Readings and Thoughts on Creative Nonfiction

Author: Ray Bradbury

Bradbury writes mostly about how to feed the Muse. In order to feed the Muse, one must work hard, write constantly, and experience life. One must also read everything, and absorb as much culture as possible, and later one can sort all that stuff out. In order to keep the Muse, Bradbury writes that one must have friends who believe in you, and to keep feeding the Muse so it can keep growing. Basically, you can't be afraid of anything, and you must be willing to experiment.

Below are a few select quotes from the piece, along with some of my thoughts regarding them.

The Muse, then, is that most terrified of all the virgins. She starts if she hears a sound, pales if you ask her questions, spins and vanishes if you disturb her dress.

I think this is a good description of the Muse, since oftentimes it seems very fleeting.

So, too, with our Muse. If we focus beyond her, she regains her poise and stands out of the way.

This is a good piece of advice; by not concentrating on trying to have the Muse, and concentrating on your work, you eventually forget you need the Muse and the Muse will come back.

Into our subconscious goes not only factual data but reactive data, our movement toward or away from the sensed events. These are the stuffs, the foods, on which the Muse grows.

I think it's interesting that Bradbury says the Muse must be fed before it exists. However, it's true that we absorb a lot of data before thinking of writing anything.

When people ask me where I get my ideas, I laugh. How strange-we're so busy looking out, to find ways and means, we forget to look in.

I think this is important-ideas do not merely come to us, they must be formed and worked on.

Poetry is good because it flexes muscles you don't use often enough.

This is interesting. It seems poetry would be so different from prose but it can still spark some ideas.

You can never tell when you might want to know the finer points of being a pedestrian, keeping bees, carving headstones, or rolling hoops. Here is where you play the dilettante, and where it pays to do so.

The idea of reading essays to write creatively is also interesting, however, the more knowledge you have, the easier it is to come up with ideas, and to be accurate.

Every time you hear an echo from your subconscious, you know yourself a little better. A small echo may start an idea. A big echo may result in a story.

I like this idea of an echo, and I think it could be true.

Why all this insistence on the senses? Because in order to convince your reader that he is there, you must assault each of his senses, inturn, with color, sound, taste and texture.

I agree with this statement. If the reader cannot visualize anything you try to write about, the story has less of an impact.

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 so be stimulated in directions you might not take for many years.

I think this is good advice. Sometimes the best things come from unexpected sources.

By living well, by observing as you live, by reading well and observing as you read, you have fed Your Most Original Self. By training yourself in writing, by repetitious exercise, imitation, good example, you have made a clean, well-lighted place to keep the Muse.

I think this is also good advice because it's true, and it also shows how much hard work writing is.