Post by Graveyardbride on Apr 17, 2024 7:49:14 GMT -5
Ray Bradbury’s Advise to Prospective Writers
Ray Bradbury, born August 22, 1920, one of the most prolific and successful writers in history, is known for such classics as Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles and The October People, as well as hundreds of short stories. Self-taught for the most part, there’s no doubt the man knew a thing or two about writing. Bradbury loved writing. He took intense pleasure in it, and it shows on every page. Following are some of his best writing tips:
Quantity creates quality. The best hygiene for beginning writers or intermediate writers is to write a hell of a lot of short stories. If you can write one short story a week – it doesn’t matter what the quality is to start, but at least you’re practicing, and at the end of the year, you have 52 short stories, and I defy you to write 52 bad ones. Can’t be done. At the end of 30 weeks or 40 weeks or at the end of the year, all of a sudden a story will come that’s just wonderful.
Get to the big truth first. A novel has all kinds of pitfalls because it takes longer and you are around people, and if you’re not careful you will talk about it. The novel is also hard to write in terms of keeping your love intense. It’s hard to stay erect for two hundred days. So, get the big truth first. If you get the big truth, the small truths will accumulate around it. Let them be magnetized to it, drawn to it, and then cling to it.
Don’t think too hard. The intellect is a great danger to creativity ... because you begin to rationalize and make up reasons for things, instead of staying with your own basic truth – who you are, what you are, what you want to be. I’ve had a sign over my typewriter for over 25 years now, which reads “Don’t think!” You must never think at the typewriter – you must feel. Your intellect is always buried in that feeling anyway.
Don’t write toward a moral. [Trying to write a cautionary story] is fatal. You must never do that. A lot of lousy novels come from people who want to do good. The do-gooder novel. The ecological novel. And if you tell me you’re doing a novel or a film about how a woodsman spares a tree, I’m not going to go see it for a minute.
Writer’s block is just a warning that you’re doing the wrong thing. What if you have a blockage and you don’t know what to do about it? Well, it’s obvious you’re doing the wrong thing, aren’t you? ... You’re being warned, aren’t you? Your subconscious is saying, “I don’t like you anymore.” You’re writing about things I don’t give a damn for. . . If you have writer’s block you can cure it this evening by stopping what you’re doing and writing something else. You picked the wrong subject.
Write what you love. Fall in love and stay in love. Do what you love, don’t do anything else. Don’t write for money. Write because you love to do something. If you write for money, you won’t write anything worth reading
I want your loves to be multiple. I don’t want you to be a snob about anything. Anything you love, you do it. It’s got to be with a great sense of fun. Writing is not a serious business. It’s a joy and a celebration. You should be having fun at it. Ignore the authors who say, “Oh my god, what work, oh Jesus Christ,” you know. No, to hell with that. It is not work. If it’s work, stop it, and do something else.
Read these three things every night. What you’ve got to do from this night forward is stuff your head with more different things from various fields ... I’ll give you a program to follow every night, very simple program. For the next thousand nights, before you go to bed every night, read one short story. That’ll take you 10 minutes, 15 minutes. Okay, then read one poem a night from the vast history of poetry. Stay away from most modern poems. It’s crap. It’s not poetry! It’s not poetry. Now if you want to kid yourself and write lines that look like poems, go ahead and do it, but you’ll go nowhere. Read the great poets, go back and read Shakespeare, read Alexander Pope, read Robert Frost. But one poem a night, one short story a night, one essay a night, for the next 1,000 nights. From various fields: archaeology, zoology, biology, all the great philosophers of time, comparing them. Read the essays of Aldous Huxley, read Lauren Eisley, great anthropologist ... I want you to read essays in every field. On politics, analyzing literature, pick your own. But that means that every night then, before you go to bed, you’re stuffing your head with one poem, one short story, one essay – at the end of a thousand nights, Jesus God, you’ll be full of stuff, won’t you?
Style is truth. Style is truth. Once you nail down what you want to say about yourself and your fears and your life, then that becomes your style and you go to those writers who can teach you how to use words to fit your truth.
Metaphors make great stories. If you’re a storyteller, that’s what makes a great story. I think the reason my stories have been so successful is that I have a strong sense of metaphor. And that with my stories, you can remember it because I grew up on Greek myths, Roman myths, Egyptian myths and the Norse Eddas. So when you have influences like that, your metaphors are so strong that people can’t forget them.
