This is a delightful, inspiring and extremely useful book on writing. Bradbury talks his evolution as a writer -- what he discovered writing 2000 words every day from the age of 12 to 22, publishing short stories every week in his twenties, and eventually creating novels such as Farenheit 451, Dandelion Wine and the Martian Chronicles.



Here is Bradbury's writing routine:



"All during my early twenties I had the following schedule. On Monday morning I wrote the first draft of my new story. On Tuesday I did a second draft. On Wednesday a third. On Thursday a fourth. On Friday a fifth. And on Saturday at noon, I mailed out the sixth and final draft to New York. Sunday? I thought about all the wild ideas scrambling for my attention, waiting under the attic lid, confident at last that, because of "The Lake," I would soon let them out.

If all of this sounds mechanical, it wasn't. My ideas drove me to it, you see. The more I did, the more I wanted to do. You grow ravenous. You run fevers. You know exhilaration. You can't sleep at night, because your beast-creature ideas want out and turn you in your bed. It's a grand way to live" (62-63).



He offers lots of suggestions for how to develop your writing, particularly on his chapter entitled, "How to Keep and Feed a Muse."



Here's a sample:



Write about what you love and also about what you hate:



"What do you love most in the world? The Big and the little Things I mean. What do you want more than anything else in the world? What do you love? Hate? Find a character who will want something or not want something with all of his heart. Give him running orders. Shoot him off. Then follow as fast as you can. The character, in his great love or hate, will rush through to the end of the story. The zest and gusto of his need, and there is zest in hate s well as love, will fire the landscape and raise the temperature of your typewriter thirty degrees" ( 6).



"Look for the little loves, find and shape the little bitternesses. Savor them in your mouth, try them on your typewriter" (7).



"... if you're going to be step on a live mine, make it your own. Be blown up, as it were, by your own delights and despairs" ( 15).



"The core of your creativity should be the same as the core of your story and of the main character in your story. What does your character want, what is his dream, what shape has it, and how is it expressed? What do I really think of the world, what do I love, fear, hate? and begin to pour this on paper."(43)





Read



"Read those authors who write the way you hope to write, those who think the way you would like to think. But also read those who do not think as you think or write as you want to write and be so stimulated in directions you might not take for many years" (39).





Take Walks



"To feed your muse, then you should always have been hungry about life since you were a child... I means you must take a long walks at night around your city or town, or walks in the country by day. And long walks, at any time, through bookstores and libraries" (42).



Perhaps most inspiring is Bradbury's passion for living and the way it informs his art. Her writes:



"We never sit anything out.

We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled.

The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out." (120)

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