Writing like a Martian, the Bradbury way

While dithering recently over whether to register for the Roanoke Writers Conference, I checked the list of presenters. There were some fine ones, writers and instructors I already knew and appreciated. And then there was Sam Weller, the authorized biographer of Ray Bradbury. 

Sam Weller

I spent my middle school and high school years devouring everything my small-town school libraries contained of Ray Bradbury writings, and still check for newer works. (Bradbury died in 2012, long past my middle school years.) So, yes, I pulled out my credit card and signed up for Roanoke, to learn from a teacher who had learned from Bradbury.

The prolific Bradbury is perhaps most famous for his volume of linked short stories, The Martian Chronicles. Or should that be, most famous for Fahrenheit 451? Or The Illustrated Man, or -- well too many other books and stories to name. (Bradbury’s official site mentions hundreds of short stories, nearly fifty books, as well as poems, essays, screen plays, teleplays, operas. If you can name it, Bradbury wrote it.)

I’ll provide a sampling of the tips Weller learned from his 12 years of association with Bradbury. But what most struck me from Weller’s two-hour creative writing class (which included some of Bradbury’s own writing prompts) was Bradbury’s dedication to his craft. Unable to afford college after he graduated from high school during the Great Depression, Bradbury became an autodidact, haunting the public library. He would later declare, Weller said, that “the public library is the only university that matters.” It’s a statement still worth considering even in these days of the Internet. 

image: wikipedia

Bradbury’s method of teaching himself to write fiction was simple but grueling: write one story every week for a year, deciding that it couldn’t be possible to write 52 bad stories. In the first year of this experiment, he sold three stories. The next year six, then nine. Five years after finishing high school, he became a fulltime writer.

(Considering how much emphasis current writing classes put on beginnings – although I’ll have more to say about that in a later post – one of the advantages of short story writing, Weller said, is that “you learn how to end things.”)

I may not be able to keep up the story-a-week schedule with NaNoWriMo looming tomorrow, but Bradbury’s suggestions resonate for any writing form:

1)     Find a community of writers (Lucky us – NaNoWriMo brings out writing groups like earthworms after a thunderstorm.)

2)     Write from a place of emotional truth – your truth (It’s not writing what you know, Weller said, it’s writing what you’ve felt.)

3)     Stay immersed in art – read books, poems, essays, listen to music, watch movies, go to the theater, to museums – what Bradbury called “stuffing your mind”

4)     Develop a routine – “all you really need is two hours a day”

5)     Write about your interests and passions, write about things you think are cool. Write about what you love. “Can you imagine,” Bradbury said, “if I’d lost my childhood fascinations with Mars?”

6)     Write for you – the first person you write for should be yourself

7)     Think beyond clichés and tropes

8)  Ignore discouragement 

9) Let your stories by written by your subconscious, write them quickly. ("Finish things! Try it! Stop being so damn precious!")

10) Generate lots of ideas until one comes along that won’t leave you alone

By now, aren't you wondering why an image of a pensive young woman illustrates this post?

Weller’s exercises for us at Roanoke are ones we can try in the coming NaNoWriMo, or all year round.  Edward Hopper’s 1927 painting “Automat” was one of those pieces of art that resonated with Bradbury (see #3 above). Bradbury favored pictures of solitary women, famously including Andrew Wyeth’s eerie “Christina’s World.” But choose any work of art that appeals to you as your own writing prompt.

A second prompt is to make a list of five or more things that interest you (see #5 above). “Don’t be afraid of being weird!” Weller urged us. “Embrace the weird!”

Bradbury also loved to make lists of nouns (file cabinet drawers full of lists, Weller said, all starting with the article “the.” For your final prompt, list five to 10 nouns, as diverse as possible. And yes, start each item on the list with “the”. 

(“If you don’t know where to start, just start describing the noun for a paragraph,” Weller said. “Then bring in characters to interact with the object. Immediately, a story will appear.”)

