the most common, used for the vast majority of transitions, is the cut. You see an image on the screen, and snap! it's not there; another image is there in its place. It's called a cut because originally when film was edited — and this has only changed in the last few years — the film stock was literally cut and then spliced together with the image that followed.

And, of course, shots are connected into scenes and scenes are developed into sequences. Scenes are unified actions occurring in a single time and place — maybe a single shot, more likely a group of shots. A sequence is a group of scenes comprising a dramatic segment of a film.

These concepts describe not only the inevitable flow of film but also the narrative voice as picture maker. These pictures have a life in time. They begin, they develop, and they end in equivalents of the filmic concepts. As in film, it is the manipulation of these "shots" accumulating into "scenes" and

"sequences" that creates meaning and produces the rhythm of the voice of the narrator.

The narrative voice in fiction is always adjusting our view of the physical world it creates, which is equivalent to another group of film techniques on a continuum from extreme long shot to extreme close-up, and the many stages in between. The long shot, the medium shot, the close-up, the extreme close-up — you can slice that sausage as fine as you wish. The narrative voice always places our reader's consciousness at a certain distance from the images it's creating. It can place us at a far distance or bring us into a position of intimate proximity by its choice of detail, by what it lets through the camera lens.

Not only do fiction and film adjust us in terms of our physical relationship to the image, they are also constantly adjusting our sense of time. Fiction and film both often speed time up or slow it down, operating in slow motion and fast motion. You're familiar with the moment when the lovers are finally reunited and they run to each other in slow motion across the plaza or the meadow. In the late sixties or early seventies Sam Peckinpah invented slow-motion violence — at the end of the Western The Wild Bunch, for example, when a gang of criminals all get blown away in excruciating slow motion. That technique has by now become a filmic clich6: every bullet's impact is in lugubrious slow motion.

Fast motion in film, however, is almost always comic in effect. Some filmmakers have tried to overcome the comic uses of fast motion, but without much success. A wonderful and deadly serious early silent film, Nosferatu, has a sequence in fast motion when Nosferatu's coffin arrives from abroad and is taken

off the ship and carried into the hearse — and it looks comic. I can't think of an example in modern filmmaking where fast motion is used except for comic effect. In fiction, though, fast motion can be used with an infinite variety of emotional nuance.

The last film technique I want to lay on the table for you Is one of the most crucial. It's called montage. Montage is a concept developed by Sergey Eisenstein, a great Russian early film director. Simply put, montage creates meaning by placing two things next to each other, juxtaposing elements. In a work of art everything is laden with affect, and whenever you put two of anything next to each other, a third thing emerges; that's what montage is about. If you see an image on the screen of a grassy slope and a freshly dug and refilled grave, and we cut to a woman in black walking slowly down a gravel path beneath some trees, the montage leads you instantly to understand that this woman has left a loved one in the grave she just visited. In film the juxtaposed elements are most often visual, but in fiction the flexibility is almost infinite.

Let's look at some examples now. I'm going to start with a piece from a short story by Hemingway, "Cat in the Rain." I want you to just listen to the flow here of Hemingway's narrative voice, and then we'll come back to it and examine it in cinematic terms.

The American wife stood at the window looking out. Outside right under their window a cat was crouched under one of the dripping green tables. The cat was trying to make herself so compact that she would not be dripped on.

"I'm going down and get that kitty," the American wife said.

"I'll do it," her husband offered from the bed.

"No, I'll get it. The poor kitty out trying to keep dry under a table."

The husband went on reading, lying propped up with the two pillows at the foot of the bed.

"Don't get wet," he said.

"The American wife stood at the window looking out." Hemingway here evokes the full figure of the wife standing at the window. In interior terms, it's a kind of medium long shot. We see her fully from across the room.

"Outside right under their window a cat was crouched under one of the dripping green tables." What has happened here? We have now cut to what she is seeing. You understand this same technique when you're watching a movie: in Out of Africa, you see Robert Redford's face on the screen. He looks. Cut. We now see a lion bounding toward the camera. We understand that this is what he is seeing because of that montage: Robert Redford's face, a Hon coming this way; and the third thing emerges. The most deprived, illiterate youngster understands this.

Hemingway has just used the same technique. "The American wife stood at the window looking out," and "Outside right under their window a cat was crouched under one of the dripping green tables." We see that cat, again in a kind of medium long shot, the table and the rain and the cat underneath. How many inexperienced writers, having written "The American wife stood at the window looking out," and now wanting us to understand what she's seeing, are going to put her back into the next sentence? "The American wife stood at the window looking out. She watched a cat crouching under one of the dripping green tables." Right? You now have a slack, awkward run of prose. It is as if, in the film, we see Robert Redford's face on the screen. Cut. Now we see the lion bounding this way, but in the foreground is the back of Robert Redford's head. Can you imagine the awkwardness of that shot? Yet we all write sentences with that kind of built-in awkwardness, when we don't need "her" in the sentence; montage takes care of it much more elegantly and powerfully.

"Outside right under their window a cat was crouched under one of the dripping green tables. The cat was trying to make herself so compact that she would not be dripped on." What just happened? We zoom in for a close-up on the cat.

" 'I'm going down and get that kitty,' the American wife said." How many times in film have you seen an image, and then a line of dialogue, somebody's voice coming in over that image, and then an image of the speaker? Images linger and other images come in on top. This is all happening very fast, but I promise you it's happening as you read, and it's exactly what Hemingway does here. The dialogue tag doesn't come until the end; first it's a voice, then we know who speaks. There's an after-image of the cat until Hemingway puts in the character.

" 'I'll do it,' her husband offered from the bed." Notice that we don't have any equivalent to "The American wife stood at the window." We know he's on the bed but don't know what his physical position is; we do not see him fully, and so for the moment it's a close up of him as he speaks.

