The Ray Bradbury Approach
I call myself a writer or more accurately, an aspiring writer, and yet I didn’t know who Ray Bradbury was……Do you know who he is? Well, grab a cup of your favorite beverage and sit a spell with me as I try to articulate this story.
As an American, I don’t really know much about the American authors that defined a generation or two of literature in the US. We’ve had greats like Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, Henry David Thearau. Where my ladies at?! Anne Rice, Harper Lee, Louisa May Alcott, Toni Morrison. Needless to say, there are a lot of great writers in times past, present and I hope to all that is holy, that we have a future of free thinking and writing and discussion. Our lives depend on the freedom of exploration, understanding and learning. Whew, down off my soapbox now. Back to Mr. Ray Bradbury. I recently watched a youtube video found here, of Ray Bradbury giving a speech at the University of California. It was an amazing speech in which he tells the story of his life and how he came to be the person he became. This isn’t going to be a history or biography lesson, but a few things stood out to me. I’ll share them with you. Please go check out the speech for yourself. Get inspired!
Mr. Bradbury said that if you go about the task of writing a novel, the task may prove to be very daunting and you may quit before you even begin. Also, if you ever have ‘writers block’, then you are writing about the wrong thing. Writing about what you love should flow easily from your fingertips into your writing medium; it shouldn’t feel like work. It really should feel like a release of something, like art! He said to write a lot of short stories. Aim to write one short story a week. That’s 52 stories at the end of a year. Who knows what will happen with them, but at least you know that you are a writer, not an aspiring writer. He also said to read one poem, one essay and one short story every night before going to bed. Read about anything and everything.
I’m not doing this person any favors with my very limited understanding of the man he was or the writing style he used, but I have some homework to do. I want to read his stories and get to know him better. I also want to employ some of his tactics to writing in the hopes that the release I’m looking for, the release I found as a very small child, will find it’s way back to the surface of me and come forth into the world again. Won’t you come along?