A Program to Become a Better Story Writer

I was listening to this talk by Ray Bradbury, and at the beginning of his talk, he was giving this advice, and I am thinking to follow it. And, to keep things easy for myself, here I extracted some of his suggestions:

For the next thousand nights, every night,

• Read one short story, 10 to 15 minutes, which will help you to recognise metaphors. Read P. G. Wodehouse, Roald Dahl, John Cheever, Richard Matheson, Nigel Kneale, John Collier, Edith Wharton, Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty (A Curtain of Green), Washington Irving, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne…
• Read one poem at a night — read Shakespeare, Alexander Pope, Robert Frost.
• Gain more and different ideas from essays, read one essay a night, from archaeology, biology, to zoology, to all the great philosophers of time. Read Aldous Huxley, Loren Eiseley (The Fire Apes) and so on…

And, to write, don’t start with novels, write a short story every week — not sure if I will follow this part as closely as he suggest 😊. At the end of the week you will feel good for finishing something, and you will have 52 of them at the end of the year.