When I recounted my experience and asked just how he achieved that particular dreamy quality in his writing, he smiled and nodded. It's where I place the narrative consciousness, I think. I go to a different place inside that first-person voice to capture the flow of consciousness where the sensual world and the emotional inner landscape meet. As you might guess from that response, Butler is used to talking about writing. He teaches creative writing at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, La., where he says his first rule for students is to stop thinking.
Fiction exists as a mode of discourse that is fundamentally sensual.
That's why that dream space is so important. And readers love it. He knows exactly the effect he wants to create. That's an intellectual process. I'll buy that.