Ray Bradbury Gives 12 Pieces of Writing Advice to Young Authors (2001)

in Books, Writing | April 4th, 2012

Like fel­low genre icon Stephen King, Ray Brad­bury has reached far beyond his estab­lished audi­ence by offer­ing writ­ing advice to any­one who puts pen to paper. (Or keys to key­board; “Use what­ev­er works,” he often says.) In this 2001 keynote address at Point Loma Nazarene Uni­ver­si­ty’s Writer’s Sym­po­sium By the Sea, Brad­bury tells sto­ries from his writ­ing life, all of which offer lessons on how to hone the craft. Most of these have to do with the day-in, day-out prac­tices that make up what he calls “writ­ing hygiene.” Watch this enter­tain­ing­ly digres­sive talk and you might pull out an entire­ly dif­fer­ent set of points, but here, in list form, is how I inter­pret Brad­bury’s pro­gram:

  • Don’t start out writ­ing nov­els. They take too long. Begin your writ­ing life instead by crank­ing out “a hell of a lot of short sto­ries,” as many as one per week. Take a year to do it; he claims that it sim­ply isn’t pos­si­ble to write 52 bad short sto­ries in a row. He wait­ed until the age of 30 to write his first nov­el, Fahren­heit 451. “Worth wait­ing for, huh?”
  • You may love ’em, but you can’t be ’em. Bear that in mind when you inevitably attempt, con­scious­ly or uncon­scious­ly, to imi­tate your favorite writ­ers, just as he imi­tat­ed H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, Arthur Conan Doyle, and L. Frank Baum.
  • Exam­ine “qual­i­ty” short sto­ries. He sug­gests Roald Dahl, Guy de Mau­pas­sant, and the less­er-known Nigel Kneale and John Col­lier. Any­thing in the New York­er today does­n’t make his cut, since he finds that their sto­ries have “no metaphor.”
  • Stuff your head. To accu­mu­late the intel­lec­tu­al build­ing blocks of these metaphors, he sug­gests a course of bed­time read­ing: one short sto­ry, one poem (but Pope, Shake­speare, and Frost, not mod­ern “crap”), and one essay. These essays should come from a diver­si­ty of fields, includ­ing archae­ol­o­gy, zool­o­gy, biol­o­gy, phi­los­o­phy, pol­i­tics, and lit­er­a­ture. “At the end of a thou­sand nights,” so he sums it up, “Jesus God, you’ll be full of stuff!”
  • Get rid of friends who don’t believe in you. Do they make fun of your writer­ly ambi­tions? He sug­gests call­ing them up to “fire them” with­out delay.
  • Live in the library. Don’t live in your “god­damn com­put­ers.” He may not have gone to col­lege, but his insa­tiable read­ing habits allowed him to “grad­u­ate from the library” at age 28.
  • Fall in love with movies. Prefer­ably old ones.
  • Write with joy. In his mind, “writ­ing is not a seri­ous busi­ness.” If a sto­ry starts to feel like work, scrap it and start one that does­n’t. “I want you to envy me my joy,” he tells his audi­ence.
  • Don’t plan on mak­ing mon­ey. He and his wife, who “took a vow of pover­ty” to mar­ry him, hit 37 before they could afford a car (and he still nev­er got around to pick­ing up a license).
  • List ten things you love, and ten things you hate. Then write about the for­mer, and “kill” the lat­er — also by writ­ing about them. Do the same with your fears.
  • Just type any old thing that comes into your head. He rec­om­mends “word asso­ci­a­tion” to break down any cre­ative block­ages, since “you don’t know what’s in you until you test it.”
  • Remem­ber, with writ­ing, what you’re look­ing for is just one per­son to come up and tell you, “I love you for what you do.” Or, fail­ing that, you’re look­ing for some­one to come up and tell you, “You’re not nuts like peo­ple say.”

Relat­ed con­tent:

Ray Brad­bury: Lit­er­a­ture is the Safe­ty Valve of Civ­i­liza­tion

The Shape of A Sto­ry: Writ­ing Tips from Kurt Von­negut

John Steinbeck’s Six Tips for the Aspir­ing Writer and His Nobel Prize Speech

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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John Steinbeck’s Six Tips for the Aspiring Writer and His Nobel Prize Speech

in Literature, Writing | February 27th, 2012

Today is the 110th birth­day of writer John Stein­beck, whose great nov­el of the 1930s, The Grapes of Wrath, gives an elo­quent and sym­pa­thet­ic voice to the dis­pos­sessed. In 1962, Stein­beck was award­ed the Nobel Prize in Lit­er­a­ture “for his real­is­tic and imag­i­na­tive writ­ings, com­bin­ing as they do sym­pa­thet­ic humour and keen social per­cep­tion.” You can watch him deliv­er his Nobel speech above.