Mix and match prompts to taste, add a dash of weirdness, a heaping cup of determination, and see what magic happens.  

Wordcraft -- Growing up with science fiction

Ray Bradbury originally insisted his 1953 dystopian classic Fahrenheit 451 was about censorship. But he didn't underestimate the role -- good or bad -- technology would play in our future.

From ear buds (he called them “shells”) streaming music relentlessly to twenty-four hour talk and reality programs shown on wall-sized screens to designer prescription drugs for every psychic ailment -- Bradbury imagined them all. Generations after the technology he foresaw, it was pertinent in this month of the Dallas Public Library’s Big Read emphasis on Fahrenheit 451 to consider what it was like -- and is like -- to grow up in a world shaped by science fiction.

So last Tuesday, Dallas literary organization WordSpace brought together a panel of literary and science geek speakers to discuss the role of science fiction played in their lives.

WordSpace’s programming co-chairperson Charles Dee Mitchell moderated the discussion by Dallas public media KERA’s Jerome Weeks, National Space Society of North Texas president Ken Ruffin, and WordSpace’s OffWorld Science Fiction Book club host Phillip Washington.

Joking that Washington -- obviously too youthful to have read Fahrenheit 451 at its initial appearance -- “kept this from being a panel of middle-aged men,” Mitchell asked, “what was your first science fiction experience?”

Washington cited Orson Scott Card’s 1980’s Ender's Game, “not because it has spaceships and interstellar aliens, but because it was the first book I read that made me consider long durations of time. It was mind bending.”

“My first exposure to science fiction was watching Star Trek,” Ruffin said. Too young to remember the show during its original 1960’s seasons, he saw it in later syndication. “My aunts and uncles were talking about this weird show with these fake-looking aliens -- it was ’60’s special effects. I’m eight years old, and I sat down in front of the TV and was mesmerized.”

(Not even Bradbury would have quibbled over Ruffin’s choice. Biographer Sam Weller notes that Bradbury, who would write many scripts for TV joked, “I never said I was against all television. I am just against bad television!”)

“Between the age of six and thirteen,” Weeks said, “I read everything in my suburban (Detroit) library” including anthologies that introduced him to such science fiction writers as Robert Heinlein and Bradbury. “My sister also subscribed to two science fiction magazines.”

Oh, those wonderful, pulpy science fiction magazines, Mitchell reminisced. The ones he looked at longingly on the book store shelves but couldn’t buy because their covers invariably displayed scantily-dressed women, “usually clutched by aliens, with tentacles covering the interesting parts.”

And then, somehow, the magic disappeared. No panelist except Washington would confess to reading or even watching science fiction after passing adolescence. Even science fan Ruffin said, “I have not re-read any novels -- as much as I enjoyed them when I was younger. I was afraid they wouldn’t have the same effect on me.”

What killed science fiction for them? And how do the newest generation of young adult readers view the genre? Can it -- should it -- be revived, or is it as dead as a T. rex? I'll continue the discussion in next Monday’s Wordcraft. Additional Big Read events include Bradbury biographer Sam Weller on a panel discussing censorship this Thursday, April 18, at Dallas’ Bar Belmont, 901 Fort Worth Avenue, from 7-8 p.m. The discussion is free, drinks are on you.   See www.bigreaddallas.org/.

Adventure classics -- Far green hills of Mars?

The Martian Chronicles

by Ray Bradbury

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“I would go out to (my grandparents’) lawn on summer nights and reach up to the red light of Mars and say, ‘Take me home!’” Ray Bradbury wrote, explaining his debt to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ stories in an essay The New Yorker prophetically titled “Take Me Home,” published the day before his death.

“I yearned to fly away and land there in the strange dusts that blew over dead-sea bottoms toward the ancient cities. . . I know that ‘The Martian Chronicles’ would never have happened if Burroughs hadn’t had an impact on my life. . . .”