" 'No, I'll get it. The poor kitty out trying to keep dry under a table.'" No dialogue tag this time. So we stay with him as her voice floats through. We know it's her because of the conventions of paragraphing in dialogue. But our attention is not brought back to her. We stay with him, and we're still close on him. And then, the husband "went on reading, lying propped up with the two pillows at the foot of the bed." The camera pulls back slowly, revealing him finally in full figure, reading and lying propped up at the foot of the bed." 'Don't get wet,' he said."

When I read that, a number of you smiled. Why? Because he has not moved a muscle. You do not have to say, "I'll do it," her husband offered insincerely from the bed. You do not need to abstract that, because all of the affect is embedded in the cin-ematically sensual way Hemingway directs the scene. The revelation comes through montage. The husband says "I'll do it," we see him lying there doing nothing, and next comes, "Don't get wet." It's raining out; of course she's going to get wet.

So much is said about the relationship in so few words! — because Hemingway was a brilliant filmmaker.

Fast action, slow motion: what I want to show you now is how these venerable film techniques have always worked for us writers of narrative. This passage is from the Book of Judges, twenty-five hundred years old. The Old Testament— King James Version, of course. The passage is self-explanatory except for the character of Sisera — a bad guy who's bringing his armies to face Israel.

Blessed above women shall Jael the wife of Heber the Kenite be; blessed shall she be above women in the tent.

He asked water, and she gave him milk; she brought forth butter in a lordly dish.

She put her hand to the nail, and her right hand to the workmen's hammer; and with the hammer she smote Sisera, she smote off his head, when she had pierced and stricken through his temples.

At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down: at her feet, he bowed, he fell: where he bowed, there he fell down dead.

The mother of Sisera looked out at a window, and cried through the lattice, Why is his chariot so long in coming?

This is utterly cinematic: ".. he bowed, he fell, he lay down: at her feet, he bowed, he fell: where he bowed, there he fell down dead." That is slow-motion violence a la Sam Peckinpah. He is falling forever. And then that wonderful cut, that wonderful bit of montage, sans transitional device: ".. he fell down dead"; "The mother of Sisera looked out at a window…" You can see the latticework, the shadow of it on her face. "Why is his chariot so long in coming?" He should be finished raping and pillaging by now. Time for dinner.

Next I want to read you a little bit of Henry James with some ellipses in it. I want to give you a cheek-by-jowl example of three speeds in a brief section of "The Siege of London." Here is an example of appropriate summary — I've used summary as an epithet in these lectures, but the summary that's destructive races through what needs to be done in the moment; it is summary that has no sensual impact on the reader. Sensual, carefully and judiciously used summary can be effective and, indeed, is how you mostly achieve fast motion — fast action — in fiction.

The "glass" referred to here is an opera glass; that is, a little pair of binoculars.

That solemn piece of upholstery, the curtain of the Comedie Francaise, had fallen upon the first act of the piece, and our two Americans had taken advantage of the interval to pass out of the huge, hot theatre, in company with the other occupants of the stalls.

She turned. and presented her face to the public — a fair, well-drawn face, with smiling eyes, smiling lips, ornamented over the brow with delicate rings of black hair and, in each ear, with the sparkle of a diamond sufficiently large to be seen across the Theatre Francais..

Littlemore looked at her, then abruptly he gave an exclamation. "Give me the glass!"

"Do you know her?" his companion asked, as he directed the little instrument.

Littlemore made no answer; he only looked in silence; then he handed back the glass. "No, she's not respectable," he said. And he dropped into his seat again. As Waterville remained standing, he added, "Please sit down; I think she saw me."

Now this is the great thing about fiction. We can move from fast action to slow motion to real time seamlessly and with great nuance. The first part of that was fast action—"that solemn piece of upholstery" — it's summary but with wonderful sensual impact—that heavy, roughly textured thing. ". the curtain of the Comedie Francaise, had fallen upon the first act, and our two Americans had taken advantage of the interval to pass out of the huge, hot theatre, in company with the other occupants of the stalls." He never lets go of the image in our minds but we move quickly. Then time stops. We examine her face in very slow motion. "She turned.. and presented her face to the public," and there's this lovely little bit of close examination: "… a fair, well-drawn face, with smiling eyes, smiling lips, ornamented over the brow with delicate rings of black hair and, in each ear, with the sparkle of a diamond.." Then we shift into real time, the moment-to-moment time that is your normal speed as fiction writers. The normal speed, I emphasize.

"Littlemore looked at her, then abruptly he gave an exclamation. 'Give me the glass!'" We watch him sit down. We watch the handing of the glass. We hear the words of their exchange. It's all in real time there.

Next I'm going to give an example from the writer who taught D. W. Griffith everything he knew about film. This is the opening of the novel Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. Our narrator, Philip Pirrip, is writing in his adulthood, looking back to his childhood as an orphan, and he refers to himself sometimes in the third person, sometimes in the first person. During his childhood he was called Pip. The

people mentioned here are his dead siblings and his parents. Just go to the movies:

Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, within, as the river wound, twenty miles of the sea. My first most vivid and broad impression of the identity of things seems to me to have been gained on a memorable raw afternoon towards evening. At such a time I found out for certain that this bleak place overgrown with nettles was the churchyard; and that Philip Pirrip, Late of the Parish, and Also Georgiana Wife of the Above, were dead and buried; and that Alexander, Bartholomew, Abraham, Tobias, and Roger, infant children of the aforesaid, were also dead and buried; and that the dark flat wilderness beyond the churchyard, intersected with dikes and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle feeding on it, was the marshes; and that the low leaden line beyond was the river; and that the distant savage lair from which the wind was rushing was the sea; and that the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry was Pip.

"Hold your noise!" cried a terrible voice, as a man started up from among the graves at the side of the church porch. "Keep still, you little devil, or I'll cut your throat!"

A fearful man, all in coarse gray, with a great iron on his leg. A man with no hat, and with broken shoes, and with an old rag tied round his head. A man who had been soaked in water, and smothered in mud, and lamed

by stones, and cut by flints, and stung by nettles, and torn by briars; who limped, and shivered, and glared and growled; and whose teeth chattered in his head as he seized me by the chin.

