Robert Olen Butler, On Becoming a Fiction Writer

00:08 [Robert Olen Butler] Well, the early writing experiences -- my mother tells a tale of when I was two or less, talking incessantly at night after she's put me in the crib, and she would go in and she would ask what I'm doing, and I would say that I'm pulling a movie out of the wall.

00:30 So, in a sense that's writing, in effect, a very real sense because I think the essence of good writing is to be able to speak to the page or to speak to the computer terminal in a very personal kind of voice. So the verbalizing of narrative, which was going on there in this very early moment, I think,

01:00 was the beginnings of writing, though I didn't follow it on the page for a long time. My early ambitions were to be an actor. In fact, when I was in high school and went off to Northwestern University in 1963, my ambition was to be an actor and I did that for a couple of years.

01:30 And at some point, I was not completely satisfied with the interpretive art form and decided I wanted to write. And so I started writing plays and went off, then, and got a master's degree at The University of Iowa in playwriting. And I was a dreadful playwright, just terrible, because in fact I was a nascent fiction writer working in entirely the wrong medium. Ultimately, you do not choose

02:00 your medium, your medium chooses you. And for me, the way I saw the world, the thing that really drove me to write, the way I was putting the world together in some intuitive way that required the process of writing in order to -- not only to express that vision but to even explore it, to understand what it is, which is the artistic process. Whatever was driving me was not suited for

02:30 the playwriting medium, and I should have known because the dozen full length plays that I finally wrote, got a master's degree for one of them, and went on to write plays for a couple of more years after that, my most impassioned writing was going into the stage directions. Now, this is a bad sign for a playwright. That should have been an indicator to me. Every art object is sensual,

03:00 exists moment to moment through the senses. That's why art exists as modes of discourse that are separate from any other. And the moment to moment sensual reality of the play as an art object is not the province of a playwright, it's the province of the actors and the director and the production designers. The playwright is responsible for two things only: structure and, to a lesser extent,

03:30 dialogue. And the playwright must let go of the moment to moment sensual fullness of the art object. It is not his or her responsibility. But if you can't let go of that, you will write bad plays. The good playwright writes fruitful blank spaces into the script.