Text: Solveig Hansen, 2016

Watch a story come alive — live.

Creative writing professor Robert Olen Butler took “show, don’t tell” to a new level in 2001, when he wrote a 4000+ word story — This is Earl Sandt — from conception to final draft, live on camera over 17 two-hour webcast sessions. Viewers could watch, in his words, “every comma stroke, every lousy, rotten, awkward sentence, every blind alley, every bad metaphor.” At the end of each session, he answered questions from the audience.

The story was inspired by a 1913 photo postcard of aviation pioneer Earl Sandt. In the photo, the right wing of the biplane appears to be tearing away. On the back, a handwritten message reads: “This is Earl Sandt of Erie Pa in his Aeroplane just before it fell.”

Butler chose to tell the story from the first-person perspective of the photographer and decided early on that the aviator would die in the crash. In reality, Earl Sandt survived the initial crash but later died in the hospital.

You may or may not agree with Butler’s philosophy of art, but the 34-hour journey is more illuminating than many traditional writing workshops. It’s captivating to watch the story take shape, from the very first sentence — “I’ve seen a man die, but not like this” — to the final reading, a performance in itself.

Butler doesn’t write in drafts. He edits as he writes, constantly rereading, pausing to look up words in the dictionary — all while Puccini’s Turandot plays in the background, with Nessun dorma looping during key moments. He uses period-accurate language like “aeroplane” and avoids anachronisms like “shimmy,” which wasn’t used in 1913..

“To achieve true meaning from your work, and connect emotionally with a reader, you have to write what you feel, not what you think,” Butler writes in From Where You Dream: The Process of Writing Fiction (2005). He describes his method using terms like “dreamstorm” instead of “brainstorm,” and emphasizes tapping into the “white hot center” — the emotional present where true art is born. “Art does not come from the mind. Art comes from the place where we dream.” His goal is to create an organic whole, where every part of the story resonates with the rest.

And if it’s not art? “Nonart, genre writing, entertainment writing,” he says, “is typically filled with abstraction, generalization, summary, analysis, and interpretation.”

One key concept Butler teaches is yearning — the deep, often unspoken longing of a character. As he writes:

“The difference between the desires expressed in entertainment fiction and literary fiction is only a difference of level. Instead of: I want a man, a woman, wealth, power, or to solve a mystery or to drive a stake through a vampire’s heart, a literary desire is on the order of: I yearn for self, I yearn for an identity, I yearn for a place in the universe, I yearn to connect to the other.”

In This Is Earl Sandt, the narrator yearns to understand his own mortality. Having never seen an aeroplane before, he’s shaken by the crash and disoriented by the new, modern world it represents. He begins to identify with the fallen barnstormer in a deeply existential way.

After watching all 34 hours, here’s what I took with me:

• Discipline: Writing requires daily commitment.
• Flexibility: Everything in the story must be negotiable. If you cling too tightly to a fixed idea or ending, you risk losing the organic flow.

This is Earl Sandt appears in Had a Good Time: Stories from American Postcards (2004).

Watch the webcast series, Inside Creative Writing, on YouTube:

Image: Rayi Christian Wicaksono/Unsplash