Like the Mars of Burroughs’ hero John Carter, Bradbury’s Mars was a land still unknown enough to harbor adventures. There‘s more than a touch of fear for the future and nostalgia for a simpler time somewhere in the past lurking in the pages of both writers. A nostalgia, in the case of The Martian Chronicles that Bradbury pinpoints in the remembered green American Midwest of his childhood in the 1920’s.

He was born in Waukegan, Illinois, in 1920 and spent much of his childhood there. In The Martian Chronicles, the Waukegan of Bradbury’s childhood would resurface under the name “Green Bluff,” reconstructed by telepathic Martians for a rocket crew from Earth, in the chapter “The Third Expedition.”

“This town out here looks very peaceful and cool, and so much like Green Bluff, Illinois, that it frightens me,” Captain John Black of the ill-fated expedition explains to his men (Bradbury taking for granted in his 1950 story, that space crews would be all-male). Black, like Bradbury, knew you can’t really go back home again.

Ultimately, the defeat of the Martians occurred not through armaments or atomics, but with the scourge of a childhood disease as lethal as terrestrial bacteria had been to the Martians of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds. And finally, the invaders from Earth would live to see their own civilization destroyed by the atomic weapons the world had learned to fear by the date of Bradbury’s writing.

That the Mars of Bradbury bore little resemblance to the planet, pictures of whose dusty pink skies and barren landscapes he saw transmitted from robotic rovers long before his death, bothered him not at all. He even resisted being labeled a science fiction writer. “Martian Chronicles is not science fiction -- it’s fantasy,” he insisted. “That’s the reason it’s going to be around a long time -- because it’s a Greek myth, and myths have staying power.”

Even a scientist could agree with that assessment. “Mars,” astronomer Carl Sagan wrote, “has become a kind of mythic arena onto which we have projected our Earthly hopes and fears.”

For more about Bradbury, who died June 5 at the age of 91, see his official site,
www.raybradbury.com/.

(Next Wednesday -- an all-Martian month at Adventure classics concludes with one of Phillip K. Dick’s greatest works, Martian Time-Slip.)

Adventure classics -- Burn, baby, burn

Fahrenheit 451

by Ray Bradbury

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A few weeks ago I mentioned screenwriting teacher Robert McKee’s justification for writing historical drama -- to view contemporary antagonisms from the safe distance of the past. But there are other ways to provide safe distance.  One is from the viewpoint of the future. This is the place of science fiction, at least of the subcategory social science fiction. And this is the territory of Ray Bradbury’s most famous work, the dystopian “Fahrenheit 451.”

First published as a book in 1953 (after a shorter version appeared in “Galaxy Science Fiction,” it presents a future society which bans reading as an aid to critical thought. A society which employs “firemen” not to prevent fires (buildings have been fireproofed by then) but to set them. Specifically, to set fire to books.

As with all book burnings, books were only the shorthand for what was really banned. As the character Faber explains to renegade fireman Guy Montag, “Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget. There is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.”

In his work, Faber argues for the protection of relatively small numbers of people devoted to thought, railing against “the most dangerous enemy to truth and freedom, the solid unmoving cattle of the majority. Oh God, the terrible tyranny of the majority.”

image: Wikimedia commons

In the coda to the 1979 edition, Bradbury himself,  weirdly curmudgeonly, turns the point of his book on its head, arguing that “. . .it is a mad world and it will get madder
if we allow the minorities, be they dwarf or giant, orangutan or dolphin, nuclear-head or water-conversationalist, pro-computerologist or Neo-Luddite, simpleton or sage, to interfere with aesthetics.”

Well, no one has ever accused Bradbury of being the most clear-thinking of writers.  Science fiction author and critic Damon Knight criticized him for failure to do what authors of the fantastic refer to as world building -- the creation of unique, fully-imagined worlds. But Bradbury himself describes his writing as myth -- and what forlorn but beautiful myths he spins.

(Next Friday: From the alienation of Bradbury’s 1950s to the aliens of Ursula LeGuinn, another way of looking at the future in “The Left Hand of Darkness.”)