Ray Bradbury is the name of one of the most enthusiastic storytellers and fiction writers of 20th century. Most of his novels are written in the themes of science fiction, fantasy, and horror.
He was also known to share openly, his knowledge of the art with young writers. Many of his teachings can be read in the form of short essays in his book Zen in the Art of Writing.
While I was reading this book myself, I came across the word ‘Gusto’ for the very first time through the initial chapters of the book. Its not like that I was awestruck, at once, reading this simple word, howsoever, the way he writes about it, playing emphasis upon it, I could feel the enthusiasm that Mr. Bradbury is known to express in his novels.
Zest. Gusto. How rarely one hears these words used. How rarely do we see people living, or for that matter, creating, by them. Yet if I were asked to name the most important items in a writer’s make-up, the things that shape his material and rush him along the road he wants to go. I would only warn him to look to his zest, see to his gusto. — Ray Bradbury
There are plenty of lessons I have learned from reading his books and writings. In this piece, I’d stick to eleven of these, mostly, pertaining to the craft of writing. So, let’s get started!
#1 Word Associations
Word Associations, he said, helped him a great deal in writing short stories. “Just write any word that comes to your head, and soon you’ll start to see a pattern in these lists. The moment you see a pattern, you have a story…” he says.
It was with great relief, then, that in my early twenties I floundered into a word-association process in which I simply got out of bed each morning, walked to my desk, and put down any word or series of words that happened along in my head. I would then take arms against the word, or for it, and bring on an assortment of characters to weigh the word and show me its meaning in my own life. An hour or two hours later, to my amazement, a new story would be finished and done. The surprise was total and lovely. I soon found that I would have to work this way for the rest of my life.
— Ray Bradbury
#2 The Ray Bradbury Challenge
Popularly known as The Ray Bradbury Challenge, this is a writing process that he would use to write his stories. Many, many writers following his generation, including Neil Gaiman, mentioned that the creative process of Mr. Bradbury inspired them to write some really good stories.
The challenge consists of two parts:
Part 1: Read Daily for 1000 Nights
Mr. Bradbury tells young writers to read three things each night: poetry, one short story and an essay. This, he said, adds beautiful material to your writing pieces.
Part 2: Write Lots and Lots of Short Stories (Precisely 52/year)
“Write a short story every week. It’s not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row”,
he says to newbie writers.
Mr. Bradbury said that there was a psychological reason to go into this training writing for short stories: At the end of every week, the writer will feel a sense of achievement, because, as he says, “you’ll have done something.”
#3 Write with Joy
Mr. Bradbury shares that he never worked a day in his life; the joy of writing propelled him from day to day, and from year to year.
“I don’t need an alarm clock. My story ideas wake me”, he would say.
I don’t believe in being serious about anything. I think life is too serious to be taken seriously. — Ray Bradbury
#4 Write Your Own Experiences
Mr. Bradbury mentions, when he was a boy, he met a young girl at the beach, who went into the water and never came back. Years later, when he was writing about this experience, tears followed through his eyes.
In order to get this essential emotional connect in our writing, it is always a great idea to write our own experiences.
#5 Add Movement to Stories
Breathe some movement into your stories. He says,
A story cannot be mechanical. It can only be dynamic. — Ray Bradbury
#6 Read Poetry every Day of your Life
Read poetry every day of your life, Mr. Bradbury tells writers.
Poetry is good because it flexes muscles you don’t use often enough. Poetry expands the senses and keeps them in prime condition. It keeps you aware of your nose, your eye, your ear, your tongue, your hand. — Ray Bradbury
Poetry helps us pay attention to the details in our sensory experience. Emphasizing the importance of these sensory details, Mr. Bradbury writes,
Why all this insistence on the senses? Because in order to convince your reader that he is there, you must assault each of his senses, in turn, with color, sound, taste, and texture. If your reader feels the sun on his flesh, the wind fluttering his shirt sleeves, half your fight is won. The most improbable tales can be made believable, if your reader, through his senses, feels certain that he stands at the middle of events. — Ray Bradbury
#7 Have Wonder
Developing the innate childlike quality of wonder isn’t just a tool for writers, but a necessity. And why only writers, I feel that, it is a necessity for every human individual. Look what Mr. Bradbury had to say about this…
Fill your eyes with wonder, live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. — Ray Bradbury
Locked into everything is a mystery. We then try to find, in any given age. You cannot grow up in a period and not be a child of your time. — Ray Bradbury
Another example through which he demonstrated the importance of having the quality of wonder, was in these verses. This is a verse from one of his unpublished but very famous poem ‘If Only We Had Taller Been’, that he recited in 1971 in a Mars mission of NASA.
Short man. Large dream.I send my rockets forth,between my ears,Hoping an inch of Will is worth a pound of years.- Ray Bradbury
#8 Develop a Good Sense of Metaphor
Read good stories, stories that have metaphor. — Ray Bradbury
I think the reason my stories have been so successful is that I have a strong sense of metaphor. Every one of my stories is a metaphor you can remember. — Ray Bradbury
#9 Be Spontaneous
In quickness and spontaneity is truth. The faster you blurt, the more swiftly you write, the more honest you are. In hesitation is thought. In delay comes the effort for a style, instead of leaping upon truth which is the only style worth deadfalling or tiger-trapping. — Ray Bradbury
#10 Quantity Over Quality
You will have to write and put away or burn a lot of material before you are comfortable in this medium. You might as well start now and get the necessary work done. For I believe that eventually quantity will make for quality. How so? Quantity gives experience. From experience alone can quality come. All arts, big and small, are the elimination of waste motion in favor of the concise declaration. The artist learns what to leave out. His greatest art will often be what he does not say, what he leaves out, his ability to state simply with clear emotion, the way he wants to go. The artist must work so hard, so long, that a brain develops and lives, all of itself, in his fingers. — Ray BradburyI always say to students, give me four pages a day, every day. That’s three or four hundred thousand words a year. Most of that will be bilge, but the rest …? It will save your life! — Ray Bradbury
#11 Have Patience
Don’t worry about things. Don’t push. Just do your work and you’ll survive. The important thing is to have a ball, to be joyful, to be loving and to be explosive. Out of that comes everything and you grow. — Ray Bradbury
Ending with one of my favorite lines from Mr. Bradbury’s novel Dandelion Wine. It seems to me that this line describes so beautifully a fact of life. That, irrespective of whether I am able to see the beauty and vastness of life, it does exist. It’s already here. All we need to do is to shift the focus of our inner eyes…
Bees do have a smell, you know, and if they don’t they should, for their feet are dusted with spices from a million flowers. — Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine
Beauty-beauty-beautiful.
Comments
Post a Comment