And for insights into how Stein­beck reached that pin­na­cle, you can read a col­lec­tion of his obser­va­tions on the art of fic­tion from the Fall, 1975 edi­tion of The Paris Review, includ­ing six writ­ing tips jot­ted down in a let­ter to a friend the same year he won the Nobel Prize. “The fol­low­ing,” Stein­beck writes, “are some of the things I have had to do to keep from going nuts.”

1. Aban­don the idea that you are ever going to fin­ish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets fin­ished, you are always sur­prised.

2. Write freely and as rapid­ly as pos­si­ble and throw the whole thing on paper. Nev­er cor­rect or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usu­al­ly found to be an excuse for not going on. It also inter­feres with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of uncon­scious asso­ci­a­tion with the mate­r­i­al.

3. For­get your gen­er­al­ized audi­ence. In the first place, the name­less, face­less audi­ence will scare you to death and in the sec­ond place, unlike the the­ater, it does­n’t exist. In writ­ing, your audi­ence is one sin­gle read­er. I have found that some­times it helps to pick out one person–a real per­son you know, or an imag­ined per­son and write to that one.

4. If a scene or a sec­tion gets the bet­ter of you and you still think you want it–bypass it and go on. When you have fin­ished the whole you can come back to it and then you may find that the rea­son it gave trou­ble is because it did­n’t belong there.

5. Beware of a scene that becomes too dear to you, dear­er than the rest. It will usu­al­ly be found that it is out of draw­ing.

6. If you are using dialogue–say it aloud as you write it. Only then will it have the sound of speech.

“As you write,” Stein­beck says, “trust the dis­con­nec­tions and the gaps. If you have writ­ten what your eye first saw and you are stopped, see again. See some­thing else. Take a leap to anoth­er image. Don’t require of your­self that you under­stand the con­nec­tion. Some of the most bril­liant things that hap­pen in fic­tion occur when the writer allows what seems to be a dis­con­nect­ed image to lead him or her away from the line that was being tak­en.”

Relat­ed con­tent:

Writ­ing Tips by Hen­ry Miller, Elmore Leonard, Mar­garet Atwood, Neil Gaiman & George Orwell

Remem­ber­ing Ernest Hem­ing­way, Fifty Years After His Death

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Writing Tips by Henry Miller, Elmore Leonard, Margaret Atwood, Neil Gaiman & George Orwell

in Books, Writing | January 31st, 2012

Image by Austin Kleon

Here’s one way to become a bet­ter writer. Lis­ten to the advice of writ­ers who earn their dai­ly bread with their pens. Dur­ing the past week, lists of writ­ing com­mand­ments by Hen­ry Miller, Elmore Leonard (above) and William Safire have buzzed around Twit­ter. (Find our Twit­ter stream here.) So we decid­ed to col­lect them and add tips from a few oth­er vet­er­ans — name­ly, George Orwell, Mar­garet Atwood, and Neil Gaiman. Here we go:

Hen­ry Miller (from Hen­ry Miller on Writ­ing)

1. Work on one thing at a time until fin­ished.
2. Start no more new books, add no more new mate­r­i­al to “Black Spring.”
3. Don’t be ner­vous. Work calm­ly, joy­ous­ly, reck­less­ly on what­ev­er is in hand.
4. Work accord­ing to the pro­gram and not accord­ing to mood. Stop at the appoint­ed time!
5. When you can’t cre­ate you can work.
6. Cement a lit­tle every day, rather than add new fer­til­iz­ers.
7. Keep human! See peo­ple; go places, drink if you feel like it.
8. Don’t be a draught-horse! Work with plea­sure only.
9. Dis­card the Pro­gram when you feel like it–but go back to it the next day. Con­cen­trate. Nar­row down. Exclude.
10. For­get the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writ­ing.
11. Write first and always. Paint­ing, music, friends, cin­e­ma, all these come after­wards.

George Orwell (From Why I Write)

1. Nev­er use a metaphor, sim­i­le, or oth­er fig­ure of speech which you are used to see­ing in print.
2. Nev­er use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is pos­si­ble to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Nev­er use the pas­sive where you can use the active.
5. Nev­er use a for­eign phrase, a sci­en­tif­ic word, or a jar­gon word if you can think of an every­day Eng­lish equiv­a­lent.
6. Break any of these rules soon­er than say any­thing out­right bar­barous.