Study the work of the masters. I used to study Eudora Welty. She has the remarkable ability to give you atmosphere, character and motion in a single line. In one line! You must study these things to be a good writer. Welty would have a woman simply come into a room and look around. In one sweep she gave you the feel of the room, the sense of the woman’s character, and the action itself. All in 20 words. And you say, How’d she do that? What adjective? What verb? What noun? How did she select them and put them together?
But only the old ones. [Read as many short stories from the turn of the (20th) century as you can, but] stay away from most modern anthologies of short stories, because they’re slices of life. They don’t go anywhere, they don’t have any metaphor. Have you looked at The New Yorker recently, have you tried to read one of those stories? Didn’t it put you to sleep immediately? They don’t know how to write short stories.
You don’t become a writer by taking writing classes. I took a writing course in summer school in 1939, when I was in high school. But it didn’t work. The secret of writing was, to go and live in the library two or four days a week for 10 years. I graduated from the library having read every single book in it. And along the way I wrote every day of every week of every month, for every year. And in 10 years, I became a writer.
You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do – and they don’t. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James, but what if you don’t want to write like Henry James? They may like John Irving, for instance, who’s the bore of all time. A lot of the people whose work they’ve taught in the schools for the last 30 years, I can’t understand why people read them and why they are taught. The library, on the other hand, has no biases. The information is all there for you to interpret. You don’t have someone telling you what to think. You discover it for yourself.
Write when the idea strikes. The short story, if you really are intense and you have an exciting idea, writes itself in a few hours. I try to encourage my student friends and my writer friends to write a short story in one day so it has a skin around it, its own intensity, its own life, its own reason for being. There’s a reason why the idea occurred to you at that hour anyway, so go with that and investigate it, get it down. Two or three thousand words in a few hours is not that hard. Don’t let people interfere with you. Boot ’em out, turn off the phone, hide away, get it done. If you carry a short story over to the next day, you may overnight intellectualize something about it and try to make it too fancy, try to please someone.
Go your own way. When I started writing seriously, I made the major discovery of my life – that I am right and everybody else is wrong if they disagree with me. What a great thing to learn: Don’t listen to anyone else, and always go your own way.
Practice word association. Three things are in your head: First, everything you have experienced from the day of your birth until right now. Every single second, every single hour, every single day. Then, how you reacted to those events in the minute of their happening, whether they were disastrous or joyful. Those are two things you have in your mind to give you material. Then, separate from the living experiences are all the art experiences you’ve had, the things you’ve learned from other writers, artists, poets, film directors and composers. So all of this is in your mind as a fabulous mulch and you have to bring it out. How do you do that? I did it by making lists of nouns and then asking, What does each noun mean? You can go and make up your own list right now and it would be different than mine. The night. The crickets. The train whistle. The basement. The attic. The tennis shoes. The fireworks. All these things are very personal. Then, when you get the list down, you begin to word-associate around it. You ask, Why did I put this word down? What does it mean to me? Why did I put this noun down and not some other word? Do this and you’re on your way to being a good writer.
It was only when I began to discover the treats and tricks that came with word association that I began to find some true way through the minefields of imitation. I finally figured out that if you are going to step on a live mine, make it your own. Be blown up, as it were, by your own delights and despairs.
Take off the safety harness. You’ve got to jump off the cliff all the time and build your wings on the way down.
Write only for yourself. You can’t write for other people. You can’t write for the left or the right, this religion or that religion, or this belief or that belief. You have to write the way you see things. I tell people, make a list of 10 things you hate and tear them down in a short story or poem. Make a list of 10 things you love, and celebrate them.
Use every experience that touches you. Any experience that touches you, in any particular way, is good. It can be a horrible experience. I saw a car crash when I was 15 here in Los Angeles and five people died as a result of it. I arrived at the scene within 20 seconds of hearing the collision. It was the worst mistake I ever made in my life. I didn’t know what I was running into. People had been horribly mangled and decapitated. So for months after, I was shaken. It’s probably the reason I never learned to drive. I was terrified of automobiles for a long time after that but I turned it into a short story called “The Crowd” six or seven years later ... So out of this horror – this really terrible event – you take something that has taught you a certain kind of fear and you pass on to others and say, “This is what the car can do.”
Indulge in your own personal madness. If you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next. You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories – science fiction or otherwise. Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.
