Build Your Wings

When I was maybe 12 or 13 years old, one of the first stories I ever wrote was about an old man wandering the streets in a dystopian future. He was so old and forgotten that he couldn’t even remember his name, going by the initials RDB. Those initials, of course, stood for Raymond Douglas Bradbury, and the man at the time was my literary hero. My very obvious stylistic mimicry of him back then, in that and many other proto-stories, was excruciating yet necessary; all part of a writer’s journey. But it’s no exaggeration to say I almost certainly wouldn’t have been a writer had it not been for Ray Bradbury and his short stories in particular. Up until the time I opened a well-pawed library copy of The Illustrated Man, I knew I loved stories (what kid doesn’t?), but I’d never realised until that moment how those stories could be presented, enclosed in beauty, garnished with lyricism and beauty. Not just the tale but the telling. That was Bradbury’s gift to me and countless other readers who, thanks to his example, began to dream of also being writers.

In some ways it would be churlish to lament the passing of a man who lived to the grand age of 91. Yet in others, his talent was so immense, the legacy he leaves so comprehensive—his longevity itself somehow becoming a part of that legacy—that I have to admit to a great sadness at his passing last week.

In terms of politics and overall cultural views, it would be difficult to find a public figure I disagreed with less yet admired more than Mr. Bradbury. But then again, he always was a contradiction: a science fiction pioneer who mistrusted hard science, a visionary for a brighter future who disliked technology, a starfield dreamer who set much of his work in small-town Illinois (you could say his Green Town was the antecedent of Stephen King’s Castle Rock). In one sense, he was a conservative neo-Luddite. Yet in others, he was a compassionate and populist advocate for creativity and the arts and the restless, rebellious spirit.

But this won’t be a long tribute. In fact, I’m going to let the man himself have his say for the most part. The following are thirteen choice quotes in no particular order, after which I will include two short passages from two of his short stories that, in some ways, best sum up the exuberance and wonder of this great American writer. He wrote horror, he wrote science fiction, he wrote fantasy. But far more importantly, he wrote.

1. “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”

2. “People ask me to predict the future, when all I want to do is prevent it. Better yet, build it.”

3. “My stories run up and bite me in the leg — I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.”

4. “The good writers touch life often. The mediocre ones run a quick hand over her. The bad ones rape her and leave her for the flies.”

5. “Stuff your eyes with wonder. Live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made up or paid for in factories.”

6. “I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room.”

7. “Science fiction is the most important literature in the history of the world.”

8. “Science-fiction balances you on the cliff. Fantasy shoves you off.”

9. “We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.”

10. “Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spent the rest of the day putting the pieces together.”

11. “If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you’ll never learn.”

12. “We are the miracle of force and matter making itself over into imagination and will. Incredible. The Life Force experimenting with forms. You for one. Me for another. The Universe has shouted itself alive. We are one of the shouts.”

13. “Go to the edge of the cliff and jump off. Build your wings on the way down.”

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An example of his astonishing descriptive abilities and feel for language first, his visceral and poetic sensibility. Here is Bradbury describing a Tyrannosaurus Rex in his famous story “A Sound of Thunder.”

“It came on great oiled, resilient, striding legs. It towered thirty feet above half of the trees, a great evil god, folding its delicate watchmaker’s claws close to its oily reptilian chest. Each lower leg was a piston, a thousand pounds of white bone, sunk in thick ropes of muscle, sheathed over in a gleam of pebbled skin like the mail of a terrible warrior. Each thigh was a ton of meat, ivory, and steel mesh […] And the head itself, a ton of sculptured stone, lifted easily upon the sky. Its mouth gaped, exposing a fence of teeth like daggers. Its eyes rolled, ostrich eggs, empty of all expression save hunger. It closed its mouth in a death grin.”

And sometimes, he was able to capture something beyond wistfulness and dreams, something both timeless and in the moment, the sweep of human history measured against the capacity for human yearning and, well, love. This, from a short story called “The Wilderness”:

“Is this how it was over a century ago, she wondered, when the women, the night before, lay ready for sleep, or not ready, in the small towns of the East, and heard the sound of horses in the night and the creak of the Conestoga wagons ready to go, and the brooding of oxen under the trees, and the cry of children already lonely before their time? All the sounds of arrivals and departures into the deep forests and fields, the blacksmiths working in their own red hells through midnight? And the smell of bacons and hams ready for the journeying, and the heavy feel of the the wagons like ships foundering with goods, with water in the wooden kegs to tilt and slop across prairies, and the chickens hysterical in their slung-beneath-the-wagon crates, and the dogs running out to the wilderness ahead and, fearful, running back with a look of empty space in their eyes? Is this, then, how it was so long ago? On the rim of the precipice, on the edge of the cliff of stars. In their time the smell of buffalo, and in our time the smell of the Rocket. Is this, then, how it was?

