From Where You Dream

Robert Olen Butler

A couple reviews of my debut novel, Behold the Bird in Flight:

• Terri Lewis offers readers more than a captivating story. She offers a re-encounter with the past—a way to see, feel, and recognize ourselves in lives once thought foreign. —Terry Shepherd blog

• “A believable heroine immersed in a believably detailed world.” —The Rocky Mountain Reader Briefly Noted

I credit these reviews to Robert Olen Butler. Before encountering his writing, I’d studied craft, determined to improve my own writing. Bird by Bird made me laugh and gave me two thoughts: “shitty first drafts” and never give up. I tried Save the Cat. At workshops, I heard about Freytag’s Pyramid and Three Act Structures. I understood the advice but felt constrained. Blocked. Nothing clicked.

Finally I found From Where You Dream. It opened with the usual caveats—this hard but it’s important—then: “Your total attention needs to be on the sensual flow of experience from the unconscious.”

What?!

“Your ambition as an artist is to give voice to the deep, inchoate vision of the world that resides dynamically in your unconscious.”

CLICK.

As a professional dancer, I knew that after mastering technique, my best performances came when I danced unconsciously, inside the music. I needed to write that way, but inside the story.

The book detailed practical methods and opened a whole other path to writing that suited me. I stayed grounded in his ideas as I wrestled with more pedantic parts of my craft and I’m immensely grateful to him

I’ll finish with a little brag of four short reviews that make me feel I’m using what I’ve learned.

• “I also really enjoyed the author’s descriptions of the clothing and setting. I felt like I was right there, but I was glad I wasn’t.” —misswbookreviews on Instagram

• “Masterfully blurred the lines of fact and fiction to create a riveting tale of power, heartthrob, heart-ache, and self discovery.” —readingonthebrink on Instagram

• “The descriptive passages evoke a real feel of life in the thirteenth century with all its pitfalls, superstitions and omens of ill-fortune.” —Stace on Goodreads

• “The novel really showed how hard life was from a very human point of view. The people were so real.” —William R Warner Jr on Goodreads

  

  To find out more, come on over to my website, TerriLewis1.com.