How Ray Bradbury created story ideas

By Dennis Mellersh

In the early stages of learning to write a book, and even when you have a good foundation in creative writing skills, you will sometimes need devices to kick-start your imagination and get your writing flowing.

One of the techniques used by the fantasy writer Ray Bradbury was to make a list of nouns and then creatively play with the nouns to stimulate his thinking as a writer and to generate ideas that he could use in developing a story.

In an interview with the Paris Review,* Bradbury noted that, although he eventually would be able to generate story ideas easily, at first, in his early writing career, he needed devices to stimulate his imagination, and for this, he chose nouns.

“…in the old days I knew I had to dredge my subconscious, and the nouns did this…I did it by making lists of nouns and then asking, What does each noun mean?. .. Then, when you get the list down, you begin to word-associate around it. You ask, Why did I put this word down? What does it mean to me? Why did I put this noun down and not some other word? Do this and you’re on your way to being a good writer…”

“…I begin to write little pensées about the nouns. It’s prose poetry …I started to write short, descriptive paragraphs, two hundred words each, and in them I began to examine my nouns. Then I’d bring some characters on to talk about that noun and that place, and all of a sudden I had a story going.”

As a first effort in trying out Bradbury’s idea we could modify the process. As a start, you could try writing down a list of six nouns and then writing just a  sentence or two about the noun that could be the lead-in or central idea for developing a story.

Here’s a list of four nouns I chose arbitrarily, followed by a written thought that might lead to a story idea.

Bubble-gum
“My addiction to constantly chewing bubble gum has caused problems for me, but if it were not for bubble gum, I would not have…”

Typewriter
“I wanted my typewriter to be one of those old-fashioned heavy ones like you used to see in movies about newspapers. I had a uniquely personal reason for this preference…”

Book
“If I had never read that book, my life would have been entirely different…”

Ink
“Just a few years ago, I could not write anything even slightly creative without having a specific color and brand of ink for my fountain pen, but now, things are quite different…”

You get the idea.

Why not make up your own list of perhaps six nouns and see if you can develop a micro-story or a poem based on the associations in your mind with each noun on your list.

You may be pleasantly surprised at the results you achieve.

* Interview by Sam Weller, The Paris Review, The Art of Fiction No. 203

You can read the entire interview at the following url:
http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6012/the-art-of-fiction-no-203-ray-bradbury