“And she decided, as sleep assumed the dreaming for her, that yes, yes indeed, very much so, irrevocably, this was as it had always been and would forever continue to be.”

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A version of this post appeared on Indies Unlimited on June 15, 2012. David Antrobus also writes for Indies Unlimited and BlergPop. Be sure to check out his work there if you like what you read here.

My God, It's Full Of Stars!

This week, I’m going to be a little more serious than usual. No idea why. I just am. And I want to talk about star ratings. No, I don’t want to discuss the relative merits of Justin Bieber or Katy Perry, fascinating as that might be; I’m talking about the graded star method many websites use to rate various products, but specifically as it pertains to indie authors, that aspect of the review system used by the mighty Amazon.

Sometimes feeling like I’ve accidentally wandered into a cosmologist convention, I keep hearing my fellow writers discussing star systems, conversations that range from the alleged importance of 5-Star ratings to dire warnings of the career damage caused by 1-Star ratings. There are even dark tales of jealous authors deliberately dropping a single star on the book pages of their competitors… a frankly bizarre behaviour, if true, since my admittedly collectivist-hippie-skewed moral compass informs me we’re less competitors than we are colleagues. My favourite star-related content is our own M. Edward McNally’s regular inclusion of 1-Star customer ratings for classic novels. The ratings, along with their concomitant cluelessness, are hilarious.

But let’s back up for a moment… as the actress said to the… oh, wait. No. Serious, remember? When I started writing music reviews for PopMatters, a large and very eclectic online pop culture magazine, unlike other similar outlets at the time, we didn’t do number ratings. I liked that. We were encouraged to really delve into the guts of whatever we were reviewing, blending journalistic facts with a more personal exploration of the music. I don’t regret my time writing for them one little bit. At the time, I was reading the thoughts of other music writers, many of whom debated the purpose of reviews: some arguing they were basically consumer guides and others championing the so-called “think piece” aspects of the form, and everything in between. If you’re interested, Robert Christgau is a great proponent and practitioner of the former (he literally names his reviews dating back to 1969 “Consumer Guides”), while the latter would probably be best personified by the late Lester Bangs (if you haven’t read him, do so, he’s great).

Now, I won’t claim I stopped writing for the site on any regular basis solely due to their introduction of number ratings, but I’m sure it was a factor when I decided to move on. They honestly felt arbitrary. Was my job to grade or rate, or was it to explore? Some might say both, and I’ve some sympathy with that position, but regardless, my own emphasis was very much on the latter. Why did it matter what number I assigned? Surely, the exploration of my reactions to the music, maybe some insight into the music’s roots or influences, comparisons with similar artists, were more valuable than a numerical rating… otherwise, why bother with the written review at all? I’ve never subscribed to the view, incidentally, that sees critics as failed artists, as something parasitic or even malicious. Oh, sure, some of them can be—music writing in particular can often be damn near toxic with snark—but at its best, the great review is complementary to the art it describes or eulogizes. It can and ought to be a symbiotic relationship.

So Amazon is in the business of selling books. They know the consumer likes to see a product quantified, so star ratings make sense for them. But for me—and I know I’m not completely alone in this—I want to hear about someone’s emotional engagement with a work. I want to know how it made them feel, what other things it reminded them of, whether plot- or character-driven, whether the language was robust or fragile, pretty or brutal. The last thing I really care about is some fairly arbitrary star ratings. Because they are arbitrary. I’ve heard writers complain about a 3-Star rating they just had, which suggests they think it means the book is considered mediocre. For what it’s worth, if forced at gunpoint to care, I’d make a comparison to the movie review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, whereby a 60% rating is considered Fresh (as opposed to Rotten). Now, my math skills are as rudimentary as the reasoning abilities of a recently-defenstrated pygmy hedgehog, but even I can work out that 3 Stars is… uh … 60%. Right?

All of which is my roundabout way of saying: don’t sweat the numbers, read the reviews themselves—at their best, they’re far more crucial to an understanding of whether you will enjoy a work or not. And my fellow indie authors, unless you strongly suspect malice (and Amazon will remove reviews that are demonstrably vindictive or spiteful), try to ignore the numerical aspect of the review and really get to grips with the words themselves. They’re our stock-in-trade, after all, or we’d all be accountants instead. And, yeah, probably richer.

