Workshop Wednesday - Yours

I posted this quote pic on Twitter a couple of weeks ago. Ray Bradbury is one of those authors chock full of good writer brain food. I guess it depends on what kind of writing advice you're looking for. I can never connect with anyone who promises he or she holds the one true key to writing a great novel. I don't like direct, step-by-step procedure or how-to guides. Writing is not like solving a math problem - there is no "right" answer. And I think straining and struggling to adhere to one person's manual is only limiting your creativity. You'll end up with a story that looks a lot like someone else wrote it, when the point of writing, the beautiful part of it, is that the story is yours when you get done telling it. I like when teachers help you find a way to channel what you think, feel, believe, and bleed it onto the paper. They help you make something yours, rather than theirs.

Just like a riding instructor teaches you how to ride all horses, yes, but she has to tailor her instruction so that you become the very best at riding your horse. Your own original, quirky, independent horse, unlike all the others. The story is never the thing over which you have mastery; the story is the mount that carries you into your dreams; you talk to it and it talks to you. Your coach helps you understand one another.

For this reason, I love Bradbury's wisdom. He's pointing out how best to better yourself; not micromanaging your imagination.

Other favorites:

“Love. Fall in love and stay in love. Write only what you love, and love what you write. The word is love. You have to get up in the morning and write something you love, something to live for.”
― Ray Bradbury

“Anything you dream is fiction, and anything you accomplish is science, the whole history of mankind is nothing but science fiction. ”
― Ray Bradbury

“I ate them like salad, books were my sandwich for lunch, my tiffin and dinner and midnight munch. I tore out the pages, ate them with salt, doused them with relish, gnawed on the bindings, turned the chapters with my tongue! Books by the dozen, the score and the billion. I carried so many home I was hunchbacked for years. Philosophy, art history, politics, social science, the poem, the essay, the grandiose play, you name 'em, I ate 'em.”
― Ray Bradbury

“If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting. I wake early and hear my morning voices leaping around in my head like jumping beans. I get out of bed to trap them before they escape.”
― Ray Bradbury

“Find out what your hero or heroine wants, and when he or she wakes up in the morning, just follow him or her all day..”
― Ray Bradbury