I wish I’d heard Ray Bradbury’s advice to young writers when I was young.
Bradbury suggested a curriculum: Read a short story, a poem and an essay every night for 1,000 nights. While you’re at it, write one short story a week.
I would go slower. I would read at the suggested pace until I found something I liked. Then I would
While I wouldn’t follow his advice exactly, I do wish I’d heard it.
In a lecture to writers, he said: “I was a collector of metaphors.”
Bradbury read thousands of stories, essays and poems and learned to look for metaphors. The metaphors rattled around his mind. Eventually sparks flew.
I’m an odd one to be saying anything about Bradbury. I am somehow immune to the pleasures of science fiction. (Bradbury was popular with my schoolmates. But even as a schoolboy, I was baffled.) Later, his politics struck me as unfortunate.
But when he speaks of the questions writers should ask themselves, I’m with him. “Who am I?” is better than “What will sell?”
• Source: Ray Bradbury’s lecture “Telling the Truth” was the keynote address of The Sixth Annual Writer’s Symposium by the Sea sponsored by Point Loma Nazarene University, April 2001. A recording is here:
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