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A version of this post appeared on Indies Unlimited on June 8, 2012. David Antrobus also writes for Indies Unlimited and BlergPop. Be sure to check out his work there if you like what you read here.

Armless and Legless

Our wonderful interwebs are full of blogs and writing websites that showcase an endless procession of writing advice and tips. We’ve discussed the pros and cons here on Indies Unlimited many times, so I don’t want to go over old ground. While planning the content of this post in the quiet small hours, however, it seemed like a good idea at the time to take a slightly skewed, bizarro-world look at writing tips using our trusty list format. Now, it seems… well, slightly stupid. But since I didn’t have a backup, here it is, anyway: a new kind of list. Twenty Five Writing Tips That Probably Suck. Seriously, though, I’m not wasting anyone’s time: loosely hidden within this apparent drivel are some actual decent tips, once they’re extricated and unpacked. You’ll see.

1. Understatement is absolutely essential. Without it, you’re dead in the water. In fact, there’s no hope whatsoever.

2. Avoid semicolons; they’re just not necessary.

3. The complete avoidance of passive clauses is very much advised by me.

4. Weather ewe think your aloud two ore knot … always rely on you’re spellchecker.

5. Eschew ostentatious verbosity, and exhibit an overall predisposition toward a paucity of embellishment.

6. Eighty-six dialect unless yer lugholes are mint, yo.

7. If you inject opinion, I think you should be struck from the author’s list, skewered on a buck elk’s rack during rutting season, and parboiled in liquefied hamster entrails.

8. Over-explaining can lead to a kind of paralysis on the part of the reader, during which their mental processes become overloaded and, in a classic demonstration of diminishing returns, become less able to absorb the full import of your writing, which behooves you to restrict exposition to a minimum, when all is said and done.

9. Entre nous, while foreign languages are awesome, au courant bon mots may appear excessive if they become de rigeur, and may even invite schadenfreude, so caveat emptor, and try to avoid this type of mea culpa or faux pas, comprende?

10. Omit, pare and cull entirely redundant, superfluous and needless words.

11. Pay great attention, to how you use punctuation.

12. As I once thought-spoke to that gelatinous glob of alien protoplasm from Arcturus over a pint of fermented gerbil spleens, write what you know!

13. Do not use commas, to bracket phrases, that are essential to a sentence’s meaning.

14. Never let someone else edit edit your own work; it’s you’re baby, and besides, you don’t know wear they’ve been.

15. Stop!! Think about the overuse of exclamation points!!

16. Make hay while the iron’s hot and don’t mix your metaphors.

17. My impression is that it’s probably not the best idea to be sort of vague about stuff.

18. Make sure your grammar works good.

19. Always finish what you

20. Do not construct gobsmackingly awkward adverbs.

21. Do not misuse apostrophe’s.

22. In dialogue, be sure the reader knows who’s speaking, said the Dalai Lama.

23. Avoid tired clichés like the plague. When you notice one in your writing, hone in on your target and deep six it with extreme prejudice.

24. A while back, right over there someplace, I was talking to some guy about this one: be specific with details.

25. As Orwell once said, only to immediately break his own rule: “never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.” George, dude, you were awesome and stuff, but isn’t “figure of speech” itself a, um, figure of speech?

I kid, of course. Orwell knew what he was talking about. Otherwise, how else would he have teamed up with that Rickenbacker dude to invent popcorn? And now, as a treat for wading through my inanities, here’s another guy who actually knew what he was talking about, so much so that he once said “When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.” Exactly. Now he’s the type of guy you need to listen to. Not me, him. Sadism and cockroaches notwithstanding.

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A version of this post appeared on Indies Unlimited on June 1st, 2012. David Antrobus also writes for Indies Unlimited and BlergPop. Be sure to check out his work there if you like what you read here.

