The Martian Chronicles was by far one of my favorite books growing up. It was so, so strange but also so human. It was perhaps one of the first books that really got my imagination working. And so! I picked up Dandelion wine which I’ve never read. Little did I know that Bradbury would write an intro to the book just for me, telling me exactly what I didn’t know that I needed to hear.

And I quote:

‘…I thought you could beat, pummel and thrash and idea into existence. Under such treatment, of course, any decent idea folds up on its paws, turns on its back, fixes its eyes on eternity, and dies.

It was with great relief, then, that in my early twenties, I floundered into a word association process in which I simply got out of bed each morning, walked to my desk, and put down any word or series of words that happened along in my head. I would then take arms against the word, or for it, and bring on an assortment of  characters to weigh the word and show me its meaning in my own life.‘

Ray: YES. I’ve been longing to get back to the organic way by which I used to start writing something, just thinking about some words that were stuck in my head, and going from there. I keep coming back to something I read in a GG Marquez book: ‘….it had been hurried and sad, and she thought, now we’ve screwed up everything.’ It’s in fact written and post-it noted above my desk, as its what I’m constantly afraid of, that I’m rushing / writing badly / out of panic.

So I should probably just not do that. But how?