OCTOBER 2001
Pulitzer winner to write online
He's a former military intelligence
officer, a Pulitzer Prize winning writer and a professor at Florida
State University.
And you're about to spend an intimate moment with him.
Online, beginning Oct. 30, Robert Olen Butler will pluck an old
picture postcard at random from his collection, and then use
it to inspire a short story.
As the world silently watches from cyberspace, he'll craft the tale.
Six nights a week, from 9 p.m. to 11 p.m., online viewers
and satellite subscribers can join his creative writing students
and follow the story's 21-day evolution keystroke by keystroke,
mistakes and corrections included.
"It's an opportunity for people to watch an established
writer in his creative process," Butler said.
Think of it as a hi-tech bus station. The bus station is a favorite
haunt for Butler, a place where he can watch from obscurity as
people come and go and little bits of their lives are laid bare.
So too, he said, with the Internet.
"You just drop into other people's lives," from
the anonymity of cyberspace. "It's not unlike going back
to that bus station."
Butler will write from his office as cameras follow his every
move. He said his inspiration for the topic will come from one
of his picture postcards dating from the early 1900s.
Before telephones, e-mails and instant messages, "people
just poured their hearts out on back of old postcards,"
he said.
And so he will write a story in the first person, picking up
the voice of the card.
He expects the audience to cause him no inhibitions or censorship.
"Absolutely none," he said. "This is a work of art, and you follow the story wherever it leads you."
Viewers can send comments or questions via e-mail, and a graduate
student will cull them for Butler's responses.
But Butler said he's not inviting viewers to participate in crafting
the story.
"Fiction is not a collaborative art form," he said.
"I doubt if any writer has ever let [another] writer sit
at his elbow."
He said cameras will not disrupt his creative efforts.
The stories will be archived in real time video, and viewers
can click on previous episodes to review the tale's progress.
Unlike most stories appearing online, this one will include not
only the finished product, but all of the revisions as well.
"Every keystroke is recorded," Butler said. Viewers
can "watch a lousy sentence go up" and then observe
its revision.
Butler, who was born in the tiny steel mill town of Granite City,
Ill., won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1993.
His prize-winning book, "A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain," tells of 15 Vietnamese expatriates living in Louisiana.
The book drew in part on his own experiences in Vietnam, where he was sent in 1971 as a U.S. Army intelligence officer. Five months later, Butler was assigned as an interpreter to an American Foreign Service officer advising the mayor of Saigon.
Butler said he has been courted by major universities, but
saw bitterness and strife in the English departments
Then came the offer last year from FSU, a university he calls
"a buried treasure, the most underrated university in the
world," where he found "actual collegiality."
"Compared to other universities, this is Shangri-la,"
he said.
The story he writes online will be the second he's based on aging
postcards.
Find him writing through www. fsu.edu. - Michelle Hayes
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