So this was going around the Web a couple of weeks ago:
Ray Bradbury Gives 12 Pieces of Advice to Young Writers.
Now, I long ago aged out of the “young writer” demographic — though I still
feel that I’m a beginner, and if God is good to me I suppose I always shall —
but there’s a lot of good stuff here for anyone, at any stage of their
career.
I’ve been on a bit of a Bradbury kick since late last year anyway. My annual Halloween
reread of
Something Wicked This Way Comes (inspiration for
this mixtape from the Popdose Conceptual Theater of the
Airwaves) was a forcible reminder of his considerable strengths and
equally considerable weaknesses. His long slide into right-wing crankdom was
sad, but hardly unprecedented; even leaving aside the long screed of
Fahrenheit
451, you can discern traces of bitter judgmentalism in those early shockers,
where he was apt to insinuate that it was perfectly okay to murder someone if
they didn’t love the same books that you loved. The fact remains that as an
imaginist, Bradbury is nearly unparalleled; as a stylist, though, he’s a
distinctly mixed bag. At its best, his prose has a kind of lucent poetry to it
— but when he stumbles, boy howdy! Vague and prolix.
The failings in others that bother us most are the ones that we fear we
might share, and the remedy they find (if any) might be the one that we seek.
Bradbury is at his best — the power of his ideas is best matched with, but not
overwhelmed by, the vividness of his prose — in his short stories. So this
piece of advice at the top of the list really jumped out at me:
Begin your writing life ... by cranking out “a hell of a lot of short
stories,” as many as one per week. Take a year to do it; [Bradbury] claims that
it simply isn’t possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row.
narrows eyes
hitches up belt
spits
Mister, I’ll take that challenge.
Look.
The Honeythief is out in the world now, a feral thing learning
to tolerate the company of human beings before I bring it out to society in the
months to come; I’m pondering my next long fiction project while keeping busy
with contract work and freelance proofreading, and nursing a general
unhappiness with the slack tone of my fiction muscle. It’s grown accustomed to
the slow lope of a novel; I want to tighten it for the sprint.
So here’s the idea for the exercise: One new short story per week — most
likely
very short — in this space, for one year or as long as I can
manage it. (I’m painfully aware that I barely made it to 100 days on a long-ago
attempt at
40x365.) Stakes
so low as to be non-existent. I’m not going to write anything that’s
purposely
terrible, but I’m not gonna lose any sleep sweating the content, either. The
important thing is just to do it. It’s about the process, not the product. And
if nothing else comes from it, I will have written a bunch of short stories.
I don’t know that Uncle Ray was entirely right. I have a suspicion that it
is all too possible to write 52 shitty stories, one after another; but I
do
believe that you can’t write 52 stories in a row, however awful, without
learning a thing or two.
And learning — that’s what being a beginner is all about.