Robert Olen Butler, On Reading Literature as a Writer

00:08 [Robert Olen Butler] I think every good writer must inevitably go through a period, an extended period, Ten, Twelve, Fifteen years even, of ravenous reading. And certainly I went through a period of that. I absorbed

00:30 all kinds of voices at that point, absorbed them in the way you absorb life, that is, it's the things that you forget, bits and pieces of usage and so forth that are present in other writers' voices. You recognize as fitting the voice that you naturally

01:00 have yourself. And maybe years later it comes out naturally from you. Was it Hemingway's or is it yours? You can't trace those effects anymore. It's the way -- no one is an autodidact in language. People have taught us the language. So I went through that period of ravenous reading, and I absorbed it

01:30 with intense sensual wonder. When there were words used that I didn't understand certainly I would look them up. A dictionary more than I use the Webster's dictionary is the Oxford-Duden Pictorial English dictionary, which has hundreds of line drawings of places and settings. And if you have in your sensual memory

02:00 a rotted out pier stretching into the Hudson River and a character moves through that sensual world and sits on the kind of sort of stocky, bulbous thing that sticks up out of the pier that you put a rope around to secure a ship, you can't say "He sat down on the stocky, bulbous thing that..." So you go to the Oxford-Duden

Pictorial English dictionary and you look up

02:30 the line drawing of the wharf, and you see that there is this thing out there and it's got a little number and you go down and find it's called a bollard. I still acquire words like that. Those were the words that were particularly interesting to me in the ravenous reading period as well. I think for an aspiring artist

03:00 for whom it is the right time, the person has done enough intense living in the real world, has ravenously taken in not only books and must have done that -- as I say, has to have gone through a period of ravenous reading -- but ravenously taken in the sensual experience of, as wide an experience of life directly as you can, and it's time to go off and make a space for yourself and become a writer,

03:30 I think at that point the writer must drastically cut back her reading. Because as the great Japanese film director, Akira Kurasawa once said, to be an artist means never to avert your eyes. And this is the thing I have the most trouble and is the most important to teach young writers.

04:00 Because a work of art does not come from the head, does not come from the mind or the will, it comes from the dream space, from the unconscious. The first thing a young writer must have and must find in herself is courage, is the courage to go into a space in herself that is extremely scary, very frightening, wildly out of control, and do it

04:30 without flinching, without averting the eyes. And to focus your gifts of language to the expression of that roiling, weltering, sensual content of that deep dream space, and to bring that up into the public eye. That is the most difficult thing for any artist, and it remains so every day. And that's the thing that you must do.

05:00 And that's the first thing I have to try to teach my young writers because you cannot be an artist otherwise. So there are lots of ways in which the part of you that is afraid of your unconscious will try to keep you out of it. It's time to write, you sit there in front of your computer, and some part of you says, "Oh, those fingernails

need cutting.

05:30 Do that. The toilets need cleaning. It's only July but let's get our IRS receipts in order today. Anything but this. Anything but this." Another really seductive one is, "Let's go read a good book. Let's hide" -- the voice won't say it in these terms, but the subtext of what the voice is saying is -- "let's hide in the vision of the world and the voice of some other writer

06:00 who has already faced down their demons and we don't have to face down ours today." And that's a danger for a young writer. I believe there's a certain point where you have to be extremely selective and greatly cut back your reading when you wish to become an artist.