I know, I know….I’m going old school here. But you have to know that I grew up reading old-school sci-fi, courtesy of an older brother who was a Star Trek fiend (and got me hooked as well). He handed me a dog-eared copy of The Martian Chronicles when I was eleven, and that was that. From that point, I read everything Ray Bradbury ever wrote. I went to Mars. I traveled through a moving mural on a wall into a veldt in Africa. I watched stories move in tattoos and flew with an April Witch. The man wrote dystopian futures and strange alternate worlds and influenced so much of what I wanted to capture in my own writing.

And here, in a lecture given in 2001, he gives twelve remarkable pointers to the young writers gathered at the Point Loma Nazarene University’s Writer’s Symposium By The Sea. I found a lot here that was so very spot-on helpful, but one point he made I’ve used over and over again as a writing exercise: Continue reading →