Mar­garet Atwood (orig­i­nal­ly appeared in The Guardian)

1. Take a pen­cil to write with on aero­planes. Pens leak. But if the pen­cil breaks, you can’t sharp­en it on the plane, because you can’t take knives with you. There­fore: take two pen­cils.
2. If both pen­cils break, you can do a rough sharp­en­ing job with a nail file of the met­al or glass type.
3. Take some­thing to write on. Paper is good. In a pinch, pieces of wood or your arm will do.
4. If you’re using a com­put­er, always safe­guard new text with a ­mem­o­ry stick.
5. Do back exer­cis­es. Pain is dis­tract­ing.
6. Hold the read­er’s atten­tion. (This is like­ly to work bet­ter if you can hold your own.) But you don’t know who the read­er is, so it’s like shoot­ing fish with a sling­shot in the dark. What ­fas­ci­nates A will bore the pants off B.
7. You most like­ly need a the­saurus, a rudi­men­ta­ry gram­mar book, and a grip on real­i­ty. This lat­ter means: there’s no free lunch. Writ­ing is work. It’s also gam­bling. You don’t get a pen­sion plan. Oth­er peo­ple can help you a bit, but ­essen­tial­ly you’re on your own. ­Nobody is mak­ing you do this: you chose it, so don’t whine.
8. You can nev­er read your own book with the inno­cent antic­i­pa­tion that comes with that first deli­cious page of a new book, because you wrote the thing. You’ve been back­stage. You’ve seen how the rab­bits were smug­gled into the hat. There­fore ask a read­ing friend or two to look at it before you give it to any­one in the pub­lish­ing busi­ness. This friend should not be some­one with whom you have a ­roman­tic rela­tion­ship, unless you want to break up.
9. Don’t sit down in the mid­dle of the woods. If you’re lost in the plot or blocked, retrace your steps to where you went wrong. Then take the oth­er road. And/or change the per­son. Change the tense. Change the open­ing page.
10. Prayer might work. Or read­ing ­some­thing else. Or a con­stant visual­isation of the holy grail that is the fin­ished, pub­lished ver­sion of your resplen­dent book.

Neil Gaiman (read his free short sto­ries here)

1. Write.
2. Put one word after anoth­er. Find the right word, put it down.
3. Fin­ish what you’re writ­ing. What­ev­er you have to do to fin­ish it, fin­ish it.
4. Put it aside. Read it pre­tend­ing you’ve nev­er read it before. Show it to friends whose opin­ion you respect and who like the kind of thing that this is.
5. Remem­ber: when peo­ple tell you some­thing’s wrong or does­n’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exact­ly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.
6. Fix it. Remem­ber that, soon­er or lat­er, before it ever reach­es per­fec­tion, you will have to let it go and move on and start to write the next thing. Per­fec­tion is like chas­ing the hori­zon. Keep mov­ing.
7. Laugh at your own jokes.
8. The main rule of writ­ing is that if you do it with enough assur­ance and con­fi­dence, you’re allowed to do what­ev­er you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writ­ing. But it’s def­i­nite­ly true for writ­ing.) So write your sto­ry as it needs to be writ­ten. Write it ­hon­est­ly, and tell it as best you can. I’m not sure that there are any oth­er rules. Not ones that mat­ter.

William Safire (the author of the New York Times Mag­a­zine col­umn “On Lan­guage”)

1. Remem­ber to nev­er split an infini­tive.
2. The pas­sive voice should nev­er be used.
3. Do not put state­ments in the neg­a­tive form.
4. Verbs have to agree with their sub­jects.
5. Proof­read care­ful­ly to see if you words out.
6. If you reread your work, you can find on reread­ing a great deal of rep­e­ti­tion can be by reread­ing and edit­ing.
7. A writer must not shift your point of view.
8. And don’t start a sen­tence with a con­junc­tion. (Remem­ber, too, a prepo­si­tion is a ter­ri­ble word to end a sen­tence with.)
9. Don’t overuse excla­ma­tion marks!!
10. Place pro­nouns as close as pos­si­ble, espe­cial­ly in long sen­tences, as of 10 or more words, to their antecedents.
11. Writ­ing care­ful­ly, dan­gling par­tici­ples must be avoid­ed.
12. If any word is improp­er at the end of a sen­tence, a link­ing verb is.
13. Take the bull by the hand and avoid mix­ing metaphors.
14. Avoid trendy locu­tions that sound flaky.
15. Every­one should be care­ful to use a sin­gu­lar pro­noun with sin­gu­lar nouns in their writ­ing.
16. Always pick on the cor­rect idiom.
17. The adverb always fol­lows the verb.
18. Last but not least, avoid clich­es like the plague; seek viable alter­na­tives.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ray Brad­bury Gives 12 Pieces of Writ­ing Advice to Young Authors (2001)

