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/.