Bradbury’s collection of essay is part advice and part auto-biography from meetings with Mr. Electrico to keeping and feeding your own Muse. The beautiful aspect of these essays is that you can read and reread them on their own or any sequence; either route still allows the reader to experience Bradbury’s generosity as he openly communicates his sources of inspiration.
There were some points in the book where I was distinctly aware that Bradbury comes from an older generation. For example, he mentions how Fahrenheit 451 was literally a dime novel since he frantically typed all the text on typewriters in a library basement that charged a dime for each half hour. Unless I survive an apocalypse and my electronic appliances don’t do the same, I don’t see myself ever having this experience. However, there are some aspects that hold true through the generations. Bradbury frequently mentions that he has written a thousand words every day for a very long time. He certainly doesn’t claim that all these words have become masterpieces, but he does imply that all writing – even bad writing – has some value (how else do we preserve our inspiration?). I won’t give away the simple but insightful steps that Bradbury mentions in his essay for which the book is titled, but I’d like to end with a simile that he offers to the reader to keep as their own. “Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. That landmine is me.”
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