Category: ray bradbury (Page 1 of 2)

Bradbury’s Big Ideas

November 29, 2023 / / 0 Comments

I’m teaching The Martian Chronicles again, something I haven’t done for almost a decade. I think the last time I taught a science fiction novel of any kind was 2014 or 2015 when I read Fahrenheit 451 with an Honors American Lit class (you can see my affinity for Bradbury).

Of course, the first comment I received from the students this year was, “This is WEIRD,” and yes, kids, it’s weird. It’s SCIENCE FICTION. I would think that in 2023, in America, in which we are ruled by the Marvel Cinematic Universe (and in which new Star Wars and Star Trek shows spring up like daisies), a science fiction novel wouldn’t weird these students out.

But it has. We are about a third of the way through, and while they are starting to groove to Bradbury’s particular brand of magic stardust, they are still a little befuddled and bewildered by the strangeness of things. I mean, it IS a strange book, but that’s part of the fun! Science fiction’s strangeness is part of its charm, part of why I like to read it.

As I keep reminding the students, science fiction is a genre of ideas. It’s all about the Metaphors (as Bradbury liked to call them). About the Big Questions. About life and death and God and the meaning of time and the power of memories and the ways in which our imagination can wield incredible, life-altering power. It’s about the eternal stuff, the primordial stuff. The point and purpose of life.

And things have to get a little weird if we want to get to these big ideas. When we ride on Bradbury’s rocket ship, we have to be ready for wonders. After all, life and death and God are all pretty strange things. Think about them for a moment and wonder: Why did life even begin? Why did the universe become the universe? Why must things die, why not infinite growth, infinite life, etc.? Why did God make all this (if you believe in God and his creative spirit)? And if there is no God, why not? What is the meaning of things without him?

And even the more practical questions: Why do we hope to find life on other planets? Why do we want to go to other planets? What will happen if we ever meet an alien species? How will we save our own planet from the destruction we’ve wrought against it? Can it be saved? What will we do to the other planets in our solar system? What will we do to ourselves in pursuit of these things?

What is happiness? What is love? What is memory? What is time?

To play in these fields of wonder, Bradbury must write with fire and rocket fuel. I am loving the experience of rereading the novel, and I’m also enjoying how my students are reacting to it. Despite all the science fiction television and movies around them, this almost-seventy-year-old book is still knocking them around, still peeling back the layers of metaphor and thought to reveal hard questions underneath.

Pretending to be Prolific

April 23, 2023 / / 0 Comments

Been thinking a lot today about my fears and the critical voice that constantly tries to stop me from writing. I wrote quite a bit in my WNB this morning, trying to figure out what my fears really are and brainstorming ways to combat them.

I’ve always admired prolific writers. Ray Bradbury. Neil Gaiman. All the old pulp guys like Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith (and so many others). And there are women too, like Andre Norton, Leigh Brackett, and Ursula Le Guin, who were incredibly prolific in their lifetimes. Jane Yolen is a writer today who is incredibly prolific and one I admire.

So, if I admire all these prolific writers, how do I combat my fears and get more writing done?

While writing in my notebook today, I decided to try a technique that will hopefully kill my critical voice and get me into the right headspace for writing.

That technique is visualization. If I can visualize myself as a pulp writer, as someone like Andre Norton, who loves to tell stories and doesn’t care what anyone thinks, then maybe I can let go of my perfectionism and fear of writing something “wrong” and just let the words flow.

You might be wondering, why the need for visualization? Why not just force myself to write more?

But this is where my critical brain is so deadly. The negative thoughts and fears keep me from “just writing.” I get hung up on worrying what people will think. I’ve tried “just writing more,” but critical voice always sneaks in and stops me.

Not necessarily in the moment of writing, but in the off-hours, when I’m thinking about what I wrote and start questioning everything. It’s in the in-between times when my critical voice is most ascendant, when it starts judging my writing and making me doubt myself. These off-hours ruin my energy and enthusiasm for the story. They make it harder and harder to sit down at the computer and write. I’ll force myself to do it, but critical voice has sucked all the fun out of it.

