Nick Le Mesurier

I came across the following Q & A on the website for Narrative Magazine It starts with a question directed to Robert Olen Butler, who seems to be a well known American writer (at least in America). You can read the article here. The question asked by a young poet, Lauren Bidden, who responds to Butler's suggestion that writers should write “absolute dreck,” “god-awful novels,” “dreadful short stories” every day." as part of the learning process. An author should not be afraid of "certain failure."

But, she says, if writing is a painful process "that requires that we touch the rawest parts of our memory, sense, and emotion", how can we overcome the inevitable sense of failure that follows from the creation of an unsuccesful work? More exactly,  "When does one revise, and when does one move on?"

Butler's reply echoes Beckett's exhortation, "Try Again. Fail again. Fail better." He says that as a novice he wrote many novels, plays, stories, all of which deserved never to be published. "I’m not speaking of craft and technique. Much of the work was not bad technically. But there was something terribly wrong with my process, as an aspiring artist. I was writing from my head. I was writing from ideas. I was willing the work into being. I was failing to let my work generate itself from my unconscious, from the place where I dream. I relied on the relatively minor technical successes to deceive myself about the overall quality of what I was doing artistically. When at last I came to understand that I was basically looking in the wrong place in myself for my stories and novels, I finally started to write—and publish—the work that articulates my deepest sense of the human condition."

As for when to revise and when to move on, he says, somewhat cryptically, that "when you truly know it’s coming from your deepest white-hot center, from the place where you dream, then revise with a passion", otherwise put it aside. How do you know? Well, he says that as a teacher there are some "pretty clear ways of doing that." but doesn't specify what they are or how an inexperienced author is supposed to know without the help of such a teacher.
 
For all that I go with Bob Butler's advice to try not to be afraid of failure (hard though it is to follow) I am disappointed by the way he resorts to a kind of mystical mush to explain how the process of critical self-evaluation works. I accept that the process may not be entirely 'visible' but that does not mean we have to abandon all efforts to undertstand rationally what works and what doesn't, and why. Neither should we seek formulae to explain when a piece works or not. Head and heart have to learn to work together. It is an iterative process.