all stripes walking through the door every other day. Forty-Seven West Broadway, Bangor, Maine, had to be the world’s best unknown writing school, but it was mostly wasted on me, for two good reasons: I was a bad listener and a worse student. Alice, lost in Wonderland, observes that she often gives herself good advice but very rarely takes it. I get that. I heard a lot of great advice as a kid and never took any of it.
Some people are visual learners; some people can glean lots of helpful information from lectures or classroom discussion. Me, everything I ever figured out about writing stories, I learned from books. My brain doesn’t move fast enough for conversation, but words on a page will wait for me. Books are patient with slow learners. The rest of the world isn’t.
My parents knew I loved to write and wanted me to succeed and understood that sometimes trying to explain things to me was like talking to a dog. Our corgi, Marlowe, could understand a few important words, like “walk” and “eat,” but really, that was about it. I can’t say I was much more developed. So my folks bought me two books.
My mother got me Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury, and while the book is full of fine suggestions for unlocking one’s creativity, what really turned my head was the way it was written. Bradbury’s sentences went off like strings of firecrackers erupting on a hot July night. Discovering Bradbury felt a bit like that moment in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy steps out of the barn and into the world just over the rainbow—it was like moving from a black-and-white room into a land where everything is in Technicolor. The medium was the message.
Nowadays I admit I find Bradbury’s sentences to be a bit cloying (not every line has to be a clown on a unicycle juggling torches). But at fourteen I needed someone to show me the explosive power of a well-crafted and imaginative phrase. After Zen in the Art of Writing, I read nothing but Bradbury for a while: Dandelion Wine, Fahrenheit 451, and, best of all, Something Wicked This Way Comes. How I loved Dark’s carnival of sick, reality-deforming rides, especially that awful carousel at the center, a merry-go-round that spun children into old men. Then there were Bradbury’s short stories—everyone knows those short stories—masterpieces of weird fiction that can be read in as few as ten minutes and then never forgotten. There was “A Sound of Thunder,” the story of some hunters who pay dearly for the chance to shoot dinosaurs. Or what about “The Fog Horn,” Bradbury’s tale of a prehistoric creature that falls in love with a lighthouse? His creations were ingenious and dazzling and effortless, and I turned to Zen in the Art of Writing over and over to figure out how he did it. And indeed, he had some sturdy, practical tools to offer the student writer. There was one exercise that involved making lists of nouns to generate story ideas. I still use a variation of it to this day (I reworked it into a game of my own called “Elevator Pitch”).
My father got me a book by Lawrence Block called Telling Lies for Fun and Profit, which collected Block’s how-to columns for Writer’s Digest. I have it still. I dropped my copy into the bath, so it’s now swollen and deformed, and the ink is blurred where I underlined long passages, but to me it’s as valuable as a signed first edition by Faulkner. What I took from Block was that writing is a trade, like other trades, like carpentry. To demystify the art, he focused in on minutiae, like: What’s a great first sentence? How much detail is too much? Why do some shock endings work while others, frankly, suck donkey nuts?
And—I found this especially fascinating—what are the benefits of writing under a pseudonym?
Block was no stranger to pseudonyms. He had a basket of them, had used them to create particular identities for particular works of fiction. Bernard Malamud once observed that a writer’s first and most challenging creation is himself; once you’ve invented yourself, the stories will flow naturally from your persona. I got a charge out of the idea that Block would, when it suited him, throw on a new face and write novels by people who were themselves fictions.
“Oh, yeah,” my dad said. “Check out Such Men Are Dangerous, the novel Block wrote