"Oh, don't cut my throat, sir," I pleaded in terror. "Pray don't do it, sir."

"Tell us your name," said the man. "Quick!"

"Pip, sir."

"Once more," said the man, staring at me. "Give it mouth!"

"Pip. Pip, sir."

"Show us where you live," said the man. "Pint out the place!"

I pointed to where our village lay, on the flat inshore, among the alder-trees and pollards, a mile or more from the church.

The man, after looking at me for a moment, turned me upside down, and emptied my pockets. There was nothing in them but a piece of bread. When the church came to itself — for he was so sudden and strong that he made it go head over heels before me, and I saw the steeple under my feet — when the church came to itself, I say, I was seated on a high tombstone, trembling, while he ate the bread ravenously.

Dickens begins with what they call the establishing shot. We're at "a memorable raw afternoon towards evening. At such a time I found out for certain that this bleak place overgrown with nettles was the churchyard…" We get a long shot in the gathering dark of the churchyard. And then, what does Dickens do? He cuts to close-ups and pans one after another along the tombstones — as we can tell from the formal phrasing "Late of the parish":

. that Philip Pirrip, Late of the Parish, and Also Georgiana Wife of the Above, were dead and buried; and that Alexander, Bartholomew, Abraham, Tobias, and Roger, infant children of the aforesaid, were also dead and buried.

These are, in fact, the graves of Pip's dead father, his dead mother, and dead brother, dead brother, dead brother, dead brother, dead brother — one after another.

You see the absolutely essential quality of fiction-as-film when you see what he does then. We go from that last dead brother to what?

. and that the dark flat wilderness beyond the churchyard, intersected with dikes and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle feeding on it, was the marshes.

He lifts his camera from the dead brother and looks off to a long shot out over the mounds and gates and dikes to the marshes, beyond the churchyard, and then where?

. and that the low, leaden line beyond was the river.

Then we go to an even longer shot:

… and that the distant savage lair from which the wind was rushing was the sea.

He takes us to an extreme shot at the farthest horizon. Then what? He cuts from that distant horizon to a close-up of the orphan child, the narrator of our novel, "the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry was Pip."

How many writers would do this, with perfect logic?

My first most vivid and broad impression of the identity of things seems to me to have been gained on a memorable raw afternoon towards evening. At such a time I found out for certain that this bleak place overgrown with nettles was the churchyard; and that Philip Pirrip, Late of the Parish, and Also Georgiana Wife of the Above, were dead and buried; and that Alexander, Bartholomew, Abraham, Tobias, and Roger, infant children of the aforesaid, were also dead and buried; and that the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry was Pip.

Perfectly logical. Perfectly thoughtful. Dead father, dead mother, dead brother, dead brother, dead brother, dead brother, dead brother, last remaining child of the family.

Montage, of course. But in such a novel, where you went from the last dead brother to the remaining child, you would be in a totally different world from the one that Dickens is creating. You would be in a world where the focus is on the plight of an orphan, a family in trouble — a sociological problem, a sentimental tale of a struggling child.

Dickens's world is about something far greater, and Pip does not yearn for a family; he yearns for his destiny. When you move from that last dead child to the marshes and the river and to the far horizon, and the whole sensual world is bleak and empty and mysterious, and there's a dark wind blowing from that far horizon, and then you cut to the child — that montage creates something utterly different, a world in which the issue is not just, "Gosh, I don't have parents. I'm a kid struggling," but "I am a human soul trying to work out the destiny of my existence."

Let's go further.

"Hold your noise!" cried a terrible voice, as a man started up from among the graves at the side of the church porch. "Keep still, you little devil, or I'll cut your throat!"

How does Pip respond to this?" 'Oh, don't cut my throat, sir,' I pleaded in terror.." Now, I don't mean to presume to edit Charles Dickens, but Dickens sometimes wrote in haste. Does he really need to say "in terror"? Do you understand what I'm talking about in terms of abstractions? Certainly the world of emotional abundance he's creating can tolerate these extra taps on the knee, but they are not necessary. Pip's terror is manifest already, is it not?

But the important thing to understand here is that the man says, "I'll cut your throat," and Pip says, "Don't cut my throat." How long do you think it took him to come to that response? A nanosecond. And how is it written? Pay attention, because there's something really interesting about these three sentences:

.. "Keep still, you little devil, or I'll cut your throat!"

A fearful man, all in coarse gray, with a great iron on his leg. A man with no hat, and with broken shoes, and with an old rag tied around his head. A man who had been soaked in water, and smothered in mud, and lamed by stones, and cut by flints, and stung by nettles, and torn by briars; who limped, and shivered, and glared and growled; and whose teeth chattered in his head as he seized me by the chin.

"Oh, don't cut my throat, sir,"..

Time stops here, doesn't it? This is extreme slow motion, because all of that comes between "I'm going to cut your throat" and "Oh, don't. " What is the psychological reality of that? When was the last time you skidded your car on a wet pavement? What happens? You hear every beat of your heart; that telephone pole is floating in your direction, in extreme slow motion, right? It is absolutely organically appropriate for time to slow down drastically in a moment of terror like that. And remember I'm talking about the organic nature of art; every tiny sensual detail has to resonate into everything else. What's unusual about those three sentences in that paragraph where time has stopped? I bet most of you didn't even notice that not one of them is a complete sentence. Listen to it again:

A fearful man, all in coarse gray, with a great iron on his leg. A man with no hat, and with broken shoes, and with an old rag tied round his head. ["Tied round his head" is a subordinate clause here.] A man who had been soaked in water, and smothered in mud, and lamed by stones, and cut by flints, and stung by nettles, and torn by briars; who limped, and shivered, and glared and growled; and whose teeth chattered in his head as he seized me by the chin.