But the prolific SFF writers? I don’t know if they really didn’t care what others thought of their work, but I suspect they had a healthy dose of “don’t give a fuck.” And that’s the attitude I need to channel.

So my solution is visualization.

I like pretending. That’s why I like writing stories in the first place. It’s all make-believe. Like when I was a kid. Telling myself stories while I ran around the backyard. My kids do this too, all the time, and they are so engrossed in their make-believe epics, they have zero time for worrying what others will think. That is the key.

Since I like to pretend, since playing make-believe is where it all started for me, I’m going play make-believe now. I’m going to pretend I’m a prolific writer. I’m going to pretend to be an Andre Norton-esque fantasy writer who writes fearlessly and doesn’t care what people think.

Dean Wesley Smith often talks about how writing should be fun. His advice: “Make it play.”

Well, this is part of my play. I’m pretending to be prolific. Playing make-believe as I sit to write. I’m playing around in the story world even as I’m playing a part at my desk. And if I pretend enough — if I visualize myself as a prolific writer — then perhaps the make-believe will bleed into reality.

Visualization is one of those popular techniques for achieving goals and establishing new habits, and there’s a bit of a hippy-dippy quality to it, but I remember a teacher training we did at my old school several years ago, and the instructor was a professor of psychology, and he told us about the studies they did with students who visualized themselves taking a test and doing well, and he said that students who visualized themselves being successful on the test before they studied did better than the students who just studied. And there’s a bunch of research on how visualization coupled with practice can help basketball players improve their free throw shooting. It’s not unusual for performers, athletes, and others to imagine themselves on stage or on the field doing their thing and having success.

So why not visualize myself as a prolific pulpster who is having a blast writing all the stories of her imagination? To some, this might seem like a crutch, but to me, it’s just an extension of the fun to be had writing stories in the first place. If I can make-believe a story and write it down, why can’t I make-believe I’m someone who has a prolific career and writes with abandon every day?

The visualization has to be coupled with practice, of course. Which means I still need to sit at my desk and write. But when I sit down, I’ll imagine I’m a pulp writer, bursting with stories, fearless, ready to spin a yarn. It’s the fun of the masquerade, of playing dress-up, of pretending. I don’t write under a pen name (well, most of the time I don’t), but I can see how a pseudonym gives one the freedom to be someone else for a little while. If I pretend to be someone else when I’m at my writing desk, perhaps I’ll unlock some of that freedom.

What I hope will happen is that over time, I won’t need the visualization exercise. I hope I’ll simply BE a prolific writer who doesn’t care what others think and who has banished her critical voice. Until then, I’ll use my imagination and pretend.

It’s what writers do.

Caught Between

March 17, 2023 / / 0 Comments

What kind of writer am I? My writing heroes are Ray Bradbury, J.R.R. Tolkien, Ursula Le Guin, Astrid Lindgren, C.S. Lewis, Neil Gaiman. Are they “literary” writers or “genre” writers? Serious or pulp? Do they write art or entertainment?

Let’s back up a bit. First, I have always loved fantasy and science fiction, and these two genres have historically been considered “low-brow” by the literature establishment in the U.S.

Tolkien and Lewis in particular had to deal with all kinds of disparaging remarks about their adult fantasy novels from snooty critics.

Le Guin has fared better because she wrote more than just sci-fi/fantasy, and she came to prominence when the genres were gaining more legitimacy. Lindgren gets a pass too because she often wrote for children. Bradbury was a force unto his own. He wrote pulpy stuff but somehow was embraced as literary (sometimes).

But still.

Science fiction and fantasy — speculative fiction — have always maintained a place outside the center of literary esteem. Even now, there feels like a divide between “literary” stuff and “genre” stuff.

I have a subscription to Poets & Writers magazine (that is soon to expire and I won’t be getting a renewal), and the thing that always strikes me when reading it, is the way it seems to ignore nearly every contemporary writer I enjoy reading today: Brandon Sanderson, Patrick Rothfuss, Helene Walker, Susanna Clark, Ken Liu, Naomi Novik. Yes, I understand that a large portion of the magazine is devoted to poets, but still, it’s surprising that some of what I consider the best speculative fiction writers today aren’t even mentioned.

