I write all my novels and stories, as you have seen, in a great surge of delightful passion. ~ Ray Bradbury
writing fiction
Ray Bradbury’s Writing Wisdom #15
But how did I begin? I wrote 1000 words a day. For 10 years I wrote at least one short story the week, somehow guessing that the day would finally come when I truly got out of the way and let it happen. ~ Ray Bradbury
Ray Bradbury’s Writing Wisdom #12
Everything I’ve ever done was done with excitement, because I wanted to do it, because I loved doing it. ~ Ray Bradbury
Ray Bradbury’s Writing Wisdom #11
Read poetry every day of your life. Poetry is good because it flexes muscles you don’t often use enough. Poetry expands the senses and keeps them in prime condition. It keeps you aware of your nose, your eyes, your ear, your tongue, and your hand. And, above all, poetry is compacted metaphor or simile. ~ Ray Bradbury
Ray Bradbury’s Writing Wisdom #9
I leave you now at the bottom of your own stairs, at half after midnight, with a pad, a pen, and a list to be made. Conjure the nouns, alert the secret self, taste the darkness. Your own thing stands waiting way up there in the attic shadows. If you speak softly, and write any old word that wants to jump out of your nerves onto the page, your thing at the top of your stairs in your own private night may well come down. ~ Ray Bradbury
11 Writing Tips from Henry Miller Tip 11
Tip 11: Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards.
11 Writing Tips from Henry Miller Tip 5
Tip 5: When you can’t create you can work.
Tip 3 of 7 Writing Fiction Tips by William Faulkner
Write from experience–but keep a very broad definition of “experience.”
To me, experience is anything you have perceived. It can come from books, a book that–a story that–is true enough and alive enough to move you. That, in my opinion, is one of your experiences. You need not do the actions that the people in that book do, but if they strike you as being true, that they are things that people would do, that you can understand the feeling behind them that made them do that, then that’s an experience to me. And so, in my definition of experience, it’s impossible to write anything that is not an experience, because everything you have read, have heard, have sensed, have imagined is part of experience.
Source: Open Culture
Hemingway’s Advice on Writing: Let Your Subconscious Work On It
Never think about the story when you’re not working.
“Hemingway says never to think about a story you are working on before you begin again the next day. “That way your subconscious will work on it all the time,” he writes in the Esquire piece. “But if you think about it consciously or worry about it you will kill it and your brain will be tired before you start.” He goes into more detail in A Moveable Feast:
When I was writing, it was necessary for me to read after I had written. If you kept thinking about it, you would lose the thing you were writing before you could go on with it the next day. It was necessary to get exercise, to be tired in the body, and it was very good to make love with whom you loved. That was better than anything. But afterwards, when you were empty, it was necessary to read in order not to think or worry about your work until you could do it again. I had learned already never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.”
Source: Open Culture
