- 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.”