She has the remarkable ability to give you atmosphere, character, and motion in a single line. from “Run Fast, Stand Still, or, the Thing at the Top of the Stairs, or, New Ghosts from Old Minds,” in Zen in the Art of Writing In delay comes the effort for a style, instead of leaping upon truth which is the only style worth deadfalling or tiger-trapping. The faster you blurt, the more swiftly you write, the more honest you are. What can we writers learn from lizards, lift from birds? In quickness is truth. from a 2001 interview with James Hibberd, published in Salon
Ray bradbury famous books full#
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? On politics, analyzing literature, pick your own.
I want you to read essays in every field. Read the essays of Aldous Huxley, read Lauren Eisley, great anthropologist. From various fields: archaeology, zoology, biology, all the great philosophers of time, comparing them. But one poem a night, one short story a night, one essay a night, for the next 1,000 nights. Read the great poets, go back and read Shakespeare, read Alexander Pope, read Robert Frost. Now if you want to kid yourself and write lines that look like poems, go ahead and do it, but you’ll go nowhere. Okay, then read one poem a night from the vast history of poetry. That’ll take you ten minutes, 15 minutes. For the next thousand nights, before you go to bed every night, read one short story. I’ll give you a program to follow every night, very simple program. What you’ve got to do from this night forward is stuff your head with more different things from various fields. If it’s work, stop it, and do something else. Ignore the authors who say, oh my god, what work, oh Jesus Christ, you know. It’s got to be with a great sense of fun. I don’t want you to be a snob about anything. from a 2002 interview with Brendan Dowling, published in Public Libraries from “ Telling the Truth,” the keynote address of The Sixth Annual Writer’s Symposium by the Sea, sponsored by Point Loma Nazarene University, 2001 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. 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.
The best hygiene for beginning writers or intermediate writers is to write a hell of a lot of short stories. So now, without further ado, I present below an incomplete but illuminating collection of some more of Ray Bradbury’s very best writing advice. If that’s what happens when you write, Bradbury taught, find some other way to spend your time. This is, of course, not possible for everyone, but still, I find it to be a lovely antidote to all the hand-wringing and hair-tearing and sit-at-the-typwriter-and-bleeding contemporary writers seem to do (or claim to do, online or otherwise) these days. He took intense pleasure in it, and it shows on every page. Like many American children, I grew up on Bradbury-”The Veldt” remains my favorite of his stories-but as I became a writer myself I began to cherish not just the great author’s work, but his attitude towards it. Bradbury loved writing. Today would have been the 98th birthday of Ray Bradbury, the greatest sci-fi writer in history, who (by no small coincidence) also happened to know a thing or two about writing.
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