There's not a single independent verb in those three sentences. Why? Time has stopped. What are the parts of speech that signify the passage of time? Active verbs. Things happen. But here nothing is happening except perception. It is beautifully appropriate — and you don't even notice, except afterward, in an analytic way.

The organic nature of art, down to syntax. We've dealt so far with very clear examples, I think, of the correspondence of film and fiction techniques, but there are many, many others. I daresay that if you examine the tiniest filmic concept, the most subtle, nuanced filmic concept, you can find its equivalence in fiction.

I want to leave you with one more example, a subtle one, but I think an unmistakable one: the common transitional device called dissolve. The dissolve is a transition from one image to another where the first fades while the second comes into focus superimposed over the first. The two things, then, mix inextricably for a time.

I want to give you an example of dissolve from my own work — a novel hardly ever read by anybody, called Wabash. I need to give you some background first. Deborah and Jeremy Cole live in the fictional steel mill town of Wabash, Illinois. It's 1932. They're both struggling with private demons of one sort or another. He's getting involved in radical politics at the steel mill where he works; she's trying to reconcile a family of women who rip each other to pieces as a matter of daily course. But Jeremy and Deborah carry a shared grief that has been a barrier in their marriage for some time — the death of their little girl, Lizzy, who died from pneumonia a couple of years before. They have not made love since Lizzy died. They do not touch. There's no intimacy between them at all. In this scene they go off for a picnic on an ancient Indian burial mound, a gesture toward reconciliation, trying to find moments when they can reconnect. But as the scene progresses, they lapse into separate memories about their daughter, memories that are lovely but painful.

The scene partly represents a technical problem — not, I need hardly stress anymore, that I was conscious of finding a technical solution to an analytically perceived problem. This is analysis after the fact. But the problem was that I wrote the book in the third-person limited omniscient, with two point-of-view characters, Deborah and Jeremy. In the sections that begin in Jeremy's sensibility, the narrator has no access to Deborah. And in the sections that begin with Deborah, the narrator has no access to Jeremy. This is so for the first eighty-some pages of the book. But in this scene of the picnic, just as they aspire to come together — so does the narrator get into both sensibilities at the same time. The narrator moves between these two isolated reveries, hoping to bring them together somehow.

A couple of things you need to know: the memory that Deborah has is of seeing Lizzy outside the house one day crouching near the grass, swaying in front of a poisonous copperhead snake, singing a variation of the old nursery rhyme "Hush little snaky, don't you cry." The copperhead is swaying and coiling as well; Lizzy has literally charmed the snake.

Jeremy's memory involves Lizzy and his work at the steel mill. He has Lizzy on his shoulders. It's nighttime. He's stopped near the slag pile and has an unobstructed view of the blast furnace. He's watching its beauty: the flames of the ovens and the billows of smoke, the constellation of lights on the equipment, and a single prominent smokestack that is flaring off a flame from the excess gasses.

Here is the passage that uses the technique of the dissolve:

Deborah waited motionless as Lizzy sang to the snake and finally Deborah whispered, Come away now, and her daughter rose slowly and left the copperhead where it lay charmed on the grass and when Lizzy was near, Deborah grasped her hand and Jeremy reached up to grasp his daughter's hand and she said, What's that jelly fire? and he looked and he knew at once what she meant — the flame coming from the tall, thin stack. It's a bleeder valve, he said, and he felt her chin touch the top of his head; he could imagine her resting her head on his so that she could study this beautiful flame and when Lizzy looked up at her mother she smiled a smile that seemed full of some special knowledge and Lizzy's thoughtful study of the flame and her smile at the charming of the snake brought both Jeremy and Deborah to the same tremor of grief. They each felt it in the other's body and to feel the other's grief was too much to add to their own and they pulled gently apart. Jeremy rose and walked to the western edge of the mound and he looked off to the mill and Deborah lay flat and closed her eyes against the sky and she thought she heard a gliding nearby in the grass but she did not care and did not move.

Did you hear the dissolve? It's set up with Lizzy's question, "What's that jelly fire?" and Jeremy knows at once what she means. Focus on "He could imagine her resting her head on his so that she could study this beautiful flame and when Lizzy looked up at her mother. " Now we are in his reverie, and for a moment there the two images are superimposed because the "looking up" we first take to mean Lizzy looking up from her father's head toward that bleeder valve; but then we realize it's with her mother. "And when Lizzy looked up." It's even tapped a little bit, because it is linked to the same gesture that Jeremy made to look in the same direction. So we have a clear sense of her looking up at the flame while she's with Jeremy and then all of a sudden she's also looking at her mother. Then we adjust to seeing her looking up only at her mother. And so one dissolves into the other. After this, the narrative voice goes back for a long while into the two separate sensibilities. So the flowing together in the narrative voice has a kind of ironic sadness to it, which resonates in the detail, because it gives a sense of what could happen between these two people but, in fact, does not.

So I urge you as fiction writers to recognize that the nature of the process you're working with is filmic. A lot of the problems that I've been articulating for you in the last few weeks can yield to you if you give yourself over to elements that are visual, sensual, transitional. Otherwise, you can get bogged down in the stodgy, unyielding doughiness of abstraction. You try to put the transitions in and explain these things, and the narrative power is lost.

Before I leave you with all this talk of film, I want to borrow one more notion from another art form, music, which you will recognize as relevant to film and also important to fiction. When you're listening to a song, a certain kind of expectation develops — harmonically, or in its key or in its rhythm or in its color — and when that expectation is set up, the moment that gives you chill bumps is when the music cuts against the grain. It suddenly spins the harmonic, shifts the key, varies the rhythm, sets the orchestration askew. Musicians call it the rub. Two things rub against each other, and that's what gives it life, the unexpected thing that nevertheless feels just right. And that is what happens, too, in the creation of character. When you are inside your characters' yearnings, whenever they're feeling one way, going in one direction, showing certain attitudes, emotions — open your unconscious to the opposite; cut against the grain. Rub the thing that seems predictable.

