Ray Bradbury’s Method for Discovering What You’re Meant to Write

Finding the words that unlock your muse

Dear Living Dark reader,

Ray Bradbury’s insights on writing and creativity have been very special to me for decades, as indeed they’ve been special to many other people, probably including you. One of his most powerful pieces of concrete advice in this area is to make lists of nouns that name things deeply important and evocative for you and your life’s journey, and then to use these as semantic talismans for self-discovery. Use your personal mythic power words, he suggested, to identify your deepest fears and fascinations, and then to enable you to bring these out of the shadows of the unconscious into the world of spoken and written language, where they can serve as the subject matter not only for your writing, but for your whole creative career, and even as a kind of road map of the soul that is uniquely you.

In his essay “Run Fast, Stand Still, or, The Thing at the Top of the Stairs, or, new Ghosts from Old Minds”—which can be found in his superb essay collection Zen in the Art of Writing—Bradbury describes how he fell into this practice himself at some point in his creative and authorial development:

I began to make lists of titles, to put down long lines of nouns. These lists were the provocations, finally, that caused my better stuff to surface. I was feeling my way toward something honest, hidden under the trapdoor on the top of my skull.

The lists ran something like this: THE LAKE. THE NIGHT. THE CRICKETS. THE RAVINE. THE ATTIC. THE BASEMENT. THE TRAP-DOOR. THE BABY. THE CROWD. THE NIGHT TRAIN. THE FOG HORN. THE SCYTHE. THE CARNIVAL. THE CAROUSEL. THE DWARF. THE MIRROR MAZE. THE SKELETON.

I was beginning to see a pattern in the list, in these words that I had simply flung forth on paper, trusting my subconscious to give bread, as it were, to the birds.¹

If you’re even minimally familiar with Bradbury’s stories and novels, you’ve surely noticed that many of the words above refer to key themes in his literary universe, and even to the titles of some of his most iconic stories. Clearly, this self-interrogation of his deepest fears, fantasies, fascinations, and desires through the tool of power nouns led him organically to write what he was meant to write. Elsewhere in Zen in the Art of Writing, he says the necessary practice of nourishing one’s creative muse “seems to me to be the continual running after loves, the checking of these loves against one’s present and future needs, the moving on from simple textures to more complex ones, from naïve ones to more informed ones, from nonintellectual to intellectual ones. Nothing is ever lost.”² The point is illustrated by his own creative biography: a long career that ranged from horror to science fiction to detective fiction and more, following an organic logic dictated by his continual pursuit of what he loved.

The same principle underlies every authentic creative life: the willingness to trust what rises unbidden, to follow the word that calls you.

In the “Run Fast, Stand Still” essay, he describes how his own experience might be fruitfully applied by other writers—including you and me—even as he also explains how it actually worked for him in practical execution:

Where am I leading you? Well, if you are a writer, or would hope to be one, similar lists, dredged out of the lopside of your brain, might well help you discover you, even as I flopped around and finally found me.

I began to run through those lists, pick a noun, and then sit down to write a long prose-poem-essay on it. Somewhere along about the middle of the page, or perhaps on the second page, the prose poem would turn into a story. Which is to say that a character suddenly appeared and said, “That’s me”; or, “That’s an idea I like!” And the character would then finish the tale for me.

It began to be obvious that I was learning from my lists of nouns, and that I was further learning that my characters would do my work for me, if I let them alone, if I gave them their heads, which is to say, their fantasies, their frights.³

I once brought Bradbury’s list-making exercise to a panel on writing that I chaired at a past World Horror Convention. As I described it to the audience, I was surprised to find that many of those in attendance, most of them writers, had never heard of this. The mere mention of Bradbury’s name tends to draw respectful and often rapt attention at such gatherings, so everyone listened intently as I talked. What did not surprise me was how deeply it landed. People were fascinated. Both during and after the panel, several told me how valuable and exciting it sounded, and said they were definitely going to try it for themselves. I have no idea how many of them carried through on that, but for those who did, I don’t doubt that it was valuable in some degree.

Bradbury’s commitment to this practice shows up throughout his career, including in interviews where he describes his working method in real time. In 1969, for instance, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation produced a half-hour documentary titled Ray Bradbury, Illustrated, that delved into Bradbury as a writer and a man. The official Ray Bradbury website, RayBradbury.com, provides a good description:

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) produced this documentary on Ray Bradbury for their Telescope series. While the first half of the video focuses on the movie adaptation of The Illustrated Man, the second half offers a broader picture of Bradbury’s life and his belief that writing dystopian fantasy and science fiction is a way of encouraging people to make the world a better place. Bradbury also offers a glimpse into the basement office overflowing with books, memorabilia, and artifacts that spark his imagination and offer him the vehicles to reveal the ideas buried deep inside himself.

This documentary captures Bradbury when he was at the very height of his powers—lucid, articulate, and radiating a charismatic enthusiasm. The first time I watched it, I was struck to hear him give yet another description of his idiosyncratic creative approach of starting with a single word and letting it serve as a provocation, and a kind of conduit, for more words to emerge through a process of focused free association, eventually coalescing into stories and essays:

So, what I try to do is go to my typewriter and, many days, experiment with words to find out what my tension is. Do I need to laugh or cry on a particular day? I don’t know. Sometimes I don’t know. So I begin to type any word that comes into my mind. The Dwarf. The Night. The Lake. The Wind. The Time Machine. And then say to myself, “Why have you put that word down there?”

Also fascinating is that, as he goes on to illustrate this with a specific example, you realize that he’s giving an account of the origin of his now classic short story “The Veldt,” though he doesn’t name it:

Why have you written “The Nursery,” for example, on the typewriter? What kind of nursery? Where? A nursery in the past? No. The present? No. What about the future? What would a nursery be like in the future? Well, it would be automated. It would provide you with an environment, let’s say, so that you could go into that nursery and command it to take you to South America or Africa or the North Pole, and suddenly you’re surrounded by the three dimensions and color of that environment. All right, put your children in such an environment. Show that environment to the parents. What does this do to the family relationship? And suddenly you’re off and flying, all because you dared to put on paper the words “The Nursery.” You didn’t even know the story was in you. But you go with it.

You can hear him say all this in the segment below:

In Bradbury’s method, you can glimpse the same principle that underlies every authentic creative life: the willingness to trust what rises unbidden, to follow the word that calls you.

Warm regards,

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The Kindle edition of Writing at the Wellspring is available for preorder. Much of its content was first published here at The Living Dark in a different form. Whether you’ve known my work for years or are just coming across it, this book brings together my thinking about creativity, inner silence, the daemon muse, and the strange, life-shaping currents beneath inspiration. It’s part craft, part philosophy, and part spiritual manifesto.

If this resonates, know that preorders genuinely help a new book reach the readers who might need it. December 15 is the release date for both print and electronic editions.

“A guide for writers who welcome the dark and hunger for meaning.
— Joanna Penn

“I can’t think of any [other books] that link the creative act so uniquely or persuasively with spirituality.”
— Victoria Nelson

“A meditation on the silence and darkness out of which all creative acts emerge....A guide for writers unlike any other.”
— J. F. Martel

“Important to any writer ready to see through the self illusion and realize the freedom this brings to any creative work.”
— Katrijn van Oudheusden

1. Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing (Joshua Odell Editions, 1996), 17.

2. Ibid., 41.

3. Ibid., 19.