Interview of Ray Bradbury
from the Paris Review

INTERVIEWER
You’re self-educated, aren’t you?

BRADBURY
Yes, I am. I’m completely library educated. I’ve never been to college. I went down to the library when I was in grade school in Waukegan, and in high school in Los Angeles, and spent long days every summer in the library. I used to steal magazines from a store on Genesee Street, in Waukegan, and read them and then steal them back on the racks again. That way I took the print off with my eyeballs and stayed honest. I didn’t want to be a permanent thief, and I was very careful to wash my hands before I read them. But with the library, it’s like catnip, I suppose: you begin to run in circles because there’s so much to look at and read. And it’s far more fun than going to school, simply because you make up your own list and you don’t have to listen to anyone. When I would see some of the books my kids were forced to bring home and read by some of their teachers, and were graded on—well, what if you don’t like those books?
I am a librarian. I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the library. Before I fell in love with libraries, I was just a six-year-old boy. The library fueled all of my curiosities, from dinosaurs to ancient Egypt. When I graduated from high school in 1938, I began going to the library three nights a week. I did this every week for almost ten years and finally, in 1947, around the time I got married, I figured I was done. So I graduated from the library when I was twenty-seven. I discovered that the library is the real school.

INTERVIEWER
You have said that you don’t believe in going to college to learn to write. Why is that?

BRADBURY
You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do—and they don’t. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James, but what if you don’t want to write like Henry James? They may like John Irving, for instance, who’s the bore of all time. A lot of the people whose work they’ve taught in the schools for the last thirty years, I can’t understand why people read them and why they are taught. The library, on the other hand, has no biases. The information is all there for you to interpret. You don’t have someone telling you what to think. You discover it for yourself.

INTERVIEWER
But your books are taught widely in schools.

BRADBURY
Do you know why teachers use me? Because I speak in tongues. I write metaphors. Every one of my stories is a metaphor you can remember. The great religions are all metaphor. We appreciate things like Daniel and the lion’s den, and the Tower of Babel. People remember these metaphors because they are so vivid you can’t get free of them and that’s what kids like in school. They read about rocket ships and encounters in space, tales of dinosaurs. All my life I’ve been running through the fields and picking up bright objects. I turn one over and say, Yeah, there’s a story. And that’s what kids like. Today, my stories are in a thousand anthologies. And I’m in good company. The other writers are quite often dead people who wrote in metaphors: Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne. All these people wrote for children. They may have pretended not to, but they did.

INTERVIEWER
How important is it to you to follow your own instincts?

BRADBURY
Oh, God. It’s everything. I was offered the chance to write War and Peace for the screen a few decades ago. The American version with King Vidor directing. I turned it down. Everyone said, How could you do that? That’s ridiculous, it’s a great book! I said, Well, it isn’t for me. I can’t read it. I can’t get through it, I tried. That doesn’t mean the book’s bad. I just am not prepared for it. It portrays a very special culture. The names throw me. My wife loved it. She read it once every three years for twenty years. They offered the usual amount for a screenplay like that, a hundred thousand dollars, but you cannot do things for money in this world. I don’t care how much they offer you, and I don’t care how poor you are. There’s only one excuse ever to take money under those circumstances: If someone in your family is horribly ill and the doctor bills are piled up so high that you’re all going to be destroyed. Then I’d say, Go on and take the job. Go do War and Peace and do a lousy job. And be sorry later.


http://www.theparisreview.org/viewinterview.php/prmMID/6012

Very sick with a headache today.

But I started a story about an alien which I've had in various forms in my head for awhile. Hope it works out.

Read sci-fi short stories.

Tomorrow if I remember I'll post part of an article by Ursula K. Le Guin. part of my mission to post things that I learn that may help others on their writing journey.

But right now I have to get to bed.

ग्राम्मर पोस्ट

I joined writerscafe.org and writer.com today. I pretty much have no brain left from looking at a million writing and other online job opportunities, most of which are scams, which is why I can't squeeze much out of this wilted brain.
I want to create something for which there's a market. There are a lot of websites which have ATROCIOUS grammar. If I didn't know that before, I know it now after sifting through a zillion sites, most of questionable legitimacy. How can a writing site advertise anything when they can't even write their own introductory articles?? And what's with the ALL CAPS ALL THE TIME anyway????? I mean, we get it, you can earn tons of money off this scheme, you don't have to SCREAM IT AT US. Or maybe you do, since it's the only way you think you'll be able to hook someone into buying into your scam. I won't ever take a site seriously that feels like it has to have ALL CAPS every other paragraph. Seriously.
Anyway. Speaking of following your own writing rules, going back to the beginning of the previous paragraph, perhaps I'll create a website marketing my proofreading skills specifically for websites. I mean, there'd be no lack of work if everybody with a website who was spelling/grammar-challenged would allow me to pick through what they wrote. I'd even take the 'get-rich-quick-online' scammers as clients if they'd let me tone down a few of their all-CAP articles.
There. Rant over. Hm. Maybe I have more mental energy than I thought. That often happens once I focus on a subject that gets me passionate. Like grammar.

I am new to the blog thing. Thus, this will probably not make sense and continue to be random for some time now.
Not that random's bad. Not making sense, though, usually is something to be frowned upon.
It's probably because I'm drained from being in front of the computer all day looking for careers and possible schools, online or not, and which degree, and whether I should do something in writing, which is what I want to do, but don't know if I have the talent for, etc. etc. etc.
Anyway. I am also doing a writing journal that has notes about how to be a writer from sites, quote snippets, thoughts about writing. That's one of the places I got an idea of doing a blog from. I really, really need a place to organize my thoughts otherwise they're all floating around in my head in no particular order and I never get anything done. I need to focus, for once I focus on a thing, that I like, especially, you can't tear me away from it.
In my writing journal for today, the first random thing is:

Polemic means
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/polemic
n.
1. A controversial argument, especially one refuting or attacking a specific opinion or doctrine.
2. A person engaged in or inclined to controversy, argument, or refutation.
adj. also po•lem•i•cal (- -k l)
Of or relating to a controversy, argument, or refutation.

It was there because I wanted to know what polemic meant since I read it somewhere before I went to bed. I wasn't clear on the definition. Now, hopefully, I'll be able to remember not only what it means, but how to say it, in case I ever have to use it (or I could just say controversial argument. Unless I want to impress someone. In which case I will probably say it the wrong way).

Perhaps this blog will evolve into a writing tips blog, daily or whatever, someday whenever I get my act together and FOCUS those random thoughts....

Epiphanous journey

In this writing blog, I'll chronicle my writing adventures/misadventures; include things that I learn along the way. Writing is a journey that never ends; on the road you meet many interesting characters, see many interesting sights. Lots of it is rather random, and so will this blog be (unless I find a sharper focus for it)

What does the title Epiphany have to do with it? Not too much, except that it started as a blog for one of my classes, which is now long-done, and the earlier posts of which I erased.

So, enjoy!