What the Genius of Ray Bradbury can Teach us About Writing
The American author of Fahrenheit 451 was a master of his craft
The famous futurist and author Ray Bradbury is one of America’s greatest writing exports of the last hundred years.
His novel Fahrenheit 451, in my humble opinion, is second only to George Orwell’s 1984 as the greatest dystopian novel ever written and it’s style and craft was way, way ahead of its time — no Bradbury, no Netflix’s Black Mirror.
Bradbury was a prolific novelist, he wrote at least 22 novels with various others being left incomplete or unpublished.
He was an extremely philosophic figure and his ability to look into the future and predict things with unwavering accuracy gave him a supernatural aura and thus the style of his writing often strayed into science-fiction.
Stuff your eyes with wonder, he said, live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.
— Ray Bradbury
But Bradbury was also a real writing craftsman, which may come as a surprise to some readers and writers.
Many authors like Orwell, Hemmingway, Stephen King and more are heralded as pushing the medium forward but Bradbury, not so much.
Bradbury isn’t the first name us budding writers research when we’re looking for writing advice, but that should change.
He actually published a lot of content around writing advice and his tips and tricks are readily available online and in books if you’re willing to look.
As a Bradbury fan, I naturally wondered across his finest writing tips and I’ve been using them to hone my craft for the last few years.
Here’s 5 of his finest words of wisdom on how to be a better writer:
1) Quantity creates quality:
Bradbury says the best hygiene for beginning writers or intermediate writers is to write a tonne of short stories.
His logic is that if you can write one short story a week — it doesn’t matter what the quality is to start, but at least you’re practicing, and at the end of the year you have 52 short stories.
Bradbury goes on to say it’s not even possible to write 52 terrible short stories, he says it simply can’t be done. At the end of 30 weeks or 40 weeks or at the end of the year, all of a sudden a story will come that’s just awesome.
So, basically, keep writing until it clicks.
2) Don’t think:
Unknown to much of the writing community, Ray had a sign hung-over his typewriter that read ‘Don’t think’ — Bradbury was a big believer in the ‘writing muscle’.
We’ve all had those times where we’ve sat in-front of a blank piece of a paper of a blank Medium screen and thought our hardest to conjure up a story.
Well, according to Bradbury’s advice, the best way to get the ball rolling is to simply flex that muscle — don’t think — even if the first few paragraphs make no sense at all, it’s all about the flow.
And it will flow, if you don’t think.
3) Get to the big truth first:
A novel has all kinds of pitfalls because it takes longer and you are around people, and if you’re not careful you will talk about it.
Bradbury often says the novel is also hard to write in terms of keeping your love intense. It’s hard to stay interested for two hundred days. So, get the big truth first. If you get the big truth, the small truths will accumulate around it.
About the smaller truths, he famously said, ‘‘Let them be magnetized to it, drawn to it, and then cling to it.’
4) Write what you love:
This will resonate with a lot of writers.
For many of us, writing is a pursuit of our obsession, of what we love but the draw of writing for a commercial motive is always a strong pull but Bradbury often reiterated how important it is to write for what you love.
Only here can you draw from enough motivation to keep writing.
Write because you love to do something. If you write for money, you won’t write anything worth reading
He gave an excellent quote in a 2002 interview published in Public Librarieson why you should always write for what you love:
I want your loves to be multiple. I don’t want you to be a snob about anything. Anything you love, you do it. It’s got to be with a great sense of fun. Writing is not a serious business. It’s a joy and a celebration. You should be having fun at it. Ignore the authors who say, oh my god, what work, oh Jesus Christ, you know. No, to hell with that. It is not work. If it’s work, stop it, and do something else.
-Ray Bradbury 2002
5) Metaphors make great stories:
You can really see that Ray practised what he preached.
His stories were always riddled with metaphors and you really have to read between the lines to appreciate his genius and storytelling.
Fahrenheit 451 is almost entirely a metaphor, but its this that creates such readability and fascination with his work.
If you’re a storyteller, that’s what makes a great story.
The reason Bradbury’s stories have been so successful is that they have a strong sense of metaphor.
Ray was brought up on, and learnt his craft from, Greek myths, Roman myths, and Egyptian myths. Influences like that, created metaphors so strong that people couldn’t forget them.
So, Ray Bradbury is a rich source of creative wisdom.
Not only can we learn heaps from his narrative structures and sheer creative drive but also from his practical tips and advice on craft and language.
He was one of the greatest and we can learn so much from his work.
Peace. R.H.