5. A Writer Prepares

I want to move on now to suggest a system of predreaming, which I used in its purest form for a novel I published back in 1983 called Countrymen of Bones and which I think helped to shape my deep instinctive reactions in the process. But hear me when I say "shape" and "instinctive." Our dreams are not "smart." There is no intellect in this world powerful enough to create a great work of novelistic art. Only the unconscious can fit together the stuff of fiction; the conscious mind cannot.

When I said earlier that you could get away with a certain, carefully managed amount of abstraction and analysis that was a part of your character's voice, I put a pistol in your mouth. This is a shotgun. I'm even going to cock the trigger for you. I'm going to teach you a way of getting your sensibility around the daunting prospect of creating such an object as a novel. I can't emphasize strongly enough that this is a dangerous system; it must be used as an aid to your unconscious, your trance. If you let this process draw you into your analytic mind, it will do far more harm than good.

Let me describe two kinds of novelists. First there are those who preplan. They outline. They know the end before they begin. But those who figure out what they're going to say before they begin to say it are utterly lost, because if they adhere to the stages of their plan in a kind of "all right, that's done" sort of way, they will end up writing from their heads, automatically.

Then there's the draft writer, who leads an admirably dismal existence. He starts the same way every other sensual artist does. He's got characters floating in his unconscious. He intuits their yearning. He has attached to them a milieu, a circumstance, perhaps an external moment in the world, some event to block that yearning. These are the basic elements you all have when you start a novel. The draft writer begins a draft for the very purposes I've been talking about; he is rightly afraid of being drawn into his mind and his analytical self. He would never preplan, because that would trap him like literal memory, like a "message," like preconceived ends, and thereby destroy his ability to get into the unconscious. So the draft writer feels the necessity of taking the merest hints to start the novel and then plunging in, making approximations, writing rough, by any and all means continuing to write and write and write through a great sprawling draft. And the draft writer relishes this. "Ah, I've got this mass of stuff, and OK, I've got to do the second draft now and the third and the fourth, and the seventeenth, and that's fine. " Great works of art have been created this way, and I suspect statistically it's the more common way to write a novel. It's done because those artists understand the danger of being sucked into their heads.

But you know what? They're just deferring the problem. Because once you have this great raw sprawling first draft, how do you find that leaner, more coherent second draft? The dangers of analysis are very powerful in that search.

What I'm suggesting instead is this:

You go to your writing space as you would on a day when you're planning to write words. You go into your trance, just as you would if you were writing your new book sentence to sentence. But that's not what you do. Instead you're going to do what I call dreamstorming—not brainstorming, dream-storming. You're going to sit or recline in your writing space in your trance, and you're going to free-float, free-associate, sit with your character, watch your character move around in the potential world of this novel. You're going to dream around in this novel, one level removed from moment-to-moment writing — that is, at the level of scene. You're going to do this for six or eight or ten or twelve weeks, every day. You're going to go into your writing space, you're going to go into your dreamspace, you're going to float around, and you're going to dreamstorm potential scenes in such a novel as this with such characters as these, with such yearnings as these. And you'll try to float everywhere in the novel: beginning, middle, end— all over.

You'll have a pad of paper in front of you (you can do it at your computer if you prefer; I do it by hand on legal pads); you'll make a list. You're going to write down on this legal pad six or eight or ten words, not many more, that represent a potential scene, just identifiers of scenes. Don't hesitate to put something down, as long as it's coming with a sensual hook. You're going to make sure that every scene you list has come to you with some — and it can be very faint, very fragmentary— but some sensual, concrete hook. A little vision of something, a little smell or taste of something, a little sound of something. Do not trust a scene that presents itself to you as an idea. Each scene must have an even fragmentary vision, some sort of sense impression attached to it.

Then you write down the briefest identifier of that scene. For example: Lloyd rapes Anna. Darrell ponders his digging trowel—those were typical identifiers from Countrymen of Bones. On a typical day you'll float among a number of possible scenes from different parts of the book. And when a compelling scene comes to you, you might be visited by the draft writer's instinct — you want to start writing the full scene right away. Don't do it. Resist it. Even if that scene is "Wow! It's vivid. It's got, oh man, it's really almost there." You've got the six- or eight-word identifier and you leave it at that. This is coitus interruptus. You float on.

Now, you might find yourself getting into little runs of scenes. This scene provokes an image of another scene and another, possibly in sequence. Well, OK, follow it; that's great. List each one, six or eight words. But as soon as the run peters out, do not force it, do not try to find what goes next.

This is very important: through the whole six or eight or ten or twelve weeks, you do nothing—and I emphasize nothing—to try to organize, structure, or otherwise manipulate these scenes. You do not even try to reconcile totally contradictory scenes. Lloyd rapes Anna; Lloyd thinks of raping Anna hut doesn't. If you have a fragment of each of those scenes on two different days, don't reconcile them. Put it all down, all that contradictory stuff.

Eventually, the law of diminishing returns sets in, the scenes come more slowly, and one day along about the sixth or eighth or tenth or twelfth week you find yourself with only one scene and you say, "Whoa, I'm finished with doing this."

Now you've got what? A hundred and fifty? Two hundred scenes? You may have three hundred. You're ready to go to the next stage.

Say you have two hundred scenes. You buy yourself two hundred three-by-five cards — not five-by-seven; you only need room for a phrase, and you want them to be easy to handle. Turn the cards horizontal. Write the identifying phrase or set of words in the center of the card. Write one scene per card. Now you have two hundred cards with two hundred scenes.

By the way, a word about three-by-five cards. Functional fixedness can cut both ways. Some of you may have a very strong association between three-by-five cards and an academic thesis or dissertation or other analytical work. If so, you may need to change something about them. If you worked with white three-by-fives in your life of the mind, perhaps you can use a different color card for your creative work.

