Nowadays I admit I find Bradbury’s sentences to be a bit cloying (not every line has to be a clown on a unicycle juggling torches). But at fourteen I needed someone to show me the explosive power of a well-crafted and imaginative phrase. After Zen in the Art of Writing, I read nothing but Bradbury for a while: Dandelion Wine, Fahrenheit 451, and, best of all, Something Wicked This Way Comes. How I loved Dark’s carnival of sick, reality-deforming rides, especially that awful carousel at the center, a merry-go-round that spun children into old men. Then there were Bradbury’s short stories—everyone knows those short stories—masterpieces of weird fiction that can be read in as few as ten minutes and then never forgotten. There was “A Sound of Thunder,” the story of some hunters who pay dearly for the chance to shoot dinosaurs. Or what about “The Fog Horn,” Bradbury’s tale of a prehistoric creature that falls in love with a lighthouse? His creations were ingenious and dazzling and effortless, and I turned to Zen in the Art of Writing over and over to figure out how he did it. And indeed, he had some sturdy, practical tools to offer the student writer. There was one exercise that involved making lists of nouns to generate story ideas. I still use a variation of it to this day (I reworked it into a game of my own called “Elevator Pitch”).

My father got me a book by Lawrence Block called Telling Lies for Fun and Profit, which collected Block’s how-to columns for Writer’s Digest. I have it still. I dropped my copy into the bath, so it’s now swollen and deformed, and the ink is blurred where I underlined long passages, but to me it’s as valuable as a signed first edition by Faulkner. What I took from Block was that writing is a trade, like other trades, like carpentry. To demystify the art, he focused in on minutiae, like: What’s a great first sentence? How much detail is too much? Why do some shock endings work while others, frankly, suck donkey nuts?

And—I found this especially fascinating—what are the benefits of writing under a pseudonym?

Block was no stranger to pseudonyms. He had a basket of them, had used them to create particular identities for particular works of fiction. Bernard Malamud once observed that a writer’s first and most challenging creation is himself; once you’ve invented yourself, the stories will flow naturally from your persona. I got a charge out of the idea that Block would, when it suited him, throw on a new face and write novels by people who were themselves fictions.