Life, Writing, Weirdness

The Bradbury Challenge comes from a quote by, surprisingly, Ray Bradbury. He almost certainly used it more than once but the idea came to prominence (I think) when he gave the keynote address at a California writing symposium in 2001 (which you can find here). The essential idea is that if you read one poem, one short story, and one essay every day for a thousand days, you’ll have so much floating around in your head that you’ll almost have to produce some exciting new writing.

I think this is a very cool idea, although to try it I’m modifying things slightly and doing a miniature version to start.

Miniature as in I’m going to try it for thirty days and if that works out try to carry on to 100. Then we’ll see. It might be ingrained as a habit by then.

Modifying it in that I don’t want to lose the novel reading I do and I’ve been trying to read more nonfiction in recent years (and not always successfully), so I want to make sure that part of the goal is a novel every four weeks (which is very slow for me most of the time) and a non-fiction book every four weeks during the Challenge period. I have several novels and one non-fiction book in progress right now.

I have a number of anthologies hanging around and online magazines bookmarked so it’s easy to stack up a queue of short stories. Likewise, poetry. Even though I vastly prefer formal poetry (as in poetry that has some kind of form or structure), it’s not as hard to find as I was first concerned it might be.

Essays have been a little more work to turn up, at least things that are essays as I understand them and not simply rambling blog posts like this one, lists of things, or things that should have been magazine articles. There’s nothing wrong with any of those things; they can be fun, interesting, and have value, but an essay is something a bit more structured that you can sink your mental teeth into.

Or maybe I just mean something different by essay than common usage of the word leads most people to expect. Maybe I’m thinking about things too academically. But in my mind, an essay is something with an introduction followed by a series of arguments or discussions that make a major point, and then a conclusion to wrap things up and tie them together. Those seem to be a lot harder to find than I thought they should be.

That argument aside, the Bradbury Experiment is going well so far. yes, it is only day nine, so I’ve really only just started. It helps a lot that summer term started eleven days ago for me and I’m not taking any courses during the summer and have no TA duties, so my work week gets to have a reasonable length.

But I’m already getting pickier about what I read and it’s also much easier for me to put something down than it used to be. Time was that I’d push through a book or a story to see if it might get better. Sometimes I’d be rewarded for the effort and sometimes not, but my willingness to do it is far in the past now. Life is too short to spend time on books (or stories or movies) that I’m not enjoying when there are a lot more out there that I will.

Promise me an essay and give me a magazine article or list of six key habits to make all my dreams come true? I close the book.

Three grammatical mistakes in the first paragraph? I close the tab.

Apostrophe abuse in the first sentence? We’re already done.

The message might be good, the topic might be interesting, it might be something I really care about, but honesty and presentation matter. Be honest about what’s been presented and present it as if it’s to be taken seriously. I have a hard time taking a piece of writing seriously if the writer and publisher couldn’t take the time and effort to do a little copyediting. If I’m annoyed by the presentation that early on, I’m not going to get any further. Life is too short.

Now, I do still have to find an essay for today.

Happy reading, and be well, everyone.