Friday, October 5, 2001

Author Will Use Online Technology to Offer a Glimpse Into the Creative Process By JEFFREY R. YOUNG While baring the body for Webcams may be verging on passé, an award-winning author at Florida State University will soon be using the technology to reveal something it has largely ignored: the writing process. Starting October 30, Robert Olen Butler, a creative-writing professor, will permit anyone to take a peek at his creative process -- as he writes a short story. A camera will be trained on his computer screen, and a microphone will capture any comments he makes as he writes. The video and audio will be available at his Web site. "For a writer or an artist, this is a kind of daunting and scary thing to allow all of the mistakes, all of the awkwardness, all of the false starts to be shown," says Mr. Butler, whose collection of stories A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain (1992) won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. The professor hopes his literary exhibitionism will serve as a teaching tool for aspiring writers. "The basic irony about teaching an art form is you end up teaching abstractly and analytically about a process that is the antithesis of that mode of thought," he says. Mr. Butler plans to write at scheduled times over a three-week period. After each session, he will respond to questions sent in by e-mail. The sessions will be archived on the Web site. Jeffrey L. Hanson, a student of Mr. Butler's, says the project fits in with Mr. Butler's teaching style, which is far more humble and open than most writing teachers he has had. During one class, for instance, Mr. Butler brought in a draft of one of his own early stories, warning students that it was awful. "And it sure was," says Mr. Hanson. "A lot of teachers like to hide that stuff." But Mr. Butler says he has a history of writing in public: He penned his first four published novels on the Long Island Rail Road, while commuting to a job in Manhattan. Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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