Ray Bradbury – My own delights and despairs can give my stories a heart

I’m reading Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury. It’s an excellent book – a collection of essays on the art and joy of writing. At one point, Mr. Bradbury talks about the stories you write while trying to imitate your favorite authors versus the stories you write in your own voice.

There’s nothing wrong with imitating first-class writing. It’s one of the ways to become more fluid. It’s also great for learning how to use words, phrases, and techniques to create beautiful prose. But if all you do is stay at this stage, you’ll never be more than a copycat. All your writing will never amount to more than “quadruple-layered mudpies, all language and style, that would not float, but rather sink without a trace.”

There comes a time when you have to understand the limits of “the minefield of imitation”. If you are to create your own great writing, you have to be willing to step on your own live mine, and be blown up by your own delights and despairs.

Here’s how Mr. Bradbury talks about it:

I grew up reading and loving the traditional ghost stories of Dickens, Lovecraft, Poe, and later, Kuttner, Bloch, and Clark Aston Smith. I tried to write stories heavily influenced by various of these writers, and succeeded in making quadruple-layered mudpies, all language and style, that would not float, and sank without a trace. I was too young to identify my problem, I was so busy imitating.

I almost blundered into my creative self in my last year in high school, when I wrote a kind of long remembrance of the deep ravine in my home town, and my fear of it at night. But I had no story to go with the ravine, so my discovering my true source of my future writing was put off for some years.

I wrote at lease a thousand words a day every day from the age of twelve on. For years Poe was looking over one shoulder, while Wells, Burroughs, and just about every writer in Astounding and Weird Tales looked over the other.

I loved them, and they smothered me. I hadn’t learned how to look away and in the process look not at myself but at what went on behind my face.

It was only when I began to discover the treats and tricks that came with word association that I began to find some true way through the minefield of imitation. I finally figured out that if you are going to step on a live mine, make it your own. Be blown up, as it were, by your own delights and despairs.

I began to put down brief notes and descriptions of loves and hates. All during my twentieth and twenty-first years, I circled around summer noons and October midnights, sensing that there somewhere in the bright and dark seasons must be something that was really me.

– Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing

The way I see it, imitation leads to well written empty stories. Your own delights and despairs, that something that is really you, lead to stories that have heart.