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You Must Write Every Single Day of Your Life
To sum it all up, if you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling.
You must write every single day of your life.
You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next.
You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads.
I wish for you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime.
I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you.
May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories—science fiction or otherwise.
Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.
RAY BRADBURY
Friday, April 29, 2011 at 01:09AM
Reader Comments (5)
I've had this site as my home page for a while now and every single post has enlightened me in one way or another. This one however is life shifting. Thank you for this :)
I really do not believe you should tell anyone to write everyday. if you write everyday without inspiration your work will worthless. Instead they should tell people to write whenever the feeling hits them.
Oh Dear Nina -- would that you were right. I'd love to wait for inspiration, but as Kirsty says well in her post on the topic http://kirstyhall.co.uk/2011/05/18/please-make-rubbish/ you must make some rubbish.
It's only in the trash and the gunk that you learn to find your voice as a writer. Somewhere within the 1800 words I write every day there are sometimes 100 perfect pieces. Some days there are none. But every single moment of writing is a gift and a time with a muse. To paraphrase, "My muse shows up every day precisely when I sit down to write."
The dreadful pieces I write are all prelude to the "inspired" writing that eventually makes it way to the public.
@Peggie - your comment was as inspiring to me as the Bradbury. Thanks for writing it. I haven't been published yet, but I write diligently every day, and have lately been wondering if it's worth it, since a lot of it has been sub-par in my estimation of it. But, as you say, some days there is nothing good that comes out, while other days there is. Thank you very much! :)
Jan - I'm delighted it spoke to you - keep on writing!