Ray Bradbury on, Well, Everything

So, I finally got around to listening to this speech by Ray Bradbury, something I'd had bookmarked for ages. He rambles through various topics and is opinionated here and there (all modern poetry is crap, etc.) but for the most part he's just really charming and engaging, with a ton of zest for writing and life, though he was 80 or 81 at the time.

The speech is addressed to writers and loosely centered around the habits that writers should develop. I know that's a subject with the potential to be more frustrating than helpful, but I think his advice is good...

To me, the most important points boil down as follows:

     • Don't start by trying to write a novel, because you could spend ages on it and then in the end it turns out not to be very good. Instead, write a short story every week. At the end of the year, you'll have 52 stories, and it's really, really hard to write 52 stories and have them all be bad!

     • Every evening, read one short story, one poem and one essay, about any topic at all. (In other words, fill yourself with all kinds of fodder and inspiration.)

     • Write about things you love, instead of about things you think you should be writing about. "Make a list of 10 things you love, madly, and write about them."


Very favorite excerpt from the whole speech:

"I sold newspapers on a street corner from the time I was 19 till I was 21. I made ten dollars a week – this is back in 1939, 1940, 41. People came by my corner and said, 'What are you doing here?' I said, 'Becoming a writer.' They said, 'You don't look like one.' I said, 'Yeah, but I feel like one.'

"I was filling myself – I lived at the library. I never went to college, I couldn't afford to do that. But I went to the library three or four days a week for ten years. And I graduated from the library when I was 28, huh?

"You live in the library. Live in the library, for chrissake! Don't live on your goddamn computers and the internet and all that crap, you know? Go to the library!"


Other favorite lines:

 "If there are any of you here tonight have gone into writing to make money, forget it, huh? It doesn't work that way."

"When I was 27, I got married. My wife took a vow of poverty to marry me, huh? We had eight dollars in the bank the day we got married, huh? I put five dollars in an envelope and handed it to the minister. And he said, 'What's this?' I said, 'That's your fee for the ceremony today.' He said, 'You're a writer, aren't you?' I said, 'Yes.' He says, 'Then you're going to need this.'"

"Have you ever taken the Greyhound bus across to New York, four days and four nights? No, don't do it."

(After describing how editors only wanted novels and he only had short stories, but then one inspired editor suggested he link together short stories he'd already written into a novel.) "So in one day, I sold The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man, without knowing what I was doing. You see? Surprise. You don't know what's in you until you test it."