Who: Sam Weller

Claim To Fame: Sam Weller is the author of Listen to the Echoes and The Bradbury Chronicles: The Life of Ray Bradbury. His is the co-editor of the Bram Stoker Award winning Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury. He has lectured across the United States on the life and work of Bradbury. Weller is the former Midwest Correspondent for Publishers Weekly magazine. He has written for The Paris Review, National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, Slate, Huffington Post and others. His fiction has appeared in numerous magazines, journals and books. Weller is the associate chair and an associate professor in the Creative Writing Department at Columbia College Chicago.

Where To Find Sam: His Website, Amazon, Twitter

Praise For Sam: “Sam Weller knows more about my life than I do.” —Ray Bradbury

When do you like to write? Are you regimented about your writing routine?

I’m a morning writer. It’s when my energy is the best, I have the most motivation, and my mind is clear. I worked for so many years as a journalist that I can pretty much write any time of day, under any conditions, in the midst of total chaos if need be. But if I have my druthers, I prefer a morning at home, a fresh pot of coffee brewed, and some rock or jazz music playing in the background. Music is absolutely essential to my process—essential to my life, really. Every book I’ve written had a soundtrack of sorts that I listened to while I wrote it.

Where do you like to write? What does your ideal work environment look like?

With three daughters, space is at a premium in our house. I wish I had a designated office to go to, but I don’t. Well, I have an office on campus at Columbia College Chicago where I am a professor in the MFA program, but it takes too much time to get to, and it is too distracting with colleagues and students dropping by. So, I choose to crank up Social Distortion or Ramones and write on my laptop on my dining room table after the kids are off to school.

I love working in a clean space, candles lit. I take breaks and walk my dog. Ray Bradbury taught me many lessons, one of which was that the most important time a writer has away from his or her work is when out walking. It affords the mind time to creative problem solve our stories. There is something about being alone and in movement that is very freeing, creatively. It opens the mind.

Do you have any pre-writing rituals or habits before you sit down to write?

I clean the house! Then, the aforementioned coffee and music. Sometimes I will read a bit just to get the alchemy of language flowing in my mind.

What do you do when the writing isn’t coming easy? Do you struggle at all with that dreaded enemy of writing: writer’s block?

We all have bad days. I try my best just to write through them. I work on multiple projects at once, so, if I get stuck, I don’t stop completely. Bradbury was adamant about this and it’s why he was so prolific. Stopping and walking away is surrendering. You must not do that. If I’m having an off day creatively, I just switch to another project or another story that hopefully comes a bit easier. I also read. I tell my writing students that reading is writing. You are growing every time you read. But you have to read as a writer. You have to read closely. You have to reverse engineer what good writers do to tell their stories, so you can learn from them. So, when writing is not happening, read. I also work on other aspects of my writing career: correspondence with my editors, setting up events, pitching ideas, doing interviews like this one. It’s all part of it.

You are not only the author of a masterful biography on one of the great American writers, The Bradbury Chronicles: The Life of Ray Bradbury, but you and Bradbury were close friends. What are some of the greatest lessons that you retained from his approach to writing?

Man, Ray taught me so much, I can’t even begin to explain. He was a bona fide creative genius. He understood the creative mind better than anyone I have ever known. He shared his ethos with me over the course over our twelve years together. Today, when I teach creative writing, Ray teaches through me. I carry his ghost in my heart everywhere I go. There are so many things he taught me, I could write a book. But here are a few important lessons about writing:

Don’t think. DO. Ray believed that first drafts must be impulsive. He believed that the subconscious is smarter than the conscious, so get out of its way. This is how he wrote a draft of Fahrenheit 451 in 9 days. First drafts must be intuitive, great blurts of creative expression. It’s only after the first fast draft that we should then bring in our other-half, our intellectual self, and begin the tough work of conscious rewriting. This is a very important lesson that Bradbury himself picked up as a young writer from author Dorothea Brande’s book, Becoming a Writer.

The other important lesson he hammered home was to write about things you love. If we love our material—the subjects, the stories, the themes—we will bring our energy and passion to the project and, as a result, we will be more propelled by enthusiasm to reach the finish line. This is so important.

