A Writer's Writer
What can you say about a writer who wrote over a thousand words a day every day of his career? Ray Bradbury was certainly a writer's writer. This book is a collection of essays written over a thirty-year period. It gives insight into his personal history and trials and successes as a writer. As he says himself, "If anything is taught here, it is simply the charting of the life of someone who started out to somewhere--and went."
These essays provide insight into his writing process and use of word association as he started to write each and every morning. His best advice to an aspiring writer is to write, write, and write "one-thousand or two-thousand words every day for the next twenty years. At the start, you might shoot for one short story a week, fifty-two stories a year, for five years. 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."
Overall, I found this book more inspirational than tip-wise informative. If you're looking for more of the later I recommend Steven King's On Writing. Speaking of which, I found it interesting that King and Bradbury share the same viewpoint regarding plot. In Bradbury's words, "Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run my on their way to incredible destinations. Plot is observed after the fact rather than before."
Here's one of my favorite quotes:
The Feeding of the Muse then, which we have spent most of our time on here, seems to me to be the continual running after loves, the checking of these loves against one's present and future needs, the moving on from simple textures to more complex ones, from naive ones to more informed ones, from nonintellectual to intellectual ones. Nothing is ever lost. If you have moved over vast territories and dared to love silly things, you will have learned even from the most primitive items collected and put aside in your life. From an ever-roaming curiosity in all the arts, from bad radio to good theatre, from nursery rhyme to symphony, from jungle compounded to Kafka's Castle, there is basic excellence to be winnowed out, truths found, kept, savored, and used on some later day. To be a child of one's time is to bo all these things.
This is a great read for anyone interested in writing, but most especially for an aspiring science-fiction writer.
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