What Are You Filling Your Mind With?
By: Ryan J. Pelton
Tags: Writing, Writer, Reading, Creativity, Writing Tips

Ray Bradbury on Writer Hygiene.

Creative Commons (pixabay.com)

Every writer will face the blank page with varying degrees of resistance, fear, and occasional diarrhea. The blinking cursor staring back at you with demon eyes speaking lies of:

“You’re an imposter, hack, your past successes mean nothing. You’re a phony. You have no talent or skills. What are you trying to prove?”

Sometimes the writer-demon manifests itself in other forms. A mind that simply lacks ideas.

The passion for a story or article that flowed with ease now hits a metaphorical brick wall. Your brain an empty vessel scratching for anything that resembles an idea. Anything that will keep the work moving along.

Regardless if you’ve written hundreds of articles and published a dozen novels, the writer-demon is real. But there’s hope my friends. And we find the hope long before you ever put a word on the page.

Legendary prolific writer, Ray Bradbury, suggested in a lecture three things for what he called: writer hygiene. What are the things you can do to keep your mind healthy before you sit and write?

“What you’ve got to do from this night forward is stuff your head with more different things from various fields . . . I’ll give you a program to follow every night, very simple program. For the next thousand nights, before you go to bed every night, read one short story. That’ll take you ten minutes, 15 minutes. Okay, then read one poem a night from the vast history of poetry. Stay away from most modern poems. It’s crap. It’s not poetry! It’s not poetry. Now if you want to kid yourself and write lines that look like poems, go ahead and do it, but you’ll go nowhere. Read the great poets, go back and read Shakespeare, read Alexander Pope, read Robert Frost. But one poem a night, one short story a night, one essay a night, for the next 1,000 nights. From various fields: archaeology, zoology, biology, all the great philosophers of time, comparing them. Read the essays of Aldous Huxley, read Lauren Eisley, great anthropologist. . . I want you to read essays in every field. On politics, analyzing literature, pick your own. But that means that every night then, before you go to bed, you’re stuffing your head with one poem, one short story, one essay — at the end of a thousand nights, Jesus God, you’ll be full of stuff, won’t you?” -from “Telling the Truth,” the keynote address of The Sixth Annual Writer’s Symposium by the Sea, sponsored by Point Loma Nazarene University, 2001

What you fill your mind with matters. It’s the difference between an ordinary writer and a prolific one. A writer that never lacks ideas. A writer that bleeds passion and joy on the page. And a writer that’s a well-rounded human.

Review

What kind of reading program does Bradbury suggest?

1. Read one short story every night (10–15 minutes).

2. Read one poem every night (5–10 minutes).

3. Read one essay on a variety of subjects every night (10–30 minutes).

In our day, finding stories, poems, and essays, are done with the click of a mouse. Read Medium articles, find essays in magazines online, and go to a library or used book store and load up on short story collections.

With the investment of less than an hour per day our minds will soar with new ideas, passions, and things to explore.

If you’re a fiction writer short stories will teach you how to create characters and a tight plot that hold the readers interest with little writing real estate.

Study these stories and see how they work. Notice the language, cadence, and themes.

Poetry is about the use of language.

Notice how great poems move the reader with only a few lines of prose. How do they paint vivid pictures and metaphors using less than one hundred words? How do poems move the emotions of readers with such sparse language?

Poetry is a lesson in the power of words. The diving into every human emotion and experience.

Read essays on a variety of subjects.

Essays are valuable for fiction and nonfiction writers. Read stuff you don’t agree with and write something that goes against their main point. Write what scares you. Give your opinion on an idea, philosophy, or political stance.

Well-written essays show the writer how to hold someone’s attention even with seemingly boring or controversial topics. How to express an idea with punch whether it be religious, political, or personal?

Essays expand your mind to the realities of a big world most of us never give the time to explore.

I’ve taken Bradbury’s advice to heart. I read short stories, novels, nonfiction, essays, and poetry regularly. The poetry is new for me.

One of my last novel ideas came from a Rolling Stone essay about a personal trainer tied to the Russian mafia. You never know where your next idea will come from?

If you want to be a factory of ideas. If you want to write with more depth. And if you want to grow as a human and have a larger vision of the world; take Bradbury’s advice.

And get those words on the page.