When we pulled open the door of an Italian restaurant a bellhop in Chicago recommended, I glanced at its name etched into the massive glass pane next to the door. Under the words was an illustration of a circle that seemed faded or splotchy on the bottom half. Curious, it was. Curious was I. “Il Culaccino” with a small “il” and larger letters for the following noun was the eatery’s name. I know no Italian, so it’s not something I’d readily be capable of deciphering. I figured “il’ meant “the.” Yet, because I speak French, I know “Cul” means “bottom,” like in ‘cul de sac’ and “cul’ connotes something circular. Nonetheless, I had no clue.

When the owner sat us, I asked the translation of “culaccino”

“The mark left on a table by a wine glass,” he said.

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It is the question I am asked most often—“How does one become the authorized biographer of a literary legend?”

In this case, the author is Ray Bradbury. I worked with him over twelve years on four books and a graphic novel. Bradbury, of course, is the author of such timeless works of the fantastic as Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and Dandelion Wine, to name a few.

Certainly, every biographer of a living writer or artist has their own decidedly singular path to their subject. In my case, my biography, The Bradbury Chronicles: The Life of Ray Bradbury (HarperPerennial, 2006) grew out a profile I wrote about the author on the occasion of his 80th birthday for the Chicago Tribune Sunday Magazine. But truth be told, there is a more chimerical backstory that begins long before this. The story behind my becoming Ray Bradbury’s biographer was, well, rather Bradburian.

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It’s not even about the absence of the Internet service, solitude, or lack of distractions. Neither simply about the time, I can measure in sunsets instead of hours.

My old van is small but it can fit lots of stories.

She holds only the bare necessities. I include books in that category. I carry three boxes of books in the storage compartment underneath the foldable bed. I laugh that my fearless Dragonfly makes the biggest library that has ever roamed these dirt roads.

Inside, I scale down, but right outside my doors stretches the endless open space. Cooking one-pot meals on a single hob, in a cubicle which is my kitchen, living room, bathroom, and bedroom at once, I am learning to cut down on what’s not essential. Including in my writing. I keep crossing off objects from my list of things to bring on a trip, and metaphors from my new poem.

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As a writing coach, I often hear my clients utter specific reasons why they cannot write. These particular reasons, focused around six words, keep writers stuck behind emotional blocks. But we can work through those blocks and find new ways to craft our words. By moving toward our writing goals, avoiding these six words.

What If

The first two words, “What if” are statements based on fear.

“What if I get a contract and I can’t meet the deadlines?”

“What if I work on this article or book and I get rejected?”

“What if I have only one book in me? Is it worth it?”

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I was in a writing class once in which the teacher decided to do a sentence-by-sentence critique of the first of page a student’s story. The teacher had gone so far as to get an overhead projector so she could display the page and her many, many edits of it in a billboard-sized font for all the class to see. The gist of this exercise, as far as I could tell, was that the story wasn’t working at all, but that with some serious line editing it could be resuscitated and given narrative life.

It was brutal. Not one sentence escaped her pen. Every edit came with an explanation for why this word was wrong or that phrase was unnecessary. I didn’t think the teacher was being unkind, but she did seem to be making a bit of an example of the student’s story: This is how not to write. The lesson, after all, was really not about the student’s story; it was about her sentences, her awkward, graceless, inexact sentences.

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When my writing goes out into the world, I want my name emblazoned on it for all to see. Except for the two times I didn’t.

Real name, pen name, which byline option is right for you? Authors might opt for a pseudonym if they:

• Prefer a barrier between their publishing and private lives.

• Want to shield someone else from the fallout of their writing.

• Need to cordon off their writing from their other professional endeavors.

• Write in a genre typically associated with a gender that is not their own.

• Have established certain expectations in their readers but want to try Something Completely Different.

• Have a name they believe is too difficult to spell or pronounce, or that is identical or confusingly similar to someone who is already famous or infamous.

• Don’t like the name given to them at birth or acquired by marriage.

Examples of literary name changes are as varied as their reasons.

I don’t have enough fingers to count the times I’ve been asked if writing was therapy. I have a therapist for that, and I wouldn’t use my friends, family, or the Internet for that purpose. But writing does help me make sense of the world. The act of getting thoughts out of our heads creates both a closeness and a distance that allows us space to heal.

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On the day the dental specialist told me I had cancer, I started a blog. It was the only response that made any sense to me – to put down words, to document it all. It was the easiest way to keep everyone updated, but more importantly, it felt like the only way I could take control of my own narrative. It was my opportunity to show people how to approach my illness: with honesty, compassion, and humour.

I don’t have enough fingers to count the times I’ve been asked if writing was therapy. I have a therapist for that, and I wouldn’t use my friends, family, or the Internet for that purpose. But writing does help me make sense of the world. The act of getting thoughts out of our heads creates both a closeness and a distance that allows us space to heal.

