Ray Bradbury’s Greatest Writing Advice

Literary Hub compilation, lithub.com, August 22, 2018, by Emily Temple — published on what would have been Ray Bradbury’s 98th birthday. Quotes are gathered from interviews and lectures spanning 1974 to 2010, principally the 2001 keynote “Telling the Truth” (Sixth Annual Writer’s Symposium by the Sea, Point Loma Nazarene University), Sam Weller’s 2010 Paris Review interview, a 1995 Playboy interview, and Zen in the Art of Writing.

This is the source document for Bradbury Truth Tracker — the app is the thousand-nights prescription below, instrumented.

The thousand nights — the passage the tracker is built on

From “Telling the Truth,” 2001. Quoted in full because the app is a direct implementation of it:

“What you’ve got to do from this night forward is stuff your head with more different things from various fields … I’ll give you a program to follow every night, very simple program. For the next thousand nights, before you go to bed every night, read one short story. That’ll take you ten minutes, 15 minutes. Okay, then read one poem a night from the vast history of poetry. Stay away from most modern poems. It’s crap. It’s not poetry! It’s not poetry. Now if you want to kid yourself and write lines that look like poems, go ahead and do it, but you’ll go nowhere. Read the great poets, go back and read Shakespeare, read Alexander Pope, read Robert Frost. But one poem a night, one short story a night, one essay a night, for the next 1,000 nights. From various fields: archaeology, zoology, biology, all the great philosophers of time, comparing them. Read the essays of Aldous Huxley, read Lauren Eisley, great anthropologist… I want you to read essays in every field. On politics, analyzing literature, pick your own. But that means that every night then, before you go to bed, you’re stuffing your head with one poem, one short story, one essay—at the end of a thousand nights, Jesus God, you’ll be full of stuff, won’t you?”

Two things are easy to miss. The prescription is not about writing — it is an input diet, a deliberate program for what goes into the head. And the variety constraint is the point: “from various fields,” archaeology through zoology, is what separates it from simply reading a lot.

Key Takeaways

• Quantity creates quality. “If you can write one short story a week—it doesn’t matter what the quality is to start… at the end of the year you have 52 short stories, and I defy you to write 52 bad ones. Can’t be done.” Same structure as the thousand nights: volume over a fixed cadence, quality as an emergent property.
• Get the big truth first. “If you get the big truth, the small truths will accumulate around it. Let them be magnetized to it, drawn to it, and then cling to it.” (Paris Review, 2010.)
• Don’t think. “I’ve had a sign over my typewriter for over 25 years now, which reads ‘Don’t think!’ You must never think at the typewriter—you must feel. Your intellect is always buried in that feeling anyway.” (1974, James Day.) The intellect is “a great danger to creativity… because you begin to rationalize and make up reasons for things.”
• Never write toward a moral. “A lot of lousy novels come from people who want to do good. The do-gooder novel. The ecological novel.”
• Writer’s block is a signal, not an affliction. “It’s obvious you’re doing the wrong thing… Your subconscious is saying I don’t like you anymore. You’re writing about things I don’t give a damn for.” The cure is to write something else tonight — you picked the wrong subject.
• Style is truth. “Once you nail down what you want to say about yourself and your fears and your life, then that becomes your style.”
• Run fast, stand still — the lesson from lizards. “In quickness 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.”
• The library, not the classroom. “The secret of writing was, to go and live in the library two or four days a week for ten years. I graduated from the library having read every single book in it.” On university: “the teachers always think they know more than you do—and they don’t… The library, on the other hand, has no biases. The information is all there for you to interpret.”
• Write the story in a day. “…so it has a skin around it, its own intensity, its own life, its own reason for being.” Carry it overnight and you will “overnight intellectualize something about it and try to make it too fancy, try to please someone.”
• Word association as method. Make a list of nouns — “The night. The crickets. The train whistle. The basement. The attic.” — then ask why each one is on the list. “If you are going to step on a live mine, make it your own.”
• Two lists. “Make a list of ten things you hate and tear them down in a short story or poem. Make a list of ten things you love and celebrate them.”
• Build the wings on the way down. “You’ve got to jump off the cliff all the time and build your wings on the way down.” (Brown University, 1995.)
• It should be fun, or stop. “Writing is not a serious business. It’s a joy and a celebration… If it’s work, stop it, and do something else.”

Connections

• The immediate artifact: Bradbury Truth Tracker, Kyle’s app for the thousand-nights protocol — three checkboxes a night, short story / poem / essay. The source repo is BradburysTruthTracker.
• The draft this feeds is Bradbury’s Truth Teller, which takes its title from the 2001 keynote “Telling the Truth” and connects to Kyle’s published Oh Say, What is Truth?.
• The attention framing is the modern reading of it. The saved tweet Okay, I’Ll Make A List… (tweet) carries the line that made this circulate again: “Ray Bradbury; this is how you rebuild an attention span.” Bradbury proposed it as an input diet for writers; it now reads as a remedy for a fragmented one.
• The library-over-university passages sit directly against University 2.0 and College Syllabi Are Ancient History — Bradbury’s is the sharpest pre-internet statement of the unbundling case, made in 1939 terms.
• On volume-produces-quality, see Compounding and Live the Library.