Well Defined? Nevermind

Writers. We write. And our tools are words. So, while contemplating this week’s blog post, I had the brilliant idea of writing about words and their definitions, using… words and their definitions. It’s almost perfect. If by “perfect” I mean “utterly confusing and almost entirely pointless.” So, anyway, a couple years ago, The New York Times compiled a list of the 50 words most likely to stump their own readers. Amazingly, “defenestrate” was not among them (if it had been, I would have defined it as “To demonstrate a specialty fencing technique often used to remove the fins of albacore tuna”). Unhelpfully, perhaps, they neglected to include definitions. Which is where I come in. Don’t get me wrong—this being the internet which, like nature, abhors a vacuum—somebody already came along and performed this admirable service, but I’m going to go one better. I will proceed to pick 13 of the 50 words, more or less at random, and provide not one but two definitions, one of which is the correct one and one which I made up out of whole cloth for no other reason than to be extremely annoying. And if you’re just as bored as me (woah, Cobain flash), you can follow along and expose me for the consummate liar I am. And since I’m also most likely stealing this whole idea from a board game or something, I’m a liar and a thief (lookit, another Cobain flash).

1. Nascent.

a) The act of saying no to the wearing of artificial fragrance. Smells like teen spirit? Uh-uh. Not a chance when we’re being all nascent.
b) Just coming into existence and beginning to display signs of future potential.

2. Hubris.

a) Excessive pride.
b) A type of cheese rendered from human fat. Illegal in most countries.

3. Jejune.

a) While reciting the months of the year, “jejune” is the act of stammering inexplicably over the summer months (see also, “Jejuly”).
b) Naïve, simple.

4. Profligacy.

a) Reckless extravagance; wastefulness.
b) The entire body of work left by an academic.

5. Austerity.

a) Sternness or severity of manner or attitude.
b) The quality of an upside down gaze, chiefly Aus. Was coined during the 1956 Melbourne Olympics by tourists attempting to capture the peculiar way Australians stared at them and their touristy Northern Hemisphere ways.

6. Solipsistic.

a) The slightly desperate and certainly reckless act of slipping your own sister a sedative to shut her up after a long day of her pointing out how badly you suck at life.
b) The view or theory that the self is all that can be known to exist.

7. Redoubtable.

a) Formidable, esp. as an opponent.
b) Something so ludicrously implausible that you will not only doubt it, but you will return and doubt it again.

8. Obstreperous.

a) Noisy and difficult to control.
b) Behaviour typical of a gynaecologist with a throat infection.

9. Sanguine.

a) A flightless bird from Antarctica that has been officially sanctified by the Vatican.
b) Optimistic or hopeful, especially in a bad situation.

10. Egregious.

a) Outstandingly bad; shocking.
b) An online lobbying group for men named Greg.

11. Polemicist.

a) A drug store employee native to Poland.
b) A person skilled in verbal or written attacks.

12. Hegemony.

a) Leadership or dominance of one country over another.
b) The unit of currency used in small hedgehog economies.

13. Feckless.

a) Lacking initiative or strength of character.
b) The baffling inability to use profanity in the country of Ireland.

I hope this was an enjoyable exercise for you all. Personally, since puns make me physically ill, I found it excruciating, but in the last words of someone who keeps spookily hijacking my post from beyond the grave: peace, love, empathy (the latter meaning “an illness brought on by exposure to the letter ‘m’”).

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A version of this post appeared on Indies Unlimited on May 25, 2012. David Antrobus also writes for Indies Unlimited and BlergPop. Be sure to check out his work there if you like what you read here.

From Minds Profound

"Innocent of what?" © Unforgiven (1992)Previous articles on Indies Unlimited have established that writing rules are far from absolute, that they are best interpreted more as guides than anything binding. But far more effective than a plainly stated rule is the aphorism, that memorable quote that both entertains and teaches… something. I keep a running list of quotes in general, but those pertaining to writing have pride of place, and they can alternately act as impetus or inspiration when you’re flagging, as an alarm bell when you’re off track, as a way to stay humble when you become overinflated, or simply as a way to laugh at yourself when you happen to forget how absurd you are. I present to you my Top Twenty Awesome Writing Quotes, mostly written by other writers, but remember: whatever germ of a lesson they contain, it’s not a rule, okay?

20. “I once asked this literary agent what kind of writing paid the best.  He said, ‘Ransom notes.’” Get Shorty (1995) – Harry Zimm (Gene Hackman)

Money? I vaguely remember that stuff. It’s green, I think. I swear, incidentally, that Gene Hackman gets some of the most gleefully brilliant lines in Hollywood. As Sheriff Daggett in Unforgiven, after being told he’d just beat the daylights out of an innocent man, he got to say this: “Innocent? Innocent of what?” To which there is quite simply no conceivable answer.

19. “A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.” – Richard Bach

He wrote about a seagull. He said this. Succinct is this guy’s middle name. Or wait, isn’t it “Livingston”? No. No, that was the seagull.

