Don't Think: Ray Bradbury's Formula for Writing
“The intellect is a great danger to creativity because you begin to rationalize and make up reasons for things instead of staying with your own basic truth..."
Chase the blinking cursor
The blinking cursor can be your friend and your enemy.
It’s your enemy when it flashes impotently at the top left of a page. Like a mysterious muse leaning against the door frame, their body half hidden by shadow, tapping the toe of a patent leather shoe against the hardwood floor. Waiting.
Again.
It’s your friend when you’re chasing it across the screen. Letter by letter. Punctuation flying like leaves in the wind. Logic, that lead-footed killjoy, left behind to be consulted some time later. Much later if you’re lucky.
Make the cursor your friend. Chase it across the page until you’re exhausted. Until you’ve had enough and all the ideas and words have spilled out.
Don’t think.
Since I was in my precocious and pimply teenage years watching Ray Bradbury Theatre on the huge old tube television in the basement of the home where I grew up I have been inspired by the very great Ray Bradbury. So it should be no surprise that I gravitate to his version of creative impetus.
Start writing. Trust your intuition. Banish the intellect (for now).
This isn’t to say that you don’t have a plan for what you’re going to try to write that day or a general feel for what you’re trying to accomplish. Maybe you need to figure out a character, maybe you’re feeling out a landscape, a building, a specific scene. It doesn’t matter.
Trust yourself to feel your way through the words that are coming out of you and to find the truth of what you’re trying to communicate without logic, intellect, or rumination ruining the fun.
As Mr Bradbury once said,
I never went to college — I don’t believe in college for writers. The thing is very dangerous. I believe too many professors are too opinionated and too snobbish and too intellectual, and the intellect is a great danger to creativity … because you begin to rationalize and make up reasons for things, instead of staying with your own basic truth — who you are, what you are, what you want to be. I’ve had a sign over my typewriter for over 25 years now, which reads “Don’t think!” You must never think at the typewriter — you must feel. Your intellect is always buried in that feeling anyway.
This week’s exercise:
Write 1000 words without thinking, without editing as you go, without heeding the protestations of your nagging intellect.
Start to build a practice that allows you the freedom to explore, experiment, and play with words, ideas, characters, and scenes without concern for where or how they may fit within the greater context of your work or practice.
1000 words without thinking. That’s it.
Maybe it’s 200 words a day. Maybe it’s more, maybe it’s less. Maybe it leads you to some interesting and unexpected places.
What I’m reading right now:
What I’m listening to right now:
What I’m watching right now:
Thank you for reading.
Good luck with your writing. Be kind to yourself and DFTBA.
I've often found freewriting to be enormously helpful in connecting with my subconscious; I otherwise tend to be overly cerebral. Thanks for this perspective on it.