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I was in Eugene to give a talk several years ago when I came as close as I have ever come to experiencing stage fright. I was still new to the kind of hour-long talks authors are invited to give. As a young man, I had done a fair amount of theater, so I was comfortable enough on the stage – but it is one thing to memorize your lines and blocking, and another thing to more or less wing it alone at a podium. I never script my talks; in fact I barely follow an outline. I knew from the first time I gave a talk that the more improvisational I could be, the better.

However, on this night, as I waited off stage and listened to my introduction, an insidious thought crept into my head. “What if you have nothing to say? What if you get up there, in front of all those people, and simply have nothing to say?” I began picturing myself mute at the microphone, struck dumb by a form of public writer’s block. My heart began to pound. There is a reason comedians say they “died” when they have a bad night. To stand in that spotlight, my silence a testament to my fraudulence, was as unimaginably intolerable to me as death. I had to do something. I had to save my life. And so I said to myself, “Think of something. Think of something to say right now!”

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The first time I sat down to write about my experiences as an expat in Cambodia and the circumstances surrounding my departure from the country, paralysis struck. Suddenly I was wading through memories. I searched for one to jot down that could encapsulate how I’d felt at home in the town of Siem Reap, or how painful it was to need to leave in search of first-world healthcare. Part of writing personal essays or memoir is putting myself mentally back in a particular scene, viscerally remembering all that I had noticed in it so I can choose which details to write about. This time I appeared on street 26, where my German boyfriend’s hostel stood among the banana palms. The dusty red road covered in a mess of traffic came to life, as did the tendrils of jungle that crept toward that traffic, as if the infrastructure of the city were only a temporary obstacle for the tangle of green to overcome. I heard the cries of tuk-tuk la-dyyy from the drivers that lined street, saw the floral pajama sets that the local women wore, smelled the burning trash and incense. Something powerful welled up in my chest, choking me with a former reality that was now intangible. I backed away from my computer, wrapped in a shroud of memory. My mind raced toward the moment I’d gone swimming in a flooded rice paddy and developed an E. Coli sinus infection, and the months of pain, fatigue, IV antibiotics, and hospital visits that followed. Memories passed through me like a ghost, so I turned on a sit-com and distracted myself with it for the next few hours. It was too soon to revisit that tender place in my mind.

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My rights have been returned!

Wait a minute. The rights for two books I signed over to the publishing company. The rights they accepted. Now, they were returning them? What exactly did that mean? That my two books would no longer be available? What about the separate year-long journeys of edits and re-edits I made? And what about all the time I had invested in writing them? And who could forget the waiting game I played—on editorial suggestions, on design, on production. Then came the day when I finally held a copy of each book, along with the excitement that I had written what lay inside the covers. Now, it was all over.

I emailed my executive editor, who was a successful novelist, writing coach, and inspirational article writer. Also, a friend. I needed comfort … reassurance. Was I finished as a writer?

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I recently published my seventh book and first collection of short stories, THE MAN WHO LOVED HIS WIFE. It's both my best book and my worst launch. That's because there was no launch. My indie publisher, Mayapple Press, has plenty of grit and commitment, but only enough pennies in the publicity budget to afford to put my book on their website.

A few weeks before my own non-launch, a friend from grad school published her second novel with a Big Five house. It was promptly reviewed in The New York Times Book Review and elsewhere. As bad as that was, it was nothing compared to googling her stats and finding that she had some 744 reviews on Goodreads--compared to my six.

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It was the day of the Aurora Awards in Vancouver, and Spider Robinson, science fiction grandmaster and author of The Callihan Series, was at the front desk of the hotel where the convention was taking place, asking directions on how to get to Granville. Seeing him there, I had a window of opportunity. I do a podcast called Just Joshing in which I interview authors and other creative people, and here was a living legend in front of me. I looked at myself in the mirror and shrugged, “The worst he can say is no.” I asked Spider Robinson to come on my show. Not only did I get a yes, but he gave me his email and his phone number so I could contact him.

Our conversation was epic. Spider is a man who has lived a very magical life, and it was inspiring listening to him talk about the White House, completing that Robert Heinlein manuscript, and mourning his wife Jeanne. In that conversation, I got a glimpse of the man behind the legend, and I’ll never forget it for as long as I live.

A lot of my success has come from asking. Whether I ask a guest to come on my show, or submit a pitch to an editor, or request a meeting with an agent, there is power with coming out there and asking for what you want. It's something I realize that neither writers nor editors do enough of. Why don't we? When I ask fellow creatives about this, eyes look downward and people get nervous when they answer me. Rejection is a difficult pill to swallow with even the simplest requests.

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