So you've overcome any possible negative associations and you've got your two hundred scenes on two hundred cards. The next day, you go into your writing space, you clear yourself a tabletop, and you go into your trance. Then you start flipping through your two hundred cards. Every time you look at a card there's a little sense impression that jumps off the card at you: bing, bing, bing. What are you doing? You're looking for the first good scene in the book — the best point of attack. Narratively, this scene will obviously be near the beginning of events but may not be the first chronologically; the story may have already begun. You find this scene, you put it in the upper left-hand corner of that big empty space. Now you flip your cards. You're in your trance. You flip the cards looking for that second scene. What scene would follow the one in the upper left corner of your table? You find it, you put it up there next to the first, and so forth. At the end of the first day, you've got, for example, eight cards in a row. Pick them up in order. Bind them tight.

The next day, you come into your writing space, you go into your trance, you flip those eight cards. You're reading your book. You lay them out again, upper left-hand corner of your table. Now you're looking for the next scene in your cards, and so forth.

Now, there are a couple of ways to go here. Let me deal first with the possibility that you're going to go all the way through to the end of the book, arranging your cards, plotting your whole novel this way. I did that with Countrymen of Bones (and in the process my two hundred cards resolved themselves into ninety-two).

What happens as you move along, in your trance, picking up your cards one after the other? Say you get to card number 22—scene number 22—and when you choose the next scene out of the remaining 178, you realize there's a hiatus.

There's a gap in the action between 22 and the next card. Now you can dream up some scenes to fill the gap. Go back into your trance and dream two or three cards in there. At some point you're going to find yourself dreaming, on cue, scenes that you didn't get to the first time, filling gaps. You'll also find that a lot of scenes you have dreamed aren't going to make it into the final structure of the novel. And you'll find that the contradictions become reconciled as the structure takes shape and you find your way through to the end. If you're arranging your cards in this extreme way, all the way to the end of the book, number the cards, one to however many represents the whole structure.

During the brainstorming phase, do not give any consideration whatsoever to continuity. Embrace the seeming randomness. If you are tapping into your unconscious and moving around a legitimate character with legitimate yearning, it's hard to say what your unconscious is already perceiving and contextualizing. Once you finish the dreamstorming — weeks — then you try to bring order to that randomness. However, you're simply looking for continuity from one scene to the next. You are looking for the through-line among all those disparate parts. The nature of transition is totally unconsidered. There are so many potential moments and so many possibilities of scene in this book that the only way to explore them fully without willing them into a structure is to let them happen at their own seemingly random pace. Then, only after that, your job is indeed to see the sequence that makes narrative sense of the disparate pieces.

Let me digress for a moment on the subject of research. I always record the books I read on index cards. I'm looking for different things than people look for in academic research, and my cards usually represent a personal index of sense details. Sense details, scenes, images you find in your research you can record on your cards and plug them into the sequence as you arrange. For example, Countrymen of Bones was set in the Alamogordo desert during the building of the first atomic bomb. This book took some historical research, as well as reading in nuclear physics and archeology, and the cards allowed me to indicate briefly certain things I might need to know for certain scenes. For example, one of my main characters worked on the bomb, and his job was to lead the team trying to craft the lens in exactly the right shape to hold in the explosion. I didn't have to know everything about the bomb; as soon as I read about the team working on that lens, I said, "That's Lloyd." So I did a lot of indexing of that particular job, the cloud chamber where they tracked the beta particles as they flew off the explosion, the photographs they took of the smoke in the chamber, the track of the beta particle as it poops out. Such details were suggested by scenes in my brainstorming, and some suggested scenes. (For example, Lloyd rearranges a table of cloud chamber photos in a scene.) When you record such details, on your card are just six or eight words, a sense detail, an indicator of scene, or maybe a reference to a book where you can fill in a historical or professional detail. The juice is not written out of these scenes because you've made sure you didn't start writing the description or the dialogue; you just put down the bare indicator and then you went on.

When your cards are arranged, you take the first card and you start writing the novel. Here's the first scene. And it's ready for your unconscious because all you have here is eight words, a sense impression to call up that scene. You go into your trance and you write that scene, and now the second scene comes up, and you write that scene, and then you write the third card, and — guess what happens in the third scene. Something you didn't expect. You don't even know where it came from, because it's coming from your unconscious. Great. That leads you to a fourth scene and a fifth scene you didn't expect. Great.

But now you feel that the story has to be drawn back into the main thrust of everything yet to come. Now that you've got an unexpected third, fourth, and fifth scene, you go back and look at the fourth card, and it doesn't fit quite the way it did at first. Wait a minute, this changes some things. In fact, you must go back and look at all the cards, numbers 4 to 92 (or however many you have). What do you do now? The next day you go into your trance and lay out cards 4 to 92 and rearrange them. In essence, you rewrite your book structurally.

I personally write from beginning to end of a book. I don't want to be dogmatic about this, because I'm sure a particular artist may do it some other way. But it's hard for me to imagine writing very much out of sequence, because sequence is crucial in a narrative. If everything is organic in a work of art, and I skip six or eight or ten scenes to write this scene that feels hot to me right now, how do I make decisions about character, voice, image, event in that scene? And there are crucial matters of motif, of recomposition, that I will soon speak of, which are impossible to manage by skipping ahead out of context. In a contextual vacuum, you make decisions that are at best tentative. And why are you doing that? I think oftentimes the impulse is to avert your eyes: that's the scene I can do safely; the scene that is not really going to challenge me; that's a good scene to unite today.

So I would say it probably doesn't work to "write around" in a novel. Structure happens from the imperatives of the whole object you're creating. When you are driven by the desire for the organic wholeness of the object, and by the need to recompose the elements that are already in the work, and by the dynamics of your character's desire, structure will inevitably come from that.

Yet this system, if it's going to work for you, has to be totally flexible. The fact that you've got ninety-two cards in a row doesn't mean that you're going to write those ninety-two cards out one after the other and think you've got a book. No, you're rewriting and rewriting and rewriting, over and over, not on the level of phrases and paragraphs, but on the level of structure. There's a lot of rewriting going on here, but it's not in drafts, it's in following those instinctive, from-the-hot-spot surprising things, and then restructuring everything to come as a result. It's got to stay flexible, and it's got to stay from the trance, or you will pull the trigger on the shotgun and blow off the back of your novel.