Don’t be afraid to cut. Most short stories are too long. When I wrote the novel Something Wicked This Way Comes, the first draft was a hundred and fifty thousand words. So I went through and cut out fifty thousand. It’s important to get out of your own way. Clean the kindling away, the rubbish. Make it clear.
Don’t be afraid to write crap, either. Whatever it is – whatever it is, do it! Sure there are going to be mistakes. Everything’s not going to be perfect. I’ve written thousands of words that no one will ever see. I had to write them in order to get rid of them. But then I’ve written a lot of other stuff, too. So the good stuff stays, and the old stuff goes.
Get comfortable with the idea of work. Let’s take a long look at that faintly repellent word WORK. It is, above all, the word about which your career will revolve for a lifetime. Beginning now you should become not its slave, which is too mean a term, but its partner. Once you are really a co-sharer of existence with your work, that word will lose its repellent aspects.
And you’ll never really have to do it. I write all the time. I get up every morning not knowing what I’m going to do. I usually have a perception around dawn when I wake up. I have what I call the theater of morning inside my head, all these voices talking to me. When they come up with a good metaphor, then I jump out of bed and trap them before they’re gone. That’s the whole secret: to do things that excite you.
Surround yourself with true believers. Get rid of those friends of yours who make fun of you and don’t believe in you. When you leave here tonight, go home, make a phone call, and fire them. Anyone who doesn’t believe in you and your future, to hell with them.
Write a little every day. Action is hope. At the end of each day, when you’ve done your work, you lie there and think, Well, I’ll be damned, I did this today. It doesn’t matter how good it is, or how bad – you did it. At the end of the week, you’ll have a certain amount of accumulation. At the end of a year, you look back and say, I’ll be damned, it’s been a good year.
Live in the goddamn library. Live in the library! Live in the library, for Christ’s sake. Don’t live on your goddamn computer and the internet and all that crap. Go to the library.
And in the end. I have three rules to live by. One, get your work done. If that doesn’t work, shut up and drink your gin. And when all else fails, run like hell!
Born in Waukegan, Illinois, Ray Bradbury and his family lived in Tucson, Arizona, in 1926-1927 and 1932-1933, while his father sought employment, but they always ended up back Waukegan. That is, until 1934, when Ray was 14, and the family relocated to Los Angeles where he attended Los Angeles High School. He was an avid reader throughout his school years, and developed a fascination for carnivals, which would feature in The Illustrated Man and Something Wicked This Way Comes. Needless to say, he spent a great deal of time in the library, where he read H. G. Wells, Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne and dozens of others.
In 1938, at the age of 18, instead of attending college, Bradbury attempted to enlist in the military but even though World War II was looming, he was rejected because of his poor eyesight. This left him free to write and very quickly, his Sci-Fi stories and mysteries were accepted for publication by popular fanzines of the day.
The writer never obtained a driver’s license and depended on public transportation or his bicycle to get around. He continued to live with his parents until, at the age of 27, he married Marguerite “Maggie” McClure, the only woman he ever dated. The two had four daughters, and lived happily until Maggie’s death in 2003.
From 1985 until 1993, he hosted The Ray Bradbury Theater, an anthology television series based on his short stories.
He remained a prolific writer into old age, publishing his last book, Farewell Summer, in 2006 when he was 86.
Bradbury died on June 5, 2012, at age 91, and there was much speculation as to the cause of his demise after family members admitted he had been ill for a long time. This led some to suspect he was suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease. However, in 2010, two years before his death, Bradbury was criticizing the Obama Administration, condemning what he called “all this political correctness that’s rampant on campuses,” and calling for a ban on quotas (i.e., Affirmative Action) in higher education, an indication his faculties of cognition were intact.
Sources: Ray Bradbury, Brown University (1995); Ray Bradbury, CalTech (2000); Emily Temple, Literary Hub; James Day (1974); Bearden Dowling, Public Libraries (2002); Rachel Goldstein, TIME (2010); Terry Gross, NPR (1988); James Hibbard, Salon (2001); Playboy (1995); "Run Fast, Stand Still, or, the Thing at the Top of the Stairs, or, New Ghosts from Old Minds," Zen in the Art of Writing; "Telling the Truth," Sixth Annual Writer's Symposium by the Sea (2001), Point Loma Nazarene University; Sam Weller, The Paris Review (2010), and John Winokur, Advice to Writers (2000).
