From Where You Dream

Many practitioners and teachers of writing (myself included) have preached freewriting, clustering, drafting, and generally "making clay"—getting any words whatsoever on the page, in order to have material to work with. Butler's writing "zone" is instead a place of meditation on the sense experience of the characters, requiring both patience and a depth of concentration that must be surrendered to and cannot be willed.

And he has devised a system whereby revision is undertaken at the level of structure rather than sentence.

"Because there are two of you, one who wants to write and one who doesn't. The one who wants to write has to keep fooling the one who doesn't."

"I've spent twenty years understanding my process, and you're asking me to change it entirely."