It's also possible to use this system in a more limited, but still more flexible way. In They Whisper, my seventh novel, for instance, I was dealing with a very complex structure driven by the flow of delicate emotional associations. No way in hell I could anticipate what the sequence was going to be. But I dreamstormed two hundred cards, and then all I did was look for eight cards that might be near the beginning, and I strung them out and rearranged and rearranged them. Then I wrote those scenes. Once they were exhausted, I went and got six or eight more cards, and so forth. The useful thing was that the possibilities already indicated on the cards helped to guide and structure my unconscious, which was improvising the form as it went.

I've never used the cards the same way twice — maybe they operate for me like a tarot deck. But this is fundamental: keep it open, fluid; realize that nothing you do here is locked in, it's got to stay subordinate to the trance state in order to work.

The advantage I see of this system over multiple drafts is that in the big sprawling rough draft, no matter how open-minded the writer is, she has to make approximations in the first draft, then she must make approximations in the second, and more in the third, adding more rough, headlong stuff in the fourth. If the book is at all complex, the draft writer will hit forks in the road, over and over, and must choose this fork instead of that. If that happens early in the book, or even in the middle, by the time she gets to the end and the novel is sprawling in whatever way it sprawls, it's very difficult to go back and take the other fork she faced on page 30. With this system, all the forks are fine — you follow this one, you follow that one; you go down this fork in the sixth week of dream-storming; in the tenth week, you go down that one, as far as you want to go — because at each point you are rewriting and redreaming the book on the level of structure.

For me, it feels as if this system gives the writer something that she loses doing the draft. But, ultimately you've got to get into your own personal white-hot center and get rid of anything in your process that interferes with that. If it means getting rid of draft writing, you get rid of it; if it means getting rid of dreamstorming, you get rid of that.

If you dreamstorm a short story, you have to understand that the working parts of short stories are not scenes, because most short stories don't have more than a handful of scenes. The working parts are of various sizes and shapes, perhaps a scene but also maybe an image, a fast-forward, a detail, a beat of dialogue. The lift of an eyebrow and Joe rapes Anna—each of those could be working pieces in the dreamstorming of a short story. Having five cards to represent a structure is not much use to you. You almost have to be a draft writer for short stories.

Still, if you dreamstorm all those various elements, you might try this, which I've done sometimes: you take a legal pad and — maybe there are only three scenes in the story — put your indicator phrase of one at the top, one in the middle, and one toward the bottom. Then all the other elements you've dreamstormed for the story you might plug in under what scenes they may visit. It feels awkward to me, but I came late to writing short stories, after I'd been in my unconscious for a decade and written half a dozen novels from there. But I have talked to writers who have found the card system useful for short stories. It works particularly well for the rare sort of story that covers a long period of time or has a large number of scenes. I've also heard from writers for whom the system gives them impetus in their work; they know better where they're going, what sense details juice their scenes.

Now, how do you make all the pieces fit together? How does something so irrational, so composed of minute details, so thoroughly rooted in the moment-to-moment sense — how does such an object cohere? How does a vision of the human condition emerge from such a thing?

I've already mentioned my premise: that the literary art object is organic and emerges because every sensual detail interlocks with and resonates with every other detail. Everything circles back on itself. The deep patterning of the sensual details mirrors that deep, most patterned level of sense detail in the world. In music it's called motif, and we borrow that term for literature. Things return and return. The associative values of these returning things evolve and interconnect. As a reader you recognize the presence of motif, and as a writer, you create meaning in this way.

At the beginning of the twentieth century acting was understood to be an art form in which an actor intellectually, consciously, willfully — often quite brilliantly, but willfully— took on the gestures, postures, facial expressions, and tone of voice of the character. Then Konstantin Stanislavsky came along to the Moscow Art Theatre and reimagined this art form. He said: No, you do not consciously, analytically put on a performance; that's not where performance comes from. Instead, the actor brings her own internal sense memory, her own sensory mechanism, into internal alignment with the sensory mechanism of the character. Once that has been accomplished, the external performance results. He said: Craft and technique are necessary, but they are secondary. They are downstream from where the performance begins, which is inside you. Inside you. This is what came to be called "method acting." It is at the heart of every good performance you see on the television, on the movie screen, on the stage today. Indeed, what I've been talking about with you all along could quite accurately be termed "method writing." It's based on many of the same insights.

There's a teacher named Keith Johnstone, who writes on improvisation and on a process he calls reincorporating. People who do improvisation work with disparate elements, some of which may come to them from the audience. Johnstone says the improvising actor is like a man walking backward. He's going forward, but he's doing so constantly with reference to where he's been. The improviser makes progress only by looking back and reincorporating the things that are already present in the narrative.

In a work of fiction those initial disparate, instinctive things come out of your dreamspace. But in writing as in improv — I promise you it's parallel — you cannot move forward narratively by transferring those elements onto your computer screen and saying, "OK, what's next?" Let's go back to Graham Greene and think about the decomposition of your life, that compost heap where all of your experiences have decomposed. Now you wish to compose a work of art. Your unconscious yields up things in an ongoing way, and as a narrator you're looking back always to what's already there. You move forward in a narrative by recomposing, reincorporating the things that are already at work in the story. What you end up with then are the interlocking elements, the return of elements, the motifs that bind everything in the work sensually together. When you do that, a gestalt emerges, a sum that is much greater than those parts. And the work thrums. The thrumming has to do with the interlocking of various tones and sounds and movements of the air.

I want to give you an example. Forgive me, I'm going to go into some detail about that novel, Countrymen of Bones— a novel you've almost certainly not read — largely because I have trouble remembering anything else. Did I mention Graham Greene?

