Yearning and an Impetus for Art

Fiction and nonfiction writers frequently push the boundaries of creativity, even those set by Pulitzer Prize-winning writers like Robert Olen Butler, author of From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction. Yet, Butler offers practical methods for going from craft to art, especially with the oft-missing element of yearning.

Some form of desire exists in most stories, real and imagined. But depictions of what a person or character desires often fall short because they’re rendered through unartistic forms, such as abstractions, analyses, generalizations, interpretations and summaries. These have their place in writing, but not so much in storytelling, where there are better ways to go from heart to art.

Yearning, per se, isn’t story, but it often drives story, or good stories anyway. When readers are invited inside a character, they start caring about what that person wants and whether she’ll get it. And the deeper the yearning (more in type than intensity) the more artful the story and the higher the stakes. So how does a story reach these goals?

Butler offers the example of James Joyce, who used "epiphany" to refer to the moment in a story when its essence appears. Butler suggests that stories actually have two epiphanies—one at the climax (the type of epiphany Joyce referred to) and one that should happen near the story’s start. Cluing the reader in to what the main subject of the work yearns for adds interest and momentum. And it can raise the stakes. Given these realities, here are two considerations:

• A person may yearn for one thing at the start of a story or novel and find out by the end that he has grown enough to want more; whether or not he gets it is another aspect of the story. The reverse may also be true.
• A character may start with specific desires, peruse them and get exactly what she wants. There is also the possibility of desire within desire, similar to what in journalism is called the "real story." So what a person may seem to want or thinks she wants isn’t what she really wants, and her journey of realization becomes part of the storyline.

Both of these considerations involve discovery and generate natural opportunities for conflict, the lifeblood of story, real or imagined. And the stronger the yearning, and the tougher the obstacles, the more tension and conflict.

One way to raise the stakes in a story and the level of writing is to reveal and explore a person’s intangible longings—for example, for respect, a sense of self as distinct from others, for recognition, permanence or legacy, a place in the world or in the heart of someone else.

Examining these deeper desires in a book or novel opens the door to artful writing. For this, Butler advocates tilling the soil of the writer's imagination and past experience. This allows events, turning points and discoveries—as well as imaginings—to emerge from the compost of memory or from sheer imagination into the light of day before they’re dismissed by the writer's internal editor or shaped by craft before they’re fully realized.

This is where Butler's “dreamstorming” technique comes into play. Here, Butler suggests that writers find a writing space away from distractions and let their minds wander within the context of the story. Instead of immediately stopping to write what emerges, Butler recommends that writers keep pen and paper handy and only jot down a word or phrase to describe what comes to mind so as not to stem the flow of what they’re remembering or imagining.

Later, writers can amplify their notes and recollections into scenes without worrying about what each scene means to the overall work. These revelations usually come in draft two anyway. This is where the writer sees a character's real yearning and can portray it more artfully because the writer’s vision of who the person is and what she wants is clearer. "The point of revision is to find meaning," Butler notes.

Revision also enables writers to recognize and remove the vagaries of abstraction and generalizations, as well as those enemies of story—analyses, interpretations and summaries—in favor letting the people in the story reveal who they are and what they really want, whether they get it all or not.

Happy writing!