Again, there is a divide.

And this divide extends into process and craft and how we should think of our writing. Am I a writer of literature, or am I writer of entertainment? Literature writers are supposed to labor over their craft, write multiple drafts, strive for greatness and make Capital A “Art.” Entertainers churn out their product, write what sells, and scoff at pretensions of “art.” Yes, I know I’m simplifying things, and yes, I know these lines between low-brow and high-brow are gradually blurring, but there’s still this sense (and maybe it’s only in my own mind) that if one wants to write and publish fiction, one must decide.

I hate this choice. I don’t want to make it. I hate the binary between purity (aka art) and business (aka entertainment). This is what happens, though, when I want to sell my stories. When I turn them into commodities, when I participate in the market, then I’m ceding ground to “writing as a business.”

Of course, I want to eat and have a roof over my head, and I want to “make a living” as a writer, so that means I need to think like a business person and regard my stories as “products” to be sold (or intellectual property to be licensed). I want to sell my fiction. I want to market my writing. But I don’t want to feel like I must abandon my creative voice in order to write books that people will buy.

Listening to self-publishing podcasts or reading subreddits for self-published authors can get depressing sometimes because everything seems to be screaming, “Write to market!” Readers want conventional fiction that adheres heavily to tropes (with just a little bit of tweaking to keep it interesting). Readers want vampires and shifters and badass females in their urban fantasy; they want elves and dwarves and dragons in their high fantasy; they want LitRPG, or they want Space Opera, or they want Grimdark. Write to market, write to market, write to market.

It’s not that I don’t like elves and dwarves and dragons in my high fantasy, and it’s not like I don’t want badass ladies kicking butt in my urban fantasy, but I don’t write with these things in mind. I just don’t. I write from my dreams and whatever weird stuff shows up in them; I write from the strange melange of influences I’ve had in my life, everything from Who Framed Roger Rabbit? to Phantastes to Pirates of Dark Waters to Luis Bunuel. I try my best in every story to make it something I would want to read, and I try my best to make it entertaining and also meaningful. But when I write, sometimes my high fantasy doesn’t have elves. Sometimes my urban fantasy has nary a badass lady in sight. It’s just how my brain works, and my imagination. I know I need to keep working at my craft, but I want to believe that I can write both something true to myself as an artist and something that will sell. Am I a fool for thinking so?

I think the divide between art and entertainment is an illusion. All art — even the “literary” stuff that gets featured in Poets & Writers — is meant to entertain. The pulpsters and the literati are all doing the same thing: spinning yarns to enchant an audience. I was heartened recently when reading Le Guin’s collection of essays, The Language of the Night. One of the essays dealt with this false dichotomy between art and entertainment:

“Therefore I totally oppose the notion that you can put Art over here on a pedestal, and Entertainment down here in a clown suit. Art and Entertainment are the same thing, in that the more deeply and genuinely entertaining a work is, the better art it is. To imply that Art is something heavy and solemn and dull, and Entertainment is modest but jolly and popular, neo-Victorian idiocy at its worst.

(from “The Stone Ax and the Muskoxen”)

I think it helps to remember Shakespeare. His plays were popular. They were entertainment for everybody, from the lowest dregs of London society to the very highest of royalty. And yet, we watch Shakespeare now and consider his work High Art. The same plays. The same lines. Entertainment and art.

Thus, the choice is an illusion.

I’ve never set out to write a story that I didn’t think would be entertaining. I might have failed in the execution of a story, but I never failed in the intention behind it.

There is only the work. There is only the hope that in writing my stories and spinning my yarns, I will make something “deeply and genuinely entertaining,” and thus, make a work of art.

What kind of writer am I?

Perhaps the answer is trite, but it remains true. I am myself. I don’t have to choose.

