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Ray Bradbury, who published more than 30 books and over 600 short stories, was about as prolific as you can be in the art of writing.
I’ve been reading about Bradbury from his book of essays, “Zen in the Art of Writing” each night before bed. I try and knock out one essay per evening. There’s no rush, and each one has plenty of delicious velvety words to chew on.
But something struck me in one essay. He’s talking about his writing space, which he says was typically the garage of whatever house they lived in at the time. He had to instead begin writing in an office for one reason: Kids.
“I was driven out of my garage by my loving children, who insisted on coming around the rear window and singing and tapping on the panes,” Bradbury wrote in the essay “Investing Dimes: Fahrenheit 451.” “Father had to choose between finishing a story or playing with the girls. I chose to play of course.”
Herein this throwaway line, this small sentence that has little to do with the rest of the essay, is a nugget of wisdom for all writers, artists, creators, athletes, and pursuers of great and noble things to remember.
Play with your dang kids. It’s more important than whatever thing you think you are creating or becoming.
It’s easy for writers to romanticize the work, to believe that nothing is as important as finishing whatever thing you are chipping away toward.
I know so many writers who celebrate weirdness but don’t celebrate the great custodians of weirdness who are children. These are beings who will walk on their tiptoes through a room, play a drum on their stomach for no reason and announce that they are now a werewolf — an honest to God, seething at the mouth werewolf — and proceed to howl at an invisible moon.
Adult weirdness is contrived to make a statement. Children spit it out like slam poetry. Their lips are on fire with it.
Nothing you are doing, save putting food in their bellies, a roof over their head or love in their heart, is more important that partaking in this celebration of strangeness — especially if you consider yourself an artist of any type.
Might I suggest this holiday season that you, mommas and daddies and aunts and uncles, get down on the floor and explore the gifts with your young ones? Build the race track. Zoom around it. Pretend you are in the cockpit of the tiny plastic cars as they careen around the figure-eight. Stomp through the house like a tyrannosaurus rex. Roar at every single person in the house who mentions politics or “acting your age.”
It’s therapy.
Wasn’t it C.S. Lewis who said, “When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”
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Previously published here and reprinted with the author’s permission.
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