I Want To Be a Time Machine

by Sean Taylor

I'm currently listing to the audio book of Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine on my drive to and from work. I must admit it took me longer to get engrossed in it than a Bradbury usually does. I kept waiting for something, well, outside of the normal to happen. Aliens show up to kidnap the Green Machine. A circus with a sinister showman gives Doug and Tom the stink-eye. Charlie turns on his parents and feeds them to the lions on a virtual reality veldt.

But, in spite of the lack of typical Bradbury action, I stuck with it. And danged it if didn't pull me in despite my preconceptions as to what a Bradbury story should be.

Now, why do I bring this up? Because I'm thinking about the power of story. You read that correctly. Story. Not Stories. The collective singular whole.

All of the stuff that is classic Bradbury is there... the struggle between nostalgia and the future, people's love/hate relationships with technology, the true fiction of the imagination. But above all in Dandelion Wine is Bradbury's eye for history and the knowledge that whatever the present is, it too will soon become that lists of facts we know as history.

So, what I see mostly in this book (and this is the point of why I'm writing) is the dichotomy between history as a bunch of memorized or recorded facts and history as a living, breathing story.

Ray Bradbury knew about the power of story.

That's why Colonel Freeleigh wasn't just an old man boring kids with old memories. He was a time machine into the past. And the boys were smart enough to realize that. That's why when he died, Doug exclaimed that not only had one man died, but that the whole Civil War had died, Honest Abe had died, at least to him and his playmates.

But, you may interject, facts are true, and stories are merely the storyteller's interpretations of the events. Well, one might argue (and many do as I learned as a History minor in college) that even the facts are the interpretations of those who managed to wrest control from others in order to write the text books and the news and reports of the time.

I, on the other hand, argue quite a different point.

Facts are dead. Facts are little lumps of truth that decay and rot and do nothing on their own but start off dead and continue to get deader everyday. Stories are the miracle that brings facts to life. Stories are the exotic elixir that restore vim and vigor to the bones and rotted muscle of facts and makes them dance and shoot and jump onto trains and fly airplanes and drop bombs and date your grandmother when she was younger and prettier than even you are now. Ultimately, stories are the life facts need in order to matter.

Facts need stories.

But for stories you have to look deeper than just the facts (ma'am).

Looking for stories is what led me to ask my MeMe about my mom as a kid, to ask her about what attracted her to my Papa when they started dating, to ask about when the brothers build the house she lived in, to ask about the drug store I saw in old family photos.

Stories are why I started to research the U.S.S. Zeilin, the ship my Granddaddy Thigpen served on in WWII in the South Pacific. Stories are why I love the old guitar my Granddaddy Taylor gave me when he died. It's full of stories that only he and I shared in his back office, playing and tuning that ol' six string.

Stories are, and I really don't think I can overstate this -- stories are the very things that make facts stick around. Stories are history. They only become mere facts after the stories are forgotten. They only become stale and rote memory when the stories are no longer told. Then they remain as the dates and epitaphs on the graves where the stories lie buried.

History is our combined story. But it's also your story. It's also my story.

History is why I tell the same stories over and over again when my family drives through Swainsboro where I grew up. I tell about how the old high school is gone now, but there, right there, was the hallway where my friends and I shoved a dead frog into a girl's locker. And that place -- follow my fingers, see where I'm pointing -- that's where the classroom was where Todd Jeter made our one neck-less teacher (a birth defect, I believe) snap around his shoulders and everything down to his waist by slamming his book on the desk. (The poor man couldn't just turn his head, not without a neck.) When we drive a mile further, I mention the library where one of my earliest girlfriends Christie and I used to kiss in one of the aisles, and my brother and our friends would play Bloody Mary in the men's bathroom with the lights out. I drive through the other side of town and mention the day I thought my mom was going to beat the crap out of me because I wandered for a full day with friends after a bomb threat got school dismissed for the day and didn't call her until the evening to let her know I was okay and where I was.

