Will I love From Where You Dream?

Dedicated to two essentials that make me jump up and salute: how to write by getting in touch with your unconscious and an amazing way to outline. That's all. Two ideas. But they're two of the most important concepts to master to become a writer who gets paid. 

This book excites me because I know how much aspiring writers need it. From the year I first read it until I left university teaching, I required it in every writing class in my department. If, for decades I made students read it, you can bet I'm delighted for you to put… show more.

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.