Liberating and refreshing

A liberating and refreshing look at the art of writing from Ray Bradbury. A little chaotic in places but all the better for it. Excellently read. Highly recommended 👌

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One of the best books for writers.

I have listened to this many times and will continue to do so. Ray understands every cell of a writer’s being and his words relate to any creative. Money so well spent on this book.

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Exuberant, excitable, of its time

I love some of Ray Bradbury's output. His grandiloquence - that's his kind of word - can get wearing though, and these essays are overflowing with it. And the real not faux naivete that fuels the excitable flow of words: his writing on how to write is full of the kind of gosh, darn, golly, mouth wide open awe that you'd expect from a kid growing up in small town America decades ago. The naivete and optimism of the mid 20th century mid West are everywhere. Grandparents are all kind, all wisdom, compared in the cringiest passages to Aristotle with Ray and the other kids at their feet on the lawns, soaking up their age old wisdom and philosophy and goodness. Something Wicked This Way Comes is one of the most arresting titles of any piece of writing. But the backwards Yoda speak is not just occasional, it is everywhere in Bradbury's writing. And watching The Upstart Crow in which a comic Shakespeare defends dramatising a sentence by 'putting all the words in the wrong order' because 'that's what I do' is a reminder that a style of writing suited to Astounding Stories and often coming across as written by an excitable boy for excitable boys can be endearing in small doses now. But it feels very dated, lacking in irony and sometimes hypey in its attempts to evoke wonder and portent and fear today. Ray was, from his writings here, a scared, sensitive child who once listed all the things that scared him - the attic, skeletons, the carnival, the thing on the stairs, the old man, the old woman, the storm etc - and decided to write about each one to set loose the fear and excitement attached to it. Write a thousand words a day for fifty years and some of it will be breathtakingly good but a lot of it won't is what he himself says. About ten percent, he says, is the good stuff. From quantity comes quality, he writes. Which applies to this book of essays, too. Some of the overlong, hyperbolic writing (in case the first metaphor in a list doesn't wow you, there are plenty more queuing up to do the same job until one does or you give in under the unrelenting barrage of words, shouting 'I get it, Ray, I got it with the first one, please move on') is partly entertaining in the way a garrulous uncle you're fond of but find annoying after a while keeps telling you the same old stories at length and insists this is deep timeless wisdom you need to pay attention to. Good insights for writers hiding in the verbiage - your subconscious is your muse, for example - but elaborately surrounded and dressed up, as you'd expect if you've read any Bradbury. Most moving anecdote - told several different times in the different essays collected into this book - is how as a small child he played on a lake beach with a little girl and then she was gone and he was playing alone. He was so young it wasn't till years later he found out she'd gone into the lake and drowned. Years after that he wrote 'The Lake ' purely so he could rescue her, bring her back out of the water, because he couldn't bear her having been left there for decades, 'though I didn't realise that until I finished it - hadn't even known how deeply she'd affected me - and couldn't stop sobbing as I typed the last word, but felt I'd released her and, after ten years of bad writing, had finally written something true.' (That's a paraphrase). Gotta love him for that.

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5 people found this helpful

A rare jewel for writers

Wasn’t sure at the beginning but it’s a treasure trove. So grateful to have stumbled over Ray Bradbury this way. The narration is brilliant too. I am racing off to the garret!

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excellent

a really enjoyable listen, would highly recommend! Excellent insights and fun experiences - well worth my time

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