Some would be inclined to dismiss it all as nostalgia. But it's not. It's history.

Sure, I don't have a story from Pearl Harbor, but someone does. I don't have a story from the Civil Rights marches, but somewhere in my circle of friends I know there must be one who does (or has a parent who does). But history happened all around me too, and not just with frogs and Bloody Mary and neck-less teachers. Where was I, and what was I doing when the space shuttle blew up, and what did I learn from it? Where was I when John Lennon was shot? What about on 9-11 when the towers fell? I was alive, damn it, and I have a story. I'm a part of that history.

I'm a part of history, period. My story is my history. It's important. It's a collection of  the facts that make me who I am. It's the binding that holds the stories that make those facts mean something real. It's me. And it's important that I pass "me" down through time just like it's important that you pass "you" down through time. You see, I want to be a time machine too, just like Colonel Freeleigh.

I only need someone to listen.

The Writer Will Take Your Questions Now #315 -- Nostalgia Filter

How much does a sense of nostalgia influence (or inspire, 

and is there a difference) your current body of work?

I'll admit that I'm a nostalgia-filtered person. I can't help it. And it's getting even stronger the older I get. I get nostalgic about my MeMe's house. I get nostalgic about the easy-reader, illustrated classic paperbacks I grew up reading. I get nostalgic about my Childcraft Encyclopedia set (plus the first few years of annuals) I devoured during my childhood. I get nostalgic about things like my Aunt Sarah's salt and pepper shakers that she gave Lisa and me as a wedding present.

And yes, I also get nostalgic about the things that influenced me as a writer.

In short. I'm a sap. Plain and simple.

But if I'm doing my job right as a writer, I'm trying to keep that nostalgia to mere inspiration and not actually influence on my work. A case in point: Reading C.S. Lewis made me want to be a writer. But my first stories were so influenced by Lewis that they are clearly not my stories. They're me trying to be him.

The same could go for all this pulp work I'm doing currently but for me having to constantly reset my nostalgia filter while I create. It would be way too easy to just write these characters the way I envision them in my memories, but that's not fair to my readers, nor is it fair to the characters and concepts. Things grow. Things change. Things mature.

So, yes, I want to write stories that feel like something familiar, but not merely something familiar. I want my stories to go beyond that and say something new, something memorable, something intrinsic to the reader.

Writing through Nostalgia-Colored Glasses

We're all inspired to write, at least in part, by things we've seen and experienced before. It's just human nature. When those experiences are looked back upon fondly, that's the birth of nostalgia. It can influence everything from the kind of TV shows we like to watch to the way we dress -- and even we kinds of stories we tell and the way we tell them.

So, that's what we're going to look at this week, this idea of nostalgia and how much it can influence our work as writers.

How much does a sense of nostalgia influence (or inspire, and is there a difference) your current body of work?

Gordon Dymowski: I would definitely say nostalgia inspires my writing: I want readers to feel the same thrill that I experienced reading certain genres. I don't think nostalgia influences my work - I really work hard to have a modern, contemporary voice despite being set in a particular time period. I'm always thinking of what I would like the reader to experience, but work hard to make sure that my prose has a quality of immediacy rather than wistfulness.

Selah Janel: I think nostalgia tends to influence me a great deal, but it does so in different ways. There’s the obvious ploy of dating stories or writing them around pop culture to speak to readers, and I may do that a little with themes of music and the like, but I more or less gravitate to what I really enjoyed while I was growing up. Theme-wise, I’ve always loved folk and faerie tales, I’ve always enjoyed speculating about what else could be out there, and I still continue to hold to those themes. I also think I’ve had this weird romanticism of mundane life since I was a kid, and I find myself going back to that a lot when writing. Genre-wise, I think a lot of my sensibilities were probably shaped by the eighties in some form or another: you could argue that the rock music that creeps into my worlds comes from there, that the vampires I write are a throwback to being influenced by The Lost Boys, all types of things. Still, I don’t like making anything a carbon copy of those influences…I prefer to let it inspire me than to redo it wholesale. If anything, those feelings I got as a kid of being overwhelmed or feeling in love with life or spooked by what I love influence me as much as what I saw on the toy shelf any given day.