Zesty

August 4, 2022 / / 0 Comments

Have been reading Lawrence Block’s A Writer Prepares and loving it so far. It’s about his earliest days as a writer in New York in the 1950s, writing a bunch of stuff under pseudonyms. What I love the most — besides Block’s very funny conversational style — is the way he describes his writing process and the sheer energy he brought to his work at the time. It’s inspirational to me. I realize that I very much want to be a pulp-style writer who writes quickly and with gusto. I’m reminded of Bradbury’s working habits too, his furious energy and joy. Bradbury calls it “zest” in Zen in the Art of Writing.

The question I keep coming back to is this: How do I write with more zest? How do I sit down in the morning and by the afternoon have an entire short story written? How do I write 4,000 words per day (or more) like Block and Bradbury and the rest of these pulpsters?

Of course, the simplest answer is, “Sit down for four hours and write four thousand words.” But I don’t have four hours, not really, most days. I could probably piece together that time if I took every spare minute I wasn’t working as an editor or taking care of my kids or my home, but most of my free hours are after the kids are in bed — when I am a living zombie and my brain can’t string more than three words together — or in drips and drabs throughout the day (also, a girl has got to eat sometime).

Unfortunately for me, my brain can’t sit down for only five minutes and start writing fiction. I need a bit more time to gather myself, to clear my head, to reenter my manuscript (this last one is the most important… I need at least five minutes to reread what I wrote previously before I can get back into the story). Maybe this is my fatal flaw, I don’t know. But my brain just doesn’t work that quickly.

So if I have, let’s say, ten minutes free time (this is the average length of time between the fights my kids have over toys or whatever). I sit down at the computer, reread what I wrote. That’s five minutes of the ten. Then I start writing for five minutes. Cool, I get about fifty words written, one hundred if I’m lucky. But then I’m called away by my kids or a household chore. I might not have another ten minutes again for the rest of the day. Having little kids means not having a set time when I can sit down to write. Little kids means a life of flux.

It’s not a great plan for finishing a short story in one day (unless it’s super-duper flash fiction). And it’s not a great plan for writing a novel at pulp speed. Sure, I can write one hundred words a day and eventually finish something. And there’s nothing wrong with doing that. Maybe that’s what I have to do. I have done that before.

But I long for the Lawrence Block/Ray Bradbury life of writing entire stories in one day, of writing at a furious speed.

I can try to get up early, before the kids wake up. But due to several issues (one of which is that I’d like to spend time with my husband in the evening before bed, so I can’t go to bed before 10:30/11:00 p.m. if I want to see him and talk to him; my kids have a rather late bedtime of 9:00 p.m.), I can’t get up too early. 6:30 a.m. is probably my earliest wake up time. So from 6:30 to 7:30 a.m., if I can peel myself off the bed sheets, I can write without distraction. Not exactly four hours, but it’s something.

In fact, I did that today. Got up at 6:45ish and headed down to the computer by 7:15. Did I work on my manuscript? Yes.

I wrote one sentence. One.

My brain just wasn’t functioning. I didn’t have the zest.

How can I get the zest? How can I cultivate it? This is why I can’t seem to be a Block/Bradbury-style pulpster writer. I had thirty minutes to write fiction, and I could only manage one sentence. My brain is pretty useless in the morning, apparently. It sucks that my ideal writing time is neither early in the morning nor later at night, but right smack dab in the middle of the day when I need to take care of my kids and get my freelance work done.

But what this morning’s one-sentence affair shows is that time isn’t really the issue. Yes, I was tired this morning, and yes, I couldn’t manage more than a sentence. But what really stops me from writing swiftly and with wild abandon like Block and Bradbury is fear. I can’t be zesty and write with gusto if I’m afraid. That’s the real problem. Fear.

Now all I have to do is figure out how to let go of the fear. Should be easy, right? (This is sarcasm.)

What am I afraid of? Fear of writing something bad, which is almost always the fear for writers. Bad can come in different flavors: using the wrong words, writing a stupid idea, sounding like a fool. Bad can mean writing something totally derivative and unoriginal. Bad can mean boring (the worst crime of all). Bad can mean incoherence or a canyon of plot holes or one-dimensional characters. That’s the fear. Fear that I’ll write something bad and be judged for it. And that judgment can come from others or it can come from myself. I can hate it or others can hate it, but either way, I’m afraid to be judged.

