Bradbury InMon: The Stories

This has been fun! The Bradbury method has definitely added a little something to InMon. It was fun to see what we did with more choices, and what each of us did with our own prompts vs. other people’s.

Here’s the roundup!

  • Tara used my prompt “The Siren” with a titillating yet disturbing piece called “Her Favorite.”
  • Kim wrote a gripping childhood tale about “The Rusty Blade” as well as a warm yet eerie piece called “The Old Straight Path,” based on his own list.
  • Kim also wrote a deliciously moody meeting of spies in “The Ukulele” with Aku’s prompt, and a historical romp with an unsavory king in “The Forest,” based on mine.
  • I wrote about scary insects and commercials in “The Wasps,” based on my own list, and the wake of a battle with evil in “The Darkness Beyond,” based on Kim’s list.

Who did I miss? Speak up!

More news soon.

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The Darkness Beyond: Bradbury InMon Piece the Second

Based on Kim’s prompt, “The Darkness Beyond,” in his Inspiration Monday: Bradbury Edition list.

Beyond the splintered back door, beyond the pummeled steps. Beyond the torn-up turf, the broken fence, the parted trees: Darkness.

And not the empty kind of darkness; not merely the absence of light. This darkness is thick, is breathing, is watching. You can feel it.

It hovers, like a snake raising its head.

Kneeling among the shards of glass on the kitchen floor, your fingers folded into fists, your knuckles bruised and split, you stare back.

You stare back and laugh.

KP’s excellent inspiration led me here. I like it rather more than the piece I wrote from my own prompt. Thanks, Kim!

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The Wasps: Bradbury InMon Piece the First

Based on my list item “The Wasps” for Inspiration Monday: Bradbury Edition.

We don’t know how long he sat there paralyzed.

We were happily occupied with our ham and cheese as we laughed at the ducks. By the time someone noticed him, he was already covered. His hand was raised, pointing at something; his mouth slightly open, about to speak. They crawled over his face, his shoulders, one on the pointing finger. An angry red color, their wings and legs and tapered abdomens made them look like sharp clumps of spikes dotted over his skin and clothes, crawling across his cheek, buzzing around his head.

His sandwich, in the hand that wasn’t pointing, was thick with them.

Someone screamed; someone else quieted her. Some people started making suggestions. Pour water on him; just wait for them to leave on their own; close your mouth for heaven’s sake.

But the real question no one was asking, was why had they chosen him—him and none of us?

They must have left eventually, flown away and let him be, but I don’t remember. I don’t remember how we got them off of him. Perhaps because we never did. Perhaps because they came for us. Perhaps because now we, too, are covered in needle legs and paperthin wings, paralyzed, afraid to move, no longer living but dreaming our lives. Maybe the whole world is covered in things that might sting, if we move the wrong way, say the wrong thing. And the barest flinch may either kill us or set us free.

SPONSORED BY EPI-PEN. LIVE LIFE EPICALLY.

So obviously this wasn’t actually sponsored by Epi-Pen; it just occurred to me as a funny, Welcome-to-Night-Vale-ian ending. The whole first half is based on a real memory I have of turning to see my cousin covered in red wasps at a picnic, afraid to move.

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Bradbury InMon: Time to Use Our Lists

Time for the next installment in the experimental Ray Bradbury edition of Inspiration Monday, based on Bradbury’s own list-making technique.

Check out the lists we created:

Kim

Aku

Me

If I missed you (Tara?), please post your list, leave a comment, and I’ll link to it!

Now What?

Now, we write! Pick an item from your list and write 300 words. Aim first for recreating the feeling that your prompt represents. If that inspires a full story, see where it goes!

Bonus: Pick an item from someone else’s list and write 100-200 words on that. Don’t forget to link back to them!

Post whenever you like, as long as it’s before January 8 (second Monday in January because I will be busy on New Year’s Day).

Thank you for joining me on this journey. Let’s have fun.

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Inspiration Monday: The Bradbury Version

This month in the InMon library, something a little different. But first, let’s look at last month’s submissions. This was a particularly good run, I think. I really enjoyed this serial from Tara, this well-placed replay from Kim, and another from Tara.

Now. What’s going on?

I’ve been dipping back into Ray Bradbury’s Zen in the Art of Writing, a brilliant, short, not-really-zen gem about finding and sustaining your writing inspiration. Bradbury wrote 1,000+ words a day, every day, from the age of 12, but it wasn’t until his twenties that he really started to find his voice. He says:

“…along through those years I began to make lists of titles, to put down long lines of nouns. Those lists were the provocations, finally, that caused my better stuff to surface. I was feeling my way toward something honest, hidden under the trapdoor on the top of my skull. The list ran something like this: THE LAKE. THE NIGHT. THE CRICKETS. THE RAVINE. THE ATTIC. THE BASEMENT. THE TRAPDOOR. THE BABY. THE CROWD. THE NIGHT TRAIN. THE FOG HORN. THE SCYTHE. THE CARNIVAL. THE CAROUSEL. THE DWARF. THE MIRROR MAZE. THE SKELETON.

“I was beginning to see a pattern in the list, in these words that I had simply flung forth on paper…I discovered my old love and fright having to do with circuses and carnivals. I remembered, and then forgot, and then remembered again, how terrified I had been when  my mother took me for my first ride on a merry-go-round.”

That terror, he goes on to say, led him to write Something Wicked This Way Comes. He details several stories he eventually wrote based on most of the items on his list, including those that became The Martian Chronicles and Dandelion Wine. Then:

“In sum, a series of nouns, some with rare adjectives, which described a territory unknown, an undiscovered country, part of it Death, the rest Life. If I had not made up these prescriptions for Discovery I would never have become the jackdaw archaeologist or anthropologist that I am. That jackdaw who seeks bright objects, odd carapaces and misshapen femurs from the boneheaps of junk inside my head, where lay strewn the remnants of collisions with life as well as Buck Rogers, Tarzan, John Carter, Quasimodo, and all the other creatures who made me want to live forever.”

What strikes me about this (aside from, “good gravy, that man could write!”) is its similarity to the thing that originally inspired Inspiration Monday: the prompting method of my first true writing teacher, Miss Judy. She’d spout a list of phrases, long pauses in between, and we’d scribble ideas into our notebooks. They were simple phrases, not wordplay, but evocative. And (though in not quite as dark a way) they touched on the same wonder, intrigue and terror that Bradbury describes.

The magic is that the words are connected first with imagery and emotion. The scenes that get burned onto your brain, and the feelings deep down in your gut that, if you could only recreate them for your readers, might spark something equally familiar and hair-raising.

So here is my proposal

This month’s InMon assignment (and I don’t know if we’ll continue this, but let’s see where it goes), is to make our own lists. Reach back and find the things that frightened and fascinated us as children. Moments we loved and hated. Things that shocked us, stayed with us. Books and cartoons we were obsessed with, and were embarrassed to be obsessed with. We’ll keep each item as simple, short and evocative as the phrases above.

Post your list on your blog at the end of the month, and please leave me a link in the comments of this post. I’ll be trying the exercise along with you. Perhaps each list will only mean something to the person who created it. But I’m curious to see if the same words are evocative for the rest of us, maybe for different reasons.

The following month, we’ll each choose prompts from our own lists and write something. I’ll hash out the details as we get to them.

What do you say? Interested?

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Happy writing!