“Do you think you have your own style, Nige?”
“Yeah, people look at one of my plaster board ceilings and know straight away it’s a fecking Perkins.”
We’re in the Tavern, talking during a pub quiz drinks break. Nige doesn’t ever officially take part in the quiz, preferring to snipe in from the side when he knows the answer to a question and stick to slurping lager when he doesn’t.
This can lead to somewhat bizarre conversations, like earlier:
Me: “Seen the latest Fringe yet?”
Nige: “Elton John!”
Me: “The one where they break out of the amber.”
Nige: “Great White fecking shark!”
Me: “We could just form a team, you know.”
Nige: “Piers Brosnan!”
Now, I get in two more drinks and say, “It’s just that I’ve been writing this story for a magazine that for one issue wants stories written in the way of Ray Bradbury.”
“Now, there was a proper writer,” he says. “Fahrenheit 451 was a brilliant book. Mind you, the Establishment don’t really need to burn fecking books anymore, do they, because the internet’s turned everyone illiterate anyway.”
“I thought it would kind of stifle my individuality, to write like someone else. But it’s actually made me work harder on aspects of my writing that I didn’t realise were missing or kind of weak.”
“I think it’s the same with anything, Tel. Take football. You start out copying all the top players; picking up their tricks – we all do that as kids. But the kid who gets noticed by the scouts is the one who’s doing his own thing. The one who spends hours every day just kicking a ball against a wall and controlling it.”
“And were you that kid, Nige?”
“No, I was the kid who wanted to do everything – football, cricket, cycling, even fecking Meccano. I never had that single-mindedness you need to succeed. Anyway – so that lone kid gets taken on by some big club, along with a load of other apprentices. But only about one in ten will make it.”
“Is that one in ten the kid who works the hardest at his technique?” I say.
He grins. “How the feck should I know. I wasn’t that kid, remember? But I do have a theory.”
There is a loud buzz and crackle as the quizmaster’s microphone fires up.
“Once you get past that first stage,” says Nige, “you have to kind of turn it all on its head. Instead of doing your own thing, you have to learn by copying everyone around you who’s better than you. Absorb what they do into your own thing.”
“I think I see that. Good theory.”
“Doris Day!”
#
Back home, I take a glass of whisky into the conservatory and sit with it in the dark. Or the semi-dark, I should say, since light from my neighbour’s safety beam is helpfully flitting over his high fence to illuminate the suspicious undersides of the leaves on our various bushes and small trees.
I think about what Nige said. Although he’d claimed it was just a theory, I think he might have been on to something.
The Bradbury-inspired story I’ve been working on has been a new experience for me. Normally, I get a vision or a feeling or a theme, then work out form it, into the plot. But now, there is another presence working on the story. It isn’t Ray Bradbury himself, of course, since I never met him. But I have been reading a very good biography about him called, ‘On Becoming Ray Bradbury’. It was published in 2011, the year before he died, and the author, Jonathan R. Eller, had full cooperation from his subject, including access to papers, letters, early drafts, unpublished stories, etc.
I’ve been moved by how much I identify with Bradbury’s approach to writing. I learned the same lesson as he, for example, about how my work was never going to really resonate until I accessed my deeper emotions. And I fully chime with his determination to walk what he called a ‘lonely, but a fine path’ between the two imposter: the hacks, as he called them, on the one hand, and the literary intellectuals on the other.
So, while I don’t know Ray personally, I feel a strong kinship with why he wrote.
Writing this story feels like stepping to one side of oneself, almost like collaborating with someone else, to steer myself in a new direction. Or perhaps it’s more like stepping to one side of one’s old self and collaborating with one’s future self.
Whatever, it’s made me more aware than normal of every word choice. Not exactly, “What would Ray do?”, but more like checking with that presence if the story is staying true to the combination of theme, emotion and prose choice that was agreed at the outset.
And within that, I’ve felt the story take on its own life, different to the way my stories have gone in the past.
I switch on my laptop and email Shedders in California about all this. It’s around 5 pm there.
Within minutes he emails back to say:
I wonder if by writing in the style of another writer you can evacuate something about yourself that then lets some other weight or talent come through?Could it be that an aspect of how ‘you’ write (almost imagine Bradbury had to copy your style, what would he have to observe that is quintessentially you?) stops other aspects coming through?An example, for me: in trying less hard to be convincing about coaching / training, the part of me that was convinced came through – which in itself was convincing . . . Just a thought, old bean – maybe ‘being Ray’ made you more yourself in some way.
#
Postscript: I sent ‘Guy’ to Penumbra magazine for their Bradbury-themed issue and on 9th December they emailed me to say it had been accepted.