Crazy Lovely Things

Hey guys,

Here are some quotes to brighten your day.

"Know something?" Sinclair Lewis said one afternoon in 1947. "We writers have power not given to anyone else?"
As his young secretary, I dutifully responded: "What's that, sir?"
"We have the power to bore people long after we are dead."

Ray Bradbury wrote: (I know it's long, but it's worth it!)

"How does one go about becoming a writer?

Well you might as well ask, how do you go about becoming a human, whatever that is! You go about being a sci-fiwriter or historical fiction writer or romance writer or mystery writer pretty much the same way you go about being a "normal" writer. We are all, first and last, tellers of stories.

You fall in love, early, with all kinds of things. I fell in love with books when I was 5 or 6, especially the way books looked and smelled.

I have been a library jackdaw all my life, which means I have never gone into that lovely holy place with a book list, but only beady bright eyes and my curious paws, monkey-climbing the stacks over among the children's, and then again where i was not allowed, burrowing among the adults' mysterious books.

I would take home, at the age of 10, eight books at a time, from eight different categories, and rub my nose in them and all but lie down and roll on them like a frolicsome springtime dog. Popular Mechanics and The Boy Mechanic were my bibles. The encyclopedia was my open meadow-field where I rambled and muttered: "Curiouser and curiouser!" and lay down with Jules Verne's robot pups only to rise with Edgar Rise Burroughs's Martian fleas.

I have run amuck ever since in libraries and booksores, with fevers and deliriums. Hysteria must be your way of life, then, if you wish, any of you, to become writers. Or, for that mater, painters or actors or any other crazy, lovely things!

If I emphasize libraries it is because school itself is only a beginning, and writing itself is a continuation. But the meat must be found and fed on in every library you can jump into and every bookstore you can pole-vault through.

Even as I did nont prowl there with preconceived lists, so I do not send you there with nice, dry, tame, small indexes of my taste, crushing you with an iron-anvil dropped from a building.

Once you start, the library is the biggest blasted Cracker Jack Factory in the world. The more you eat, the more you want!

And the more you read, the more the ideas begin to explode around inside your head, run riot, meet head-on in beautiful collissions so that when you go to bed at night the damned visions color the ceiling and light the walls with huge exploits and wonderful discoveries.

I still use librares and bookstores in the same fashion forthy years later. I spend as much time in child's country as I do over the corseted adults'.

And what I take home and browse and munch through each evening should give you a relaxing view of a writer tumultuous just this side of madness.

I may start a night's read with a James Bond novel, move on to Shakespeare for half an hour, dip into Dylan Thomas for 5 minutes, make a fast turnabout and fasten on Fu Manchu, that great and evil Oriental doctor, ancestor of Dr. No, then pick up Emily Dickinson, and end my evening with Ross Macdonald, the detective novelist, or Robert Frost, that crusty poet of the American rural spirit.

The fact should be plain now: I am an amiable compost heap. For I learned, early on, that in order to grow myself excellent I had to start myself in the plain old farmyard blood manure. From such heaps of mediocre or angelic words I fever myself up to grow fine stories, or roses, if you prefer.

I am a junkyard, then, of all the libraries and bookshops I ever fell into or leaned upon, and am proud and happy that I never developed such a rare taste that I could not go back and jog with Tarzan or hit the Yellow Brick Road with Dorothy, both characters and their books banned for 50 years by all librarians and most educators. I have had my own loves, and gone my own way to become my own self.

I highly recommend you do the same. However crazy your desire, however wild your need, however dumb your taste may seem to other... follow it!

When I was 9 I collected Buck Rogers comic strips. People made fun. I tore them up. 2 months later, I said to myself: "Hold on! What's this all about? These people are trying to starve me. They have cut me off from my vitamins! And the greatest food in my life, right now is Buck Rogers! Everyone, outa the way! Git! Runty Ray is going to start collecting comic strips again!"
And I did. For I had the great secret!

Everyone else was wrong. I was right. For me, anyway.

What if I hadn't done as I have done? Would I ever have grown up to become a writer of Science Fiction or, for that atter, any kind of writer at all?

No. Never.

If I had listened to all the tastemongers and fools and critics I would have played a safe game, never jumped the fence, and become a nonentity whose name would not be known to you now.
So it was I learned to run and leap into an empty swimming pool, hoping to sweat enough liquid into it on the way down to make a soft landing.

Or, to change the metaphors, I dropped myself off the edges of cliffs, daring to build myself wings while falling, so as not to break myself on the rocks below.

To sum it all up, if you want to write, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling.

You must write every single day of your life.

You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next.

You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads.

I wish for you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories- science fiction or otherwise. Finally, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world." (From The Complete Guide to Writing Fiction)

Sean