Percival Constantine: I think there's a sense of nostalgia in my work, particularly my current serial, VANGUARD. It was very much inspired by the X-Men/Avengers comics of the 70s and 80s. Lots of done-in-one tales that feature a villain and a story while there are plot threads that carry over in the background from issue to issue. My other stories feature this kind of influence as well--my fantasy novel SOULQUEST was very much inspired by Final Fantasy VII, one of my all-time favorite video games, and THE MYTH HUNTER's Elisa Hill wears the influence of Indiana Jones on her sleeve.

What are the benefits of having a strong sense of nostalgia in your work? What are the dangers?

Selah Janel: I think emotionally, people can connect to a very strong sense of nostalgia. If you make it too obvious, it might as well be product placement, but I think if done well, you can really have a type of conversation with your readers. When I read Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine, it doesn’t feel dated to me. I remember what it’s like to have a friend move away, I used to love getting new shoes, that sort of thing. That whole book is nostalgia, and it works tremendously well and has touched a lot of people.  The danger is that if you load something with too much detail, too much pop culture, or too much of your singular experience, it becomes harder for people to relate to, and they’re picturing a materialistic image rather than what that object or experience may have meant to them. In some ways it’s why all these movie remakes miss the mark so horribly: because people are nostalgic for certain franchises, studios assume it’s because of one or two key reasons instead of realizing that it’s much more of an emotional thing, something that’s much harder to reproduce. In a lot of ways, that’s easier to do in books, but you still have to tread a certain line and give a reader a certain amount of space after drawing them in. Otherwise, you risk turning people off or distancing them.

Percival Constantine: The benefits of having a strong sense of nostalgia is that it gives readers something familiar. As much as audiences say they want something new and different, the truth is the majority cleaves towards the familiar. It's why sequels, reboots, and adaptations are so popular in Hollywood, because that's what audiences will go to see in droves. The downside is that too much nostalgia can make it seem like your work is nothing more than a cheap knock-off of whatever property influenced you. So there's a fine line to walk. You want the work to be familiar enough so that audiences will feel comfortable giving it a shot, but at the same time it has to be different enough to set it apart from what's come before.

Gordon Dymowski: Having a sense of nostalgia makes it much easier to build credibility with a reader - after all, if your tale of a two-fisted masked vigilante is like other tales of two-fisted vigilantes, your work is half complete. The danger (and I see this in quite a bit of New Pulp....especially in my own work) is the tendency to be blinded by nostalgia. Sometimes, it's easy to do variations on a theme without bringing anything new, original, or even distinctive. Nostalgia can only take you so far; the rest is dependent upon telling a good story.

How do you know when it becomes too much and starts to impact the story in a bad way, and how do you remedy that in your work?

Gordon Dymowski: My immediate tell-tale sign is when I identify too many plot elements or storytelling tricks that I've picked up from other writers, or I feel conflicted about a particular character's progress in the story. For me, the challenge is to remember that I'm writing within a distinct time and place, and that my writing needs to reflect *now*, even if I am writing in a familiar genre or with a familiar character.