I have a Youtube page where I regularly share a lot of the wisdom that Ray taught me. I also share some of it on my twitter feed. If people want to learn me, they should check these out.

Along with books, you contribute regularly to places like the Huffington Post. Does your writing routine change at all when you’re writing a book versus when you’re writing an article? Is there any change in routine depending on what publication you’re writing an article for?

My routine is pretty much the same. Ass-in-seat. Get it done. Neil Gaiman said: “Whatever it takes to finish things, finish. You will learn more from a glorious failure than you ever will from something you never finished.” I believe in this philosophy completely.

All of your work is very research intensive. What is your method for researching and organizing material you might want to use for your future writing?

I spent a day last fall combing through the special collections at the New York Public Library. Oak tables. Banker’s lamps. Cloth gloves. I was holding original letters that were seventy-years old and my heart rate accelerated. I LOVE researching. Every sojourn, every adventure, every excursion is an archeological dig. A treasure hunt. Curiosity propels me, and researching is exhilarating. I love it. I am a lifelong learner. All writers must be. Fiction. Poetry. Nonfiction. It doesn’t matter. If you aren’t curious, you will not grow.

The most important thing a researcher can do is listen. Active listening skills are so freaking underrated in the writing world. When someone is educating me, telling me something, I key-in to every word. The same holds true when pouring over documents, letters, and archival material. Listen to it. Pay close attention. Read between the lines. Good nonfiction writers must be good storytellers. What I do is I absorb all of my research, and through a sort of osmosis, it becomes second nature to me. So, when I sit down to write, the storyteller is allowed to emerge, the butterfly from the chrysalis. If I need to fact check later, I do.

Finally, staying organized is vital. Keeping good notes. Filing things so you can find them quickly. Everything must be done to allow the storyteller to flourish and to not be encumbered by mountains of research chaos.

You are also a tenured professor of Creative Writing. How does teaching the craft help you in your own writing career? What are some common mistakes you see aspiring writers make?

Being around younger creators is gold. It’s the best part of teaching. I think I am more experimental as an artist because of it. Young artists often take more creative risks. They are constantly on the cusp of the next thing and I get to be around this. I love it! My new book, Dark Black, a collection of short stories is punk, it’s Gothic, its supernatural, it’s literary. It has 20 beautiful illustrations. I created the book that I wanted to create, and I let it find a publisher who understood this. This sort of risk taking is what my students do all the time.

The common mistakes I see younger writers make, especially creative nonfiction writers, is they often can’t think outside of themselves. They are too consumed by their own trials and tribulations. It can border on narcissism and it’s not particularly interesting. The world is a huge and bold place. You aren’t the first person to go through things, and you won’t be the last. Look away from the mirror occasionally and out the window. Glorious story is out there!

Great writers tend to be voracious readers. What does your reading habit look like? Can you recommend some of your favorite writers and books?

I became a professional writer in the world of journalism first. This caused me to study great writers who wrote for magazines and also wrote books such as: David Hadju, James Wolcott. Lester Bangs, Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe. Nothing pleases me more as a reader than a finely-crafted feature story in a magazine. And I think studying this so closely charged all of my writing with a compactness and an energy. I read every day. Over morning coffee. On the train going to teach. In bed before I go to sleep. Reading is one of the most important things we can do to grow as writers.

I have go-to books that always jump-start my writing. The Stories of Ray Bradbury will forever be my creative Bible. Capote’s In Cold Blood has so many layers, I don’t think I will ever peel them all away. And the prose is simply majestic. Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethleham. I’ve been reading more poetry lately. I love Langston Hughes and N. Scott Momaday. Haki Madhubiti is one of my heroes. He is the real deal.

My new book is modern Gothic, so I have read a lot in that realm. Classics, of course, including Bradbury’s The October Country, and Peter Straub’s indispensable two-volume anthology, American Fantastic Tales, but also horror and supernatural collections by Joe Hill and Paul Tremblay. Those guys are fantastic.

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