18. “It is impossible to discourage the real writers – they don’t give a damn what you say, they’re going to write.” – Sinclair Lewis

It’s not a job, it’s a calling. Like the urge to use the bathroom. If you feel that, Lewis is talking about you. The writing thing, not the bathroom thing.

17. “If you’re going to be a writer, the first essential is just to write. Do not wait for an idea. Start writing something and the ideas will come. You have to turn the faucet on before the water starts to flow.” – Louis L’Amour

What might have been a fairly ordinary, common sense platitude is rescued—like when the guy with the poncho and the sandblown crowsfeet rides into town—by a startlingly apt metaphor.

16. “I’ve been reading reviews of my stories for twenty-five years, and can’t remember a single useful point in any of them, or the slightest good advice. The only reviewer who ever made an impression on me was Skabichevsky, who prophesied that I would die drunk in the bottom of a ditch.” – Anton Chekhov

Um, only take the bad reviews to heart? No, that’s not what Chekhov’s saying here at all. I’m not really sure what he’s saying, but it made me laugh anyway. Odd. I don’t remember him being this funny in Star Trek.

15. “You must write your first draft with your heart.  You rewrite with your head.  The first key to writing is to write, not to think!” Finding Forrester (2000) – William Forrester (Sean Connery)

You won’t go too far wrong if you remember this, while simultaneously forgetting Sean Connery ever starred in this clunky embarrassment of a movie.

14. “I’m all in favour of keeping dangerous weapons out of the hands of fools. Let’s start with typewriters.” – Frank Lloyd Wright

Okay, it’s dated, but it’s too good to exclude on that basis. If you must, substitute “laptops” for the last word.

13. “If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn’t brood. I’d type a little faster.” – Isaac Asimov

He means it, too. You can just tell.

12. “There’s no free lunch. Writing is work. It’s also gambling. You don’t get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but ­essentially you’re on your own. ­Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don’t whine.” – Margaret Atwood

Well, that told us. Wait, I didn’t know that about the pension plan…

10. “To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it’s about, but the inner music the words make.” – Truman Capote

Included here because I agree one hundred per cent. You don’t have to, but it’s my list.

9. “If you can’t annoy somebody with what you write, I think there’s little point in writing.” – Kingsley Amis

Put more strongly than I’d put it, but then again, Amis was by all accounts a class one melonfarmer. I’ve always said, however, that you sure can’t worry about offending people when you write. Unless you’re aiming for anodyne, that is.

8. “I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning and took out a comma. In the afternoon, I put it back in.” – Oscar Wilde

The sad part is, I get this. I know this. And I’ll bet you do too. I’ll also bet Wilde was tempted to remove that damn comma again by nightfall.

7. “What creates a writer is huge, psychological dysfunction.” – Kathy Lette

Well, we’ve hinted at it here, before. Kathy Lette, however, just comes right out and says it. And it’s kind of a horrible relief. Like when Asimov’s doctor up there delivers the bad news.

6. “Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.” – Gene Fowler

Easy, you say? Anyone else detect the sarcasm here?

5. “Poets need not go to Niagara to write about the force of falling water.” – Robert Frost

Worth remembering. An antidote to “write what you know”. There’s a reason we have an imagination. But it takes a poet to say it so memorably and so well.

4. “Ever tried? Ever failed? No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” – Samuel Beckett

And you thought Richard Bach was succinct? Also, why isn’t the word “succinct” only one syllable?

3. “The King died and then the Queen died. That is a story. The King died and then the Queen died of grief. That is a plot.” – E M Forster

Brilliant. Since I like this kind of thing so much, I will throw in a bonus 3.b.: “The cat sat on the mat is not a story. The cat sat on the other cat’s mat is a story.” – John le Carré

2. “Times are bad. Children no longer obey their parents and everyone is writing a book.” – Cicero, circa 43 BC

All I know from this is that things don’t change all that much and that Cicero would probably have a catastrophic mental breakdown if he lived today.

1. “Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them.” – Flannery O’Connor

Ha ha. That one’s a stand alone. Flannery sure doesn’t need me to expand on it. Not that any of them do, really. But I had to write a blog post, so I have. Enjoy.

Or, as Dorothy Parker (who clearly didn’t have Text Edit handy) once said: “I might repeat to myself, slowly and soothingly, a list of quotations beautiful from minds profound; if I can remember any of the damn things.”

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A version of this post appeared on Indies Unlimited on May 18, 2012. David Antrobus also writes for Indies Unlimited and BlergPop. Be sure to check out his work there if you like what you read here.