John Steinbeck’s Six Tips for the Aspir­ing Writer and His Nobel Prize Speech

Elmore Leonard’s Ulti­mate Guide for Would-Be Writ­ers

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High School Student Talks Symbolism with 75 Big Authors (1963)

in Literature, Writing | December 8th, 2011

Let’s let The Paris Review give you the back­sto­ry:

In 1963, a six­teen-year-old San Diego high school stu­dent named Bruce McAl­lis­ter sent a four-ques­tion mimeo­graphed sur­vey to 150 well-known authors of lit­er­ary, com­mer­cial, and sci­ence fic­tion. Did they con­scious­ly plant sym­bols in their work? he asked. Who noticed sym­bols appear­ing from their sub­con­scious, and who saw them arrive in their text, unbid­den, cre­at­ed in the minds of their read­ers? When this hap­pened, did the authors mind?

Of the 150 authors McAl­lis­ter solicit­ed, 75 wrote back, and most offered the young­ster some sub­stan­tive thoughts. Over at The Paris Review, you will find replies by Jack Ker­ouac, Ayn Rand (above), Ralph Elli­son, Ray Brad­bury, John Updike, Saul Bel­low, and Nor­man Mail­er. Not bad for a kid who sent out a form let­ter … and nev­er both­ered to send a thank-you let­ter.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Paris Review Inter­views Now Online

Down­load 20 Pop­u­lar High School Books Avail­able as Free eBooks & Audio Books

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Jennifer Egan, Pulitzer Prize Winner, Talks Writing @Google

in Books, Google, Literature, Writing | August 30th, 2011

Ear­li­er this month Jen­nifer Egan, the new­ly-mint­ed Pulitzer Prize win­ner, paid a vis­it to Google to talk about A Vis­it from the Goon Squad, her exper­i­men­tal nov­el that won the Pulitzer, among many oth­er awards. That’s the osten­si­ble focus. But the con­ver­sa­tion moves quick­ly into oth­er areas that will inter­est writ­ers and read­ers alike — how Egan first devel­ops ideas for her nov­els, why she writes her first drafts in illeg­i­ble hand­writ­ing on legal pads, why she wrote a chap­ter of her new nov­el in Pow­er­Point (with­out ever hav­ing used the soft­ware before), what her nov­el has in com­mon with The Who’s Quadrophe­nia (I’m hooked), and how tech­nol­o­gy might change the nov­el as we know it.

The Egan video went live yes­ter­day, and runs about 54 min­utes. Oth­er videos appear­ing in the Authors@Google series fea­ture con­ver­sa­tions with Salman Rushdie, Neil Gaiman, Eliz­a­beth Gilbert, Michael Pol­lan, Slavoj Zizek and Junot Diaz. H/T @webacion

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William S. Burroughs Tells the Story of How He Started Writing with the Cut-Up Technique

in Art, Books, Literature, Writing | August 16th, 2011

In late 1920, the Dadaist writer Tris­tan Tzara wrote “dada man­i­festo on fee­ble love and bit­ter love,” which includ­ed a sec­tion called “To Make a Dadaist Poem,” and it gave these instruc­tions:

Take a news­pa­per.
Take some scis­sors.
Choose from this paper an arti­cle of the length you want to make your poem.
Cut out the arti­cle.
Next care­ful­ly cut out each of the words that makes up this arti­cle and put them all in a bag.
Shake gen­tly.
Next take out each cut­ting one after the oth­er.
Copy con­sci­en­tious­ly in the order in which they left the bag.
The poem will resem­ble you.
And there you are — an infi­nite­ly orig­i­nal author of charm­ing sen­si­bil­i­ty, even though unap­pre­ci­at­ed by the vul­gar herd.

Decades lat­er, the Beat writer William S. Bur­roughs took this basic con­cept and put his own twist on it. Between 1961 and 1964, Bur­roughs pub­lished The Nova Tril­o­gy, a series of three exper­i­men­tal nov­els fash­ioned with his own cut-up method. Often con­sid­ered his defin­i­tive work of cut-up writ­ing, The Soft Machine, the first nov­el in the tril­o­gy, stitched togeth­er pages from a series of man­u­scripts that Bur­roughs him­self wrote between 1953 and 1958.

