Thanks to a tweet by Joe Hill, I came across a video on the wonderful Brain Pickings of a speech by Ray Bradbury.

In the video the legendary author of classics like The Illustrated Man and Fahrenheit 451 talks at good length about his tips for writer’s hygiene, as well as other anecdotes from his long career. It’s a great video and well worth watching.

What he means by “hygiene”, for those like me for whom that’s a strange term in this context, is the good habits a writer should cultivate in order to further their abilities.

His tips struck a chord with me and I couldn’t find a post with his recommendations on them anywhere else online. For those looking, here they are:

Ray Bradbury’s Recommendations

Basic Writerly Hygiene

• Write 52 short stories a year
  • Doing so, you’ll end up with thousands and perhaps hundreds of thousands of words in a year.
  • You build your craft; your ability to tell a story will improve along with all the other aspects that will help if/when you move to longer forms.
    • Novellists are often guilty of “padding” the book too much, in Bradbury’s opinion, and by bringing yourself up on short stories you learn not to do that. Every word counts.
  • At the end of the week you’re happy – you’ve accomplished something and have something to show for a week’s work. Novelists rarely feel like that.

“I defy you to write fifty-two bad stories. Can’t be done, eh?”

Mr. Bradbury also had reading recommendations for us.

• Every night for 1,000 nights, read:
  • One short story
  • One poem
  • One essay
• This nightly homework is to help you to “collect metaphors” – stuff your head with nuggets from various fields that you can jumble up with your own experiences to form new ideas, or novel twists on old ones.

Around the same time in the speech, he drops a few other miscellaneous tips.

• Get rid of friends who make fun of you and don’t believe in you. They’ll hold you back and distract from your goals.
• Don’t spend your whole time on the “damn” internet.
  • Worth noting that for a sometime sci-fi writer who also wrote in Fahrenheit about the need to preserve books, Bradbury became a bit of a curmudgeon about eBooks and computerised reading. Until his death, there were very few of his books available on Kindle, although they are now available on the Kindle Store.
  • That said, he has a serious point here. I don’t know about you, but I can very easily spend far too long very much wasting time on the internet instead of doing anything constructive. Especially when I “sit down to write.”

Author Recommendations

For the nightly reading, he had a lot of stream-of-consciousness recommendations. I can personally attest to how good Roald Dahl’s shorts and Robert Frost’s poems are, but the rest are new to me and I’m looking forward to diving in.

Short Story Authors

• Roald Dahl
• Guy de Maupassant
• John Cheever
• Richard Matheson
• Nigel Kneale
• John Collier
• Katherine Ann Porter
• Worten
• Eudora Welty
• Washington Irving
• Melville
• Edgar Allen Poe
• Nathaniel Hawthorne

Ray Bradbury himself was obviously a very prolific and accomplished writer of short stories. I’ll be including his in my nightly hygiene reading, as well as others like Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, Jack London, etc.

Poets

• Robert Frost
• Shakespeare
• Alexander Pope

Essay Writers

• Martin Luther King
• Aldous Huxley
• Lauren Eiseley
• George Bernard Shaw (GK Chesterton collaboration essays)
• Various other sources from all kinds of places and subjects
  • Politics, science, anthropology, technology, history…

My own personal routine

I intend to complete my reading every night, and blog about some of it. I’ll also tweet mini-reviews when I think to, so give me a follow: @RoKeeffe if you’re interested in keeping up.

Fifty-two short stories a year is slightly ambitious for me given that I am not a full-time writer as Bradbury and the majority of his audience were and have a hectic work and training schedule, but I’m going to try to do what I can in this regard and see how far short I fall. Aim for the stars, etc.

I’m going to, deep breath, post some or all of my completed stories here as I go. Should be interesting/painful for anyone who drops by for that.

If this helped you, drop a comment and let me know. I’d love to know how your hygiene is going!