Percival Constantine: That's a tough question. I think if you get to a point where you could replace your main character's name with the name of the character that influences your work without it seeming out of place, then that's a problem. I think nostalgia is good as a starting point, but once you have that template, you have to differentiate it from your influences and help the character come out from under the shadow of those influences. One thing I do is I try to focus more on a tone of nostalgia than nostalgic characters, or to mix and match influences from different characters. For example, if you compared those Avengers comics of the 70s/80s to The Ultimates revamp, there's a clear difference. The Avengers takes a much more hopeful, maybe even idealistic view of the world whereas The Ultimates approaches superheroes with a very nihilist view. I try to keep a similar tone to the former as opposed to the latter. So the world the characters are in, the way I choose to structure my stories, the types of characters I write about, these are all influenced by the Avengers. But the characters themselves aren't just ciphers for the Avengers. You can't point to Gunsmith and say, "that's Captain America" or Paragon and say "totally the Wasp." I may have used aspects of those characters as a starting point, but I built past them in order to stop the characters from being cheap knock-offs. So to answer your question after a very long-winded response, it basically comes down to character.

Selah Janel: For me, it’s not just overdetail, but it’s a certain type of overdetail. If I’m reading something and it’s way too concerned about what characters are wearing and dating every little thing within a certain time period, that’s going to get annoying and slow the story way down, especially if It’s set in the real world.  I lived through the eighties and nineties, I can picture it, I don’t need every little thing to help me live through it again. I think, too, that if people are writing about experiences or time frames that they’re not fully committed to or haven’t lived through and they don’t do the research and really get things wrong, that’s also damning. That just tells me that you were trying to play nostalgia for nostalgia’s sake and not because you care about what you’re writing about. There has to be some sense of emotional connection there and not “oh I’m writing about this geeky thing because people dig it, or this decade because it’s in right now.” People eventually catch on, and will stop reading if they feel that the nostalgia isn’t there for a real reason. At the end of the day, part of nostalgia is not just a love of what’s come before, but a longing for it, a sort of hollowness left by that love, and that’s what you really want to convey. It’s not just “oh, do you remember this?” It’s “Do you remember why you loved that, why you miss it now?”

The Writer Will Take Your Questions Now #293 -- New Pulp, Right and Wrong

What is New Pulp doing right? What is New Pulp doing wrong?

Doing right? Consistently bringing new authors to readers, even if the pool is smaller than we'd like it to be. Keeping great characters alive and reviving them in some cases.

Doing wrong? Relying so heavily on nostalgia. Refusing to grow and accept the expansion of pulp that went into hard-boilded into Noir into spy thrillers into etc. Instead of retreading, we should be using the vibe of pulp and going new places with our prose, our characters, our stories, our tone, our very how and why were are publishing pulp. Embrace the action-packed, tight story-telling and get rid of the nostalgic baggage.

I believe pulp should embrace the kind of storytelling it used to, from horror to crime to costumed vigilante to sci-fi. But our sense of nostalgia is giving us publishers who refuse to do anything that doesn't meet a fairly strict definition of "pulp" that limits it to the costumed vigilante or some other kind of vigilante (jungle, etc.). Where are the freaky horror tales? Where are the Bradbury-esque and Asimov-esque sci-fi adventures that don't feature swash-buckling space heroes? Where are hard-core crime thrillers where good and bad get mixed up and the heroes are as dark as the villains they have to take down? And why are publishers not running the gamut of what pulp can be (in any era, not just the old days) and embracing all kinds of story-telling. Granted, a very few publishers of pulp have opened themselves up to the wider definition, but so many still limit themselves and their writers with a purely nostalgic line of clear cut good guys in masks vs. clear cut cookie cutter bad guys.


Of course, the reason a lot of New Pulp publishers focus on the vigilante fiction could be that every other pulpy genre (horror, thrillers, sci-fi, etc.) has "grown into its own and already has an outlet in the publishing world at large, so "new pulp" is getting relegated to that kind of vigilante story in the eyes of a lot of publishing and reading folks, because that kind of story has nowhere else to go but to New Pulp publishers.

So I guess I should change my "doing wrong" to this: What New Pulp is doing wrong currently is not being able to claim and build on the audience based on the genres that fall outside the masked vigilante to increase the audience throughput into all kinds of New Pulp work. In other words, we could be a uniting force for lots of genre fiction instead of bickering about what is and isn't pulp.

Of course your mileage may vary. Just my opinion.