We’ve been spending a lot
of time with Ray Bradbury in my class.
Oh, sure, I know the guy
died in 2012, but that doesn’t stop us.
We read his short story “Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed” (which is not
part of The Martian Chronicles), and
we watched a video from The Ray Bradbury
Theater of “The Long Years” (which is part of The Martian Chronicles). The
students are also finishing their own versions of Bradbury’s bizarre modern
dinosaur story “The Fog Horn.”
In between all of this, we
watch an old video interview with Bradbury in which he talks about having to
add 25,000 words to Fahrenheit 451. He claims he accomplished this daunting task
by letting the characters come to him and tell him things about
themselves. He reasons that he didn’t
actually write his books; his characters wrote the books by telling him what to
write, and he wrote what they told him.
The kids’ reaction to this
information? That old guy was a whacko!
I understand exactly what
he’s saying, and I’m going to let you in on a secret: Writers are not sane.
Seriously. Writers have people living inside of our
brains who are fighting to get out.
Fighting like hell. I would love
to let these people out of my brain, but right now I don’t have the time. I’m trying to make the time, to find the
time. Okay, they do make it out of my
brain, but they’re all hiding inside half-finished manuscripts. I feel so bad for them just hanging out in
the folders, pressed into lined paper or typed reams of white with black
letters. They’re like the Flat Stanleys
stuck inside my cerebral cortex.
For now, I only have the
time, the patience, and the ability to let one of those crazy whackos out of my
head: Me.
Soon, though, very soon I
might unleash a few more of those voices … uh … characters … because I want
some peace in my mind and also because I want to prove to my students that I
can be whacko, too (as if they don’t already know this). Sometimes I’m like the clown on the water
tower: armed with words, my insane sense of the ironic, and poised to jump over
the side into literary oblivion.
For the time being,
though, I’ll have to be satisfied with E. D. Heliand because I’m not sure if I’m
up to Bradbury’s extra 25,000 words yet, but I’m not one to let a good writer’s
advice go to waste. Even a dead writer
whose words live on.
