Butler on an arduous bus ride<\/p>\n
Evi Mariani, The Jakarta Post\/Jakarta<\/p>\n
On his visit to Indonesia this week, Pulitzer-prize-winning
\nauthor Robert Olen Butler, 60, kept his face pressed to the
\nwindow of a Bandung-Lampung bus, eagerly watching the landscape
\nalong the way.<\/p>\n
\"I'm delighted to be in Indonesia, as this is a wonderful
\ncountry though I sort of complained about ... Ah, no, I won't say
\nthat,\" Butler said, smiling.<\/p>\n
He eventually conceded he found the journey, which usually
\ntakes nine to 10 hours, uncomfortable, and had taken in the view
\nto keep his mind from his discomfort.<\/p>\n
\"I had a lovely time,\" said Butler, who was visiting Bandung,
\nLampung and Jakarta as part of the Literary Biennale organized by
\nTeater Utan Kayu.<\/p>\n
With more than a dozen works of fiction under his belt,
\nButler's work shows he is no stranger to roughing it, however,
\nand he enjoys experiences that take him out of his comfort zone.<\/p>\n
During the Vietnam War in 1969, Butler says he spent an
\ninspiring year in Vietnam, not in the battle fields, but in the
\nback alleys of Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) as a kind of spy.<\/p>\n
A member of the Army Military Intelligence, wearing civilian
\nattire he regularly walked around the city at nights, talking to
\npeople from all walks of life.<\/p>\n
His job made him a fluent speaker of Vietnamese and gave him
\nan ample opportunity to immerse himself in the world of Saigon's
\npeople and its culture.<\/p>\n
In one non-fiction article titled Saigon -- written after he
\nrevisited the city in 1995 -- he explained Saigon's hectic
\ntraffic in a way few people could.<\/p>\n
\"To cross the streets of Ho Chi Minh City you look to the far
\nside of the street and set your goal. Then you look to your left,
\nand at the slightest opening you step into the flow of traffic...
\nThe traffic rushing at you will never stop, will never slow down.
\nBut the vehicle that is about to strike you at any given moment
\nwill, at the last second, veer to the right or left, without
\nlooking ... And so you move slowly to your goal and the traffic
\nwill endlessly rush and veer and ripple and rejoin,\" he wrote for
\nConde Nast Traveler.<\/p>\n
\"The flexibility, the patience, the pragmatism of the
\nVietnamese people are entirely manifest in this process.\"<\/p>\n
Butler also has the gift of telling engrossing stories about
\neveryday people, their feelings and their desires.<\/p>\n
Writing fiction, he said, was a work of art; it did not come
\nfrom ideas but more from one's unconscious.<\/p>\n
\"I write every day for at least two hours. Fiction writers
\nhave to write every day. You cannot write this weekend and not
\nnext week,\" said Butler, who lectures in the creative writing
\nclass at McNeese State University in Louisiana and has published
\na non-fiction book about writing, From Where You Dream: The
\nProcess of Writing Fiction.<\/p>\n
\"I write in commuter trains, in airplanes, in hotels, I write
\nwherever I am,\" he said.<\/p>\n
\"You have to discipline yourself. I don't write from the mind
\nnot from the head or ideas. Artists write from their dreams, from
\ntheir unconscious. And it's a very scary place,\" he said.<\/p>\n
\"But you have to go in there every day. But if you go in every
\nday, the way in stays open. But if you go out even for a few
\ndays, when you go back the path will close itself off and it will
\nbe very difficult to restart,\" Butler said.<\/p>\n
Artists did not choose their calling, their works of art chose
\nthem, the way writing chose him more than 30 years ago, he said.<\/p>\n
\"Before Vietnam I wanted to be a playwright. But it wasn't my
\nmedium. It didn't really work, I was a terrible playwright.\"<\/p>\n
Butler realized he was a fiction writer after his Vietnam
\nexperience. Now living with \"the best writer in our house\"
\nnovelist Elizabeth Dewberry, he believes his first \"really good
\nbook\" was his novel Alleys of Eden, written in 1979 and published
\nin 1981.<\/p>\n
But the work that won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1993, however,
\nwas his 1992 collection of short stories about exiled Vietnamese
\nliving in Louisiana, A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain.<\/p>\n
\"I didn't start writing good fiction right away. I had to
\nfigure out what I was doing, I wrote a lot of bad fiction which I
\nnever published,\" he said.<\/p>\n
\"They're in the attic,\" he said, laughing.<\/p>\n
Did he ever write anything bad again?<\/p>\n
\"No. I don't think so,\" he says.<\/p>\n
\"I recognize it if I'm not writing well on a given day and
\nthat's what the delete button is for.\"<\/p>\n
\"We write badly all the time, you just recognize it and fix
\nit.\"<\/p>\n
In beginning when becoming a writer, he said he recognized it
\nif what he wrote was bad but, \"I didn't realize how bad it was.\"<\/p>\n
His wife -- whom he proposed to after only one 24-hour
\nencounter -- never read his \"bad fiction\", he said. Nevertheless,
\nhe would never burn the work.<\/p>\n
\"In a way, it shows how I have developed,\" and could be of
\ninterest to scholars who were looking at how people became
\nwriters, he said.<\/p>\n
As a writer, he said, even in the U.S., where books had become
\na primary need for many, life was not easy.<\/p>\n
Butler said that most writers in the U.S. had other jobs, some
\ntimes as university lecturers.<\/p>\n
For the past 12 years, he had also written screenplays for
\nHollywood movies, which was a job that earned good money.<\/p>\n
\"Before the Pulitzer I could not make enough money from
\nwriting fiction. Because I do not write commercial books. I'm not
\nDan Brown, John Grisham.\"<\/p>\n
After the Pulitzer, he said, finance-wise life was a lot
\neasier but he had also encountered some difficult times.<\/p>\n
\"I have never tried to earn a full living as a literary
\nwriter.\"<\/p>\n
\"Just from the fiction, it would be very difficult. And poets,
\nforget it...\"<\/p>",
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