Dreamstorming

Yesterday, during my little artist date, I made a serendipitous find—a book on novel writing that I’d never read before. It’s called From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction, and the author, Robert Owen Butler, is a Pulitzer Prize-winner who advocates a unique way of approaching the novel.

I have this mysterious ability to open up a new book to the exact page I need to read, and that is exactly what happened yesterday. Right there, in the library, I cracked open the book to the following paragraph:

Let me describe two kinds of novelists. First there are those that preplan. They outline. They know the end before they begin. [...] Then there’s the draft writer, who leads an admirably dismal existence. [...] 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. [...] So the draft writer feels the necessity of taking the merest hints to start the novel and then plunging in…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….” —From Where You Dream, p. 86.

Up to now, I have always been a draft writer (see my earlier entry on Polishing). Each of my two detective novels went through 10 drafts before I considered them finished. Now, mind you, only the first five drafts are substantially different from each other; it’s in those early stages that you rethink structural issues, and a lot of scenes that seemed perfect in the beginning don’t make the subsequent cuts. But 10 drafts is still a hell of a lot of work, because regardless how much gets changed from one draft to the next, each one still represents one complete cycle through the book.

As I stated at the beginning of this month when I outlined my writing experiment, my biggest problem with novel-writing has been the GRIND of doing draft after draft. Over and over, while rewriting, I found myself mumbling, “There has to be an easier way.”

Well, there just might be.

On the very next page of Butler’s revelatory book, he discusses an alternative approach to writing the novel. Instead of the outline or draft methods,

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’re going to do. Instead, you’re going to do what I call dreamstorming—not brainstorming, dreamstorming. [...] 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’ll have a [legal pad] in front of you; 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…with some sensual, concrete hook…some sort of sense impression attached to it.

Butler goes on to describe the rest of the process. Basically, at the end of the 6-12 week period of this “dreamstorming,” you, the novelist, write all of these potential scenes onto notecards. At this point, you begin thinking about continuity and organization, but not before.

I realize that to a person who has never written a novel before, all of this talk about lists and sensual impressions, etc. must be pretty dull. But the reason I mention it is that, for someone who has labored through the GRIND of draft after draft after draft after draft after draft after draft after draft after draft after draft after draft (10!), the idea of being able to work out a lot of these structural kinks using the “movie” in one’s mind is very attractive.

Why go through the physical work of typing page after page (many of which may not make the final cut) when you can “read” your book over and over, invent new scenes, move scenes around, and add or eliminate characters before typing word one?

It’s precisely the GRIND that burns me out with novel-writing, which is why, for my next novel project, I’m going to use Butler’s method. So, instead of writing a new “something” today, I’m going to go lie on my bed with a legal pad and record the scenes that occur to me.