This is where the process mindset stuff comes in. Focus on process not product. Who cares if the finished product is terrible, what matters is the process. Enjoy the process!

I keep telling myself this. Because I do enjoy the process. I love the process. I love thinking up stories and images and characters and writing down what’s in my head. I can’t think of anything I love more (except maybe reading books, but reading books and writing books are like two sides of the same coin).

But my process, despite my best efforts, is a slow process. I need time to get back into my story. I need time to think and ponder and daydream and let stuff simmer, and maybe all of that is just my way of dealing with my fear, but I don’t think it is. I think that’s just how my brain works. Or not. I don’t know.

I do know that it really helps to be thinking about my story all day long, to be listening to music, to be daydreaming while washing dishes or making lunches. What gets me stuck is when I let my story drift into the background and all the other anxieties and responsibilities of the day take over. I can’t be zesty on command, when my butt hits the chair for ten minutes a day. I need to stay zesty all day long. I need to make the whole day part of my process, even as I’m doing other stuff, all the survival stuff like feeding my kids and making money from my day job. I still need to keep my story in mind, still need to let my imagination wander.

I want to restart my morning writing habit, my 6:30-7:30 butt-in-chair time, but in order to write more than one sentence, I need to be thinking about my story all day long. If I’m caught up in my story — in the process of making stuff up — then hopefully I won’t have time for fear. If I’m having fun all day using my imagination, then the anxieties about judgment can’t creep in. Zesty is a state of mind, but it’s also a habit of being. I need to stay zesty all day by living in my imagination all day. Then, when 6:30 a.m. rolls around — or those ten minutes of free time — my brain will be ready.

That’s the theory, anyway.

3d6, straight down the line

April 18, 2021 / / 0 Comments

Lately, I’ve been rolling up zero-level characters for DCC RPG. Not for any reason, really, just for the fun of it. It’s weirdly meditative. Roll 3d6, straight down the line,  and see what unbalanced, horrible/incredible stats ensue. Then roll for birth augur, occupation, random equipment, and copper pieces and bingo! Instant player character.

Why is this kind of character creation so satisfying? I think it’s due to the randomness of it. The character that begins to take shape, with her 16 strength and her 7 luck, her beggar bowl and her random candle, all leads to a low-pressure but satisfying imaginative exercise. I have to start making sense of this weird and sometimes contradictory amalgamation of numbers, stats, equipment, and info. Why was her birth augur “conceived on horseback”? What’s the story with that?! Why does she have such high strength and such low luck? Where did she get the candle and what was the last thing that someone dropped in her beggar bowl?

I’m not planning to use the character for anything, but even if I were going to run her through a funnel adventure, the whole thing is still very low-stakes. I can let my imagination drift through this hazy fictive world and spend a few moments dreaming up an entirely new  person. There’s no real purpose, it’s just me playing a game. And when I’m done, I feel both satisfied and energized. The combination of rolling dice, checking charts, and drawing the outlines of a fictional character all help me chill out and relax.

And yeah, I need to relax. Often, when I sit down to write or work on my fiction, I’m tense. “It’s getting late, I only have twenty minutes,” or, “I have no idea what to write and it’s gonna suck.” I sit down tense. Pressured.

I hate that.

I know Bradbury’s advice: “Relax. Don’t think. Work.” But I really struggle with the “relax” part. I can’t get past my perfectionism, and I’m always under the illusion that I’m running out of time.

So. I grab my 3d6, some percentage dice, a d24, a d30, and 5d12, a pencil and paper, and suddenly I’m in the midst of CHARACTER CREATION: such a simple process and yet the possibilities feel inexhaustible. It relaxes me, let’s me do something with my hands, let’s me explore a little corner of my imagination without worry or pressure.