Countrymen of Bones, as I said, is set in 1945, mostly in the Alamogordo desert. It's told as a third person narrative with two main point-of-view characters — that is, the narrator has access to two sensibilities. One of them is Darryl Reeves, an archeologist, who has found an Indian burial mound out in the middle of the desert. The mound dates from the seventeenth century, though the desert Indians of the seventeenth century were nomads. So this Indian tribe had to come from the Midwest where the mound builders were. What is it doing here? It's a great archeological find.

Darryl has two grad students working with him, trying to uncover this Indian burial site, and as the book opens they've just cleared the mound away and are about to go into the tableau below the surface of the ground. There are B-29S doing practice bombing nearby, but most important, a thousand yards down the desert south of them, the first atomic bomb is being assembled. The first test is going to happen in fourteen weeks.

The second major character is Lloyd Coulter, a nuclear physicist working on the bomb with J. Robert Oppenheimer, who's a minor character in the book. What we have are two men of the mind, Darryl and Lloyd, scientists who pride themselves on their rationality but who yearn for connection because they are very much disconnected from the world.

I'm going to talk in secondary, artificial ways about this book now, not in the way the book is meant to be encountered.

Each of the men is reining in a potential for violence. Lloyd, particularly, saw his father beat his mother, badly, over and over, and that knowledge roils deep inside him. Darryl seems at first not to have a potential for violence; his problem is disconnectedness, and the devastating loss of a wife who left him several years before.

There's a third major character — not a point-of-view character — Anna Brown, in the Women's Army Corps. She's awakening to her independence, as many women did during the war. Lloyd has encountered her in the supply house of Los Alamos, and he greatly desires her. He arranges for her to be transferred down to the bomb site to work for him. At some point, Darryl also meets Anna and also falls for her. Oppenheimer, sympathetic to the young archaeologist, loans Anna Brown to the excavation site, so an intense jealous rivalry springs up between Lloyd and Darryl.

On one site, then, the atom bomb is being created. On the other, that tableau being uncovered from the earth reveals an Indian king laid out on a cape of twenty thousand polished shell beads — meaning he was a great power. Darryl finds one, then another, and finally a third body within the sacred circle, all three of quite young women whose necks have been broken. It's clear they were ritually murdered to accompany the king to the afterlife.

When the army took over the Alamogordo desert, they put some ranchers off their property. At the very opening of the novel, in addition to the bombs on the horizon, you hear gunfire off to the east because one of those ranchers is holed up there, conducting a kind of guerrilla warfare in rage at having been forced off his ranch.

The book, in its large patterns, is already about violence, is it not? That theme is tapped again when Darryl goes back to Santa Fe and meets a professor who had joined the army, had his back and leg shot off, and who brings rumors of the Holocaust going on in Europe. Political violence echoes the personal violence building between the two men.

In its pattern of small details, also, the book returns to and recomposes its motifs.

Look at their occupations. Darryl is an archeologist opening up the earth. When he thinks of the wife who left him, from whom he was aloof, he understands her only by looking at the things she has left on her dresser: a hair brush, a mirror, objects he examines as if they were pieces of an ancient excavation.

He's awkward with Anna, but when he uncovers the first skeleton of a murdered woman (the sexing of a skeleton is a matter of feeling the pelvis; certain parts of the pelvis gape open farther in a woman), this is an intensely erotic scene. The young woman's presence in his consciousness is very strong.

On the second page of the book, he pauses and wipes his brow. He looks at the trowel in his hand, his primary tool for uncovering the past, and he notes that the blade is as strong and as flexible "as a Toledo sword." Toledo, Spain, was a great sword-making center at the time that these Indians he's uncovering flourished.

Well into the book, 158 pages into it, one of the ranchers who has been displaced by the government comes and takes Darryl and his two grad assistants hostage. The army has the place surrounded. The rancher threatens to kill his hostages. At some point, the young woman starts to weep, which angers the rancher, and he moves his rifle as if to kill her. Darryl is appalled, but what can he do? The rancher doesn't kill her, but a few moments later, to show he means business, he turns and fires his gun, and what he chooses for a target is the skull of one of the young women. The skull shatters. This is what makes Darryl act and exposes the pattern of his psychology. Lying there unnoticed in the dirt is the trowel that was introduced a hundred pages earlier in what metaphor? The Toledo sword. That's what he uses to kill the rancher. He is capable of killing a man, and he does it with what is the very symbol of his humane science but which was introduced with a metaphor of violence.

Lloyd will eventually come to rape Anna Brown. But let me tell you first about that atomic bomb and Lloyd's work. The first atom bomb was a fusion device, which means that in the middle of the bomb is a bit of fissionable plutonium to start the chain reaction. Around it are packed conventional explosives, and then surrounding all of that a lens (and it requires a very precise development to get it just the right shape). When the explosives are set off, the shock wave travels outward, but instead of dispersing outward, it hits the lens and is redirected with exponentially greater force into the center — that is, into the plutonium. And that force is sufficient to start the chain reaction.

Early in the book, Lloyd meditates on the bomb he is creating, and how in his own mind does he see this fusion process? He says, "The plutonium waits in the center of the bomb like a bride."

Well, the fusion process is exactly the process of Lloyd's psychology. He's a man of the mind, rigorously so. He keeps the explosive potential of his violence within him. He proposes to Anna — he wants to make her his bride—and she turns him down pretty sharply. It's the way he shuts in — ignores— his explosive rage that eventually leads him to rape her. The rape scene, which is very near the end of the book, though it is an in-the-moment, through-the-senses scene, is also a precise metaphor for the bomb Lloyd has created. It waits in the center like a bride.

You understand what I'm saying now, in this artificial way, with regard to this one novel, about the sensual patterning of details. The bomb, the fusion process, the abusive father, the trowel, the sword, the bride, the ancient murders, the hostage-taking rancher, the rape, the Holocaust, the uncovering of the past, and the containing of violence: event echoes detail, sensual moment becomes metaphor, returning, recomposing, and reincorporating toward the phenomena of resonance and motif.