“Write a short story every week. It’s not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row.” – Ray Bradbury
Bradbury said that in 2001 at The Sixth Annual Writer’s Symposium by the Sea, sponsored by Point Loma Nazarene University. Let’s call it the Ray Bradbury Challenge. (The first part, I mean, not the challenge to see how many bad short stories you can write in a row.)
Would you take that challenge? Could you write one short story every week for a year?
The challenge is part of the larger context of his talk. It’s worth watching the whole 55-minute video. His speech included great pieces of writing advice, and I’ll address those in a future post.
Bradbury thought it best for most beginning writers to start with short stories, rather than novels. (How I wish I’d done that when I started out!) He reasoned that the short story form trains you to focus on one idea, to compact your words. Moreover, every week you’ll complete a finished product, a tangible output.
It might seem a daunting challenge, but let’s break it down. Typical short stories run 1000 to 7500 words. That’s an average of 150 to 1100 words per day, though you’d more likely write a first draft at high speed and spend the rest of the week editing it.
By contrast, the NaNoWriMo challenge drives you to an intense burst of activity for one month (November), during which you must average almost 1700 words per day. Ideally, the end product is a 50,000-word novel, but in most cases, it’s an unpublishable one.
Bradbury’s challenge helps you form the daily habit of writing. It allows for—even expects—that you’ll enjoy concentrated, focused bouts of feverish, unconstrained flow, followed by periods of calm, dispassionate editing and revision to round out the week.
Moreover, his challenge grants frequent glows of happiness, satisfaction, accomplishment. Each week you affirm you’re a writer.
Think about the probabilities implied by his challenge. You’ll write no fewer than 1 good story out of 52. If you spent each year writing a novel instead, how long might it take before you wrote a good one?
Some might object that readers don’t read short stories, and publishers prefer novels. Perhaps, but you could do what Ray Bradbury did and publish themed collections of related short stories—so called ‘fixup novels,’ as he did with The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, and others.
Consider accepting Bradbury’s Challenge. You could write one short story a week for a year, couldn’t you? Even if 51 of those stories turn out to be terrible, you’ll have spent time learning the craft and discovering your voice. And you’ll have at least one good story to submit for publication.
I know, I know. You’re asking if I, Poseidon’s Scribe, am so willing to foist a challenge on others, would I be willing to accept it myself? Maybe I will set aside a year to do that sometime. Right now, I’m working on two novels. I’ve already written over eighty short stories, and had three dozen of them published. Though the writing took many years, I could claim I accomplished the Bradbury Challenge in slow motion.
If you do accept and complete the Bradbury Challenge, remember that all credit goes to the late Ray Bradbury, not to—
Poseidon’s Scribe