Whether I play these characters or not doesn’t matter. They didn’t exist a couple of minutes ago, but now they do. A handful of random rolls and a new character came into being. Where once there was nothing, now there is something. It’s that simple, and it’s awesome. It might not seem very creative since the entire process is so formulaic and random, but I’m gonna go ahead and argue that it IS creative. As the dice fall and the stats gets filled, my brain starts to take over inventing and filling in the blanks. The numbers on the paper don’t really make the character; I do. Through my imagination, the character becomes a character and not just a series of game mechanics. This is what I love about randomization. It isn’t a substitute for creativity and invention: it’s a tool for creativity and invention. It allows the player to synthesize disparate elements, and in that act of synthesis, the player engages in the highest order of thinking and creation. All thanks to a roll of the dice.

A Wizard of Earthsea and How Great Books Can Inspire My Writing

August 12, 2018 / / 0 Comments

earthsea_coverWhen I wrote the second draft of The Thirteen Treasures of Britain, I was also reading The Last Unicorn. Even though my story and Beagle’s had little in common, the music of his prose, the vitality of his world made an impact on me while I was writing. I wanted my book to capture some strain of the magic that I felt The Last Unicorn possessed. Even though I knew my own novel would never equal Beagle’s masterpiece, I wanted to try. In short, The Last Unicorn was inspiring. It energized my writing, and I found myself more joyful while I read it, and more joyful while I was writing my own story.

It’s no secret that I’ve had trouble finishing my second novel, Ysbaddaden and the Game of Chess. I’ve had babies, become the mother of three children all under the age of five, struggled to navigate the demands of teaching, mothering, and adulting, and all the while, I’ve felt less joyful and more overwhelmed. My writing time has evaporated, and with it, a lot of my enthusiasm. I’ve still managed to push on, to write even when it feels like a slog through the Swamps of Sadness, but without that spark of joyfulness that I felt when drafting The Thirteen Treasures. So this second book is taking an eternity to finish.

Curiously, at this very moment, I’m reading another classic of fantasy literature (A Wizard of Earthsea), and I’m finding myself suddenly joyful and energized again, inspired to sit down and work on the draft of my own novel.

Just like what happened with The Last Unicorn.

Le Guin’s prose, the depth of her world and her themes, the way I become completely immersed and lost in her story, the way it feeds my imagination — all of these things remind me of what it’s like to be a fantasy writer, to dream up characters and places and fantastical creatures. And when I do sit down to write, I feel nourished by Le Guin’s story. Great writing makes us as writers see what’s possible, what can be achieved with words, and when I know there are storytellers out there who have reached greatness, then in some small way, I hope I can reach it too. I know I won’t; that’s not the point. It’s the striving for greatness that gives me energy, that helps me find joy in my writing.

I am, at times, haunted by Ray Bradbury’s maxim to “write with gusto.” So much of my writing over the last year and a half has not been filled with much gusto. But when I read a great book — fantasy or otherwise — I gain some measure of gusto, some “kick-joy” (as Kerouac? would say), and I begin to wonder why I don’t just read great books all the time. If these books work like a tonic on my brain, why wouldn’t I imbibed every day? Why am I spending time on things that don’t fill me up with this kind of excitement and awe?

I suppose it’s because we don’t know which books will contain the magic until we start them, and I’m the sort of reader who hates to abandon a book once I’ve started it. There are a few that I DNF, but they are very few. And I also feel obliged to read widely in my genre, most particularly the books being published right now; I can’t exactly restrict myself to the Great Classics of Fantasy if I’m trying to keep up with what’s being written currently. Of course, I’ve read some current fantasy that has indeed been the magical-kind-of-great that I’m describing in this post, but without the benefit of time and distance, it’s hard to know which of these books will be The Ones, and which won’t.

Maybe I need to constantly have a great book on hand, for those times when my verve seems a little limp. I can always read more than one book at a time; I’ve been that kind of reader since I was a kid. But now I realize that I DO need to keep pumping blood into my imagination via these great books. I need Ged — naming the otak, struggling against the shadow, overcoming his pride — and others of his kind to journey with me, keeping me on the path of adventure, like Gandalf and the dwarves leading Bilbo to the Lonely Mountain.

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