Butler on an arduous bus ride

Evi Mariani, The Jakarta Post/Jakarta

On his visit to Indonesia this week, Pulitzer-prize-winning author Robert Olen Butler, 60, kept his face pressed to the window of a Bandung-Lampung bus, eagerly watching the landscape along the way.

"I'm delighted to be in Indonesia, as this is a wonderful country though I sort of complained about ... Ah, no, I won't say that," Butler said, smiling.

He eventually conceded he found the journey, which usually takes nine to 10 hours, uncomfortable, and had taken in the view to keep his mind from his discomfort.

"I had a lovely time," said Butler, who was visiting Bandung, Lampung and Jakarta as part of the Literary Biennale organized by Teater Utan Kayu.

With more than a dozen works of fiction under his belt, Butler's work shows he is no stranger to roughing it, however, and he enjoys experiences that take him out of his comfort zone.

During the Vietnam War in 1969, Butler says he spent an inspiring year in Vietnam, not in the battle fields, but in the back alleys of Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) as a kind of spy.

A member of the Army Military Intelligence, wearing civilian attire he regularly walked around the city at nights, talking to people from all walks of life.

His job made him a fluent speaker of Vietnamese and gave him an ample opportunity to immerse himself in the world of Saigon's people and its culture.

In one non-fiction article titled Saigon -- written after he revisited the city in 1995 -- he explained Saigon's hectic traffic in a way few people could.

"To cross the streets of Ho Chi Minh City you look to the far side of the street and set your goal. Then you look to your left, and at the slightest opening you step into the flow of traffic... The traffic rushing at you will never stop, will never slow down. But the vehicle that is about to strike you at any given moment will, at the last second, veer to the right or left, without looking ... And so you move slowly to your goal and the traffic will endlessly rush and veer and ripple and rejoin," he wrote for Conde Nast Traveler.

"The flexibility, the patience, the pragmatism of the Vietnamese people are entirely manifest in this process."

Butler also has the gift of telling engrossing stories about everyday people, their feelings and their desires.

Writing fiction, he said, was a work of art; it did not come from ideas but more from one's unconscious.

"I write every day for at least two hours. Fiction writers have to write every day. You cannot write this weekend and not next week," said Butler, who lectures in the creative writing class at McNeese State University in Louisiana and has published a non-fiction book about writing, From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction.

"I write in commuter trains, in airplanes, in hotels, I write wherever I am," he said.

"You have to discipline yourself. I don't write from the mind not from the head or ideas. Artists write from their dreams, from their unconscious. And it's a very scary place," he said.

"But you have to go in there every day. But if you go in every day, the way in stays open. But if you go out even for a few days, when you go back the path will close itself off and it will be very difficult to restart," Butler said.

Artists did not choose their calling, their works of art chose them, the way writing chose him more than 30 years ago, he said.

"Before Vietnam I wanted to be a playwright. But it wasn't my medium. It didn't really work, I was a terrible playwright."

Butler realized he was a fiction writer after his Vietnam experience. Now living with "the best writer in our house" novelist Elizabeth Dewberry, he believes his first "really good book" was his novel Alleys of Eden, written in 1979 and published in 1981.

But the work that won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1993, however, was his 1992 collection of short stories about exiled Vietnamese living in Louisiana, A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain.

"I didn't start writing good fiction right away. I had to figure out what I was doing, I wrote a lot of bad fiction which I never published," he said.

"They're in the attic," he said, laughing.

Did he ever write anything bad again?

"No. I don't think so," he says.

"I recognize it if I'm not writing well on a given day and that's what the delete button is for."

"We write badly all the time, you just recognize it and fix it."

In beginning when becoming a writer, he said he recognized it if what he wrote was bad but, "I didn't realize how bad it was."

His wife -- whom he proposed to after only one 24-hour encounter -- never read his "bad fiction", he said. Nevertheless, he would never burn the work.

"In a way, it shows how I have developed," and could be of interest to scholars who were looking at how people became writers, he said.

As a writer, he said, even in the U.S., where books had become a primary need for many, life was not easy.

Butler said that most writers in the U.S. had other jobs, some times as university lecturers.

For the past 12 years, he had also written screenplays for Hollywood movies, which was a job that earned good money.

"Before the Pulitzer I could not make enough money from writing fiction. Because I do not write commercial books. I'm not Dan Brown, John Grisham."

After the Pulitzer, he said, finance-wise life was a lot easier but he had also encountered some difficult times.

"I have never tried to earn a full living as a literary writer."

"Just from the fiction, it would be very difficult. And poets, forget it..."