I WANTED TO LEARN MY CRAFT, and I had not one but two brilliant writers living under the same roof with me—not to mention novelists of all stripes walking through the door every other day. Forty-Seven West Broadway, Bangor, Maine, had to be the world’s best unknown writing school, but it was mostly wasted on me, for two good reasons: I was a bad listener and a worse student. Alice, lost in Wonderland, observes that she often gives herself good advice but very rarely takes it. I get that. I heard a lot of great advice as a kid and never took any of it.

Some people are visual learners; some people can glean lots of helpful information from lectures or classroom discussion. Me, everything I ever figured out about writing stories, I learned from books. My brain doesn’t move fast enough for conversation, but words on a page will wait for me. Books are patient with slow learners. The rest of the world isn’t.

My parents knew I loved to write and wanted me to succeed and understood that sometimes trying to explain things to me was like talking to a dog. Our corgi, Marlowe, could understand a few important words, like “walk” and “eat,” but really, that was about it. I can’t say I was much more developed. So my folks bought me two books.

My mother got me Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury, and while the book is full of fine suggestions for unlocking one’s creativity, what really turned my head was the way it was written. Bradbury’s sentences went off like strings of firecrackers erupting on a hot July night. Discovering Bradbury felt a bit like that moment in The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy steps out of the barn and into the world just over the rainbow—it was like moving from a black-and-white room into a land where everything is in Technicolor. The medium was the message.