From Where You Dream (5 page)

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.

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.