You can watch Bur­roughs demon­strat­ing his cut-up tech­nique above, and for­ev­er find this clip in our col­lec­tion of Cul­tur­al Icons, which lets you see great writ­ers, film­mak­ers, and thinkers talk­ing in their own words.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Gus Van Sant Adapts William S. Bur­roughs: An Ear­ly 16mm Short

William S. Bur­roughs Shoots Shake­speare

William S. Bur­roughs’ Clay­ma­tion Christ­mas Film

 

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Dave Eggers: The Teacher Who Encouraged Me to Write

in Books, Education, Literature, Writing | August 4th, 2011


Thou­sands of pub­lic school teach­ers won’t be return­ing to the class­room this fall, thanks to bud­get cuts nation­wide. And that means more than a few Jay Criche’s won’t get the chance to tap the hid­den tal­ents of young stu­dents. Jay Criche, in case you’re won­der­ing, taught Eng­lish at Lake For­est High School and count­ed Dave Eggers (A Heart­break­ing Work of Stag­ger­ing Genius and What Is the What) as one of his stu­dents. Criche passed away recent­ly, and, writ­ing in Salon, Eggers remem­bers his teacher’s deep influ­ence:

He was kind to me, but I had no sense that he took par­tic­u­lar notice of me. There were oth­er, smarter kids in the class, and soon I fell back into my usu­al posi­tion — of think­ing I was just a lit­tle over aver­age in most things. But near the end of the semes­ter, we read “Mac­beth.” Believe me, this is not an easy play to con­nect to the lives of sub­ur­ban high school­ers, but some­how he made the play seem elec­tric, dan­ger­ous, rel­e­vant. After pro­cras­ti­nat­ing till the night before it was due, I wrote a paper about the play — the first paper I typed on a type­writer — and turned it in the next day.

I got a good grade on it, and below the grade Mr. Criche wrote, “Sure hope you become a writer.” That was it. Just those six words, writ­ten in his sig­na­ture hand­writ­ing — a bit shaky, but with a very steady base­line. It was the first time he or any­one had indi­cat­ed in any way that writ­ing was a career option for me. We’d nev­er had any writ­ers in our fam­i­ly line, and we did­n’t know any writ­ers per­son­al­ly, even dis­tant­ly, so writ­ing for a liv­ing did­n’t seem some­thing avail­able to me. But then, just like that, it was as if he’d ripped off the ceil­ing and shown me the sky.

Over the next 10 years, I thought often about Mr. Criche’s six words. When­ev­er I felt dis­cour­aged, and this was often, it was those six words that came back to me and gave me strength. When a few instruc­tors in col­lege gen­tly and not-so-gen­tly tried to tell me I had no tal­ent, I held Mr. Criche’s words before me like a shield. I did­n’t care what any­one else thought. Mr. Criche, head of the whole damned Eng­lish depart­ment at Lake For­est High, said I could be a writer. So I put my head down and trudged for­ward.

You can read Egger’s remem­brance in full here.

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The Shape of A Story: Writing Tips from Kurt Vonnegut

in Books, Literature, Writing | April 4th, 2011

A few years ago, Open Cul­ture read­ers list­ed Slaugh­ter­house Five as one of your top life-chang­ing books. But Kurt Von­negut was not only a great author. He was also an inspi­ra­tion for any­one who aspires to write fic­tion – see for exam­ple his 8 rules for writ­ing fic­tion, which starts with the so-obvi­ous-it’s-often-for­got­ten reminder nev­er to waste your read­er’s time.

In this video, Von­negut fol­lows his own advice and sketch­es some bril­liant blue­prints for envi­sion­ing the “shape” of a sto­ry, all in less than 4 min­utes and 37 sec­onds.

FYI. Orig­i­nal works by Von­negut appear in Free Audio Books and Free eBooks col­lec­tions.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ray Brad­bury Gives 12 Pieces of Writ­ing Advice to Young Authors (2001)

John Steinbeck’s Six Tips for the Aspir­ing Writer and His Nobel Prize Speech

Writ­ing Tips by Hen­ry Miller, Elmore Leonard, Mar­garet Atwood, Neil Gaiman & George Orwell

Sheer­ly Avni is a San Fran­cis­co-based arts and cul­ture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Week­ly, Moth­er Jones, and many oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low her on twit­ter at @sheerly.

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