Story Jazz

Create in the moment.

It started with A Night in the Lonesome October…

It started with Dean Wesley Smith Writing into the Dark…

It started with James Artemus Owen turning three random lines into an amazing dragon picture…

It started with Miles Davis and crew and Kind of Blue…

It started with Ray Bradbury’s Magician’s Toyland, his African Veldt and his Martian landscape, exactly one half exhilaration and exactly one half terror…

It started with a Far Land, David Farland to be precise, teaching us the power of resonance in writing and how our influences not only shape us, but shape the readers to prepare them to embrace our stories…

It started with a Fyre: Fyrecon, to be precise, my favorite writing and art conference. They posted a flash fiction prompt every day in October of 2023, and I strove to write a flash piece for every prompt…

It started with me writing too long for the Fyrecon prompts—not that anyone was surprised—and writing full-length short stories… which I began to see as something more…

It started with a favorite October ritual: rereading Roger Zelazny’s A Night in the Lonesome October, one chapter a day through the month of October. I listened to a chapter a day, and I wrote a chapter a day. Here was one of my influences, as David discussed, one of those pieces that informed my view of story…

And though little of Zelazny’s book is recognizable in this work, it was all part of what I call Story Jazz: The influences and experiences that make up a writer’s repertoire to allow you to create a story from the elements deep inside you.

That book was created in the moment. Each day, sometimes on my commute home from work, I dictated a short story… but I recognized these as something more. By day five, surely by day six, I realized that though these short stories were set in three or four different story worlds, they were all one novel. Launched by the prompts, but not bound by the prompts. One long novel, written without a plan.

But with faith. Like Miles Davis and his crew going into the studio with nothing more than a few jazz modalities and a few words of wisdom, and emerging with Kind of Blue, one of the greatest jazz albums in history. No rehearsal, no score, just the freedom to create. As Nina Kariki Hoffman says, “Dare to be bad.”

Ray Bradbury would understand Nina’s motto. I don’t know, but I suspect he appreciated Miles Davis’s grand creation. As dramatized in the opening to Ray Bradbury Theatre episodes, Ray would sit in his cluttered office, look around at his toys and souvenirs and memories, and compose a story on the spot. He never knew what it would be, but he knew he would enjoy the trip. He once jokingly advised writers, “Write a short story a week. No one can write 50 bad stories in a row.”

Or at least, people took this as a joke. But from his own accounts and those of his friends, that was Ray’s method. Every Monday, he wrote a story. On Tuesdays and Wednesdays and Thursdays, he refined it as needed. By the weekend, he sent it out to editors. Every week he wrote a story, from age 12 until he passed away. Doing the math, that’s roughly four thousand stories, Of those, he actually published somewhere around four to six hundred of them. Ten to fifteen percent, which isn’t a bad ratio for any writer.

And of those he did publish, many of them were gold. I call Bradbury’s method of fast writing and looking for the good ones “Panning for gold.”

This method takes a certain amount of courage. It isn’t easy to dare to be bad. But thanks to my mentors, I have learned. When the challenge came up to write a story in a month, a chapter per day with no grand plan, I was ready. I was full of Story Jazz.

Did I succeed? You’ll be the judge, when I release this book. But at another level, I absolutely succeeded. The first audience for any art should be the artist. If you’re not writing something you love, writing is just work. Tedious, disappointing work.

Well, I love A Fine and Dangerous Season. It’s my favorite thing that I’ve ever written. The process off writing it and what I learned about Story Jazz were well worth the time I invested.

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