From Where You Dream

This book, by Pulitzer prize winner Robert Olen Butler, is in three parts. Transcripts of inspiring lectures are followed by well-edited accounts of individual coaching sessions. These provide very useful nuggets of practical wisdom about unblocking habitual patterns that get in the way of flowing writing practice – habitual patterns that every writer faces and needs to deal with. The stories analysed in the book are found in the final part. An appendix follows, with a story by Butler called ‘Open Arms’, which demonstrates his skill as a writer. A theme that flows through the book is ‘yearning’ – and… show more.

Olen Butler is a Pulitzer-Prize-winning author. His focus on “dreamstorming” and finding the link to your characters’ yearnings as the story’s compass, is for me, a unique, challenging, valuable, and vibrant direction for the work we do as writers.

It also crosses into any artistic endeavor. I’ve highlighted so many passages from this book, from quotes of other artists to Olen Butler’s own perspective.

One is from Claude Debussy, “There is no theory, you have merely to listen.”

And Butler says, “Every other art form is irreducibly sensual. Dancers move, musicians/composers work with sound, painters with color; even abstract art isn’t abstract at… show more.