Tag: Ray Bradbury

Free Speech, Censorship Petitions, and Book Burning

December 27, 2022December 27, 2022 · 4 Comments ·

Above: The original 1787 manuscript of the United States Bill of Rights, ratified in 1791.

by Jim Denney
author of Your Writing Mentor C. S. Lewis

I recently learned of a petition, signed by hundreds of people calling themselves “members of the writing, publishing, and broader literary community” who “care deeply about freedom of speech.” So far, so good. I’m a big advocate of First Amendment freedoms myself. I’m sure you are, too.

But then the petition goes on to call for a certain book and author to be cancelled. The petitioners claim, “We cannot stand idly by while our industry misuses free speech to destroy our rights.”

Hold it right there! How can you say you “care deeply” about free speech—then complain that someone “misuses” free speech by speaking or publishing a viewpoint you dislike? The word free in “free speech” means that no one else gets to decide how I use (or “misuse”) my speech. How I use my speech is 100 percent my call.

The publication of the book in question would not destroy anyone’s rights. That’s a specious rationalization. Fact is, none of the petition signers have any idea what’s in the book, because it hasn’t been written yet.

The petitioners state, “We are not calling for censorship.” Yet the point of their petition is to demand that a publisher cancel a book deal and deplatform an author. If that’s not censorship, what is?

I’m not going to say who the author is or what the book is supposedly about. If you want to know, I’m sure you can google it easily enough. I don’t care about the politics of the author or the politics of the petitioners. What’s at stake here is a vital and transcendent principle—the principle of free speech.

I’ve seen attacks on our First Amendment freedoms from both the Left and Right. To me, viewpoint censorship is always wrong, no matter who is doing it. All attempts to silence political, religious, and philosophical viewpoints are wrong-headed and a violation of our American freedoms.

Many people mistakenly think that only governments can censor. But censorship is the suppression of speech or public communication, whether it is conducted by governments or private institutions or an Internet petition. It’s the next-worst thing to book-burning.

The suppression and destruction of authors and their books has always been a weapon of repression. In 213 BC, the newly crowned Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang ordered the torching of books so that he would not be compared to rulers of the past. The Great Library of Alexandria and its manuscripts were burned several times, including a partial destruction when Julius Caesar laid siege to Alexandria in 48 BC and a complete destruction when Caliph Omar invaded the city in AD 642. British troops vengefully torched the United States Library of Congress during the War of 1812. Book-burning was a major feature of Hitler’s attempt to exterminate the Jewish people and their contributions to society. Book-burning was also a central strategy employed by Mao in the murderous “Cultural Revolution” of 1966 through 1976.

Book-burning is always a detestable act. But I submit to you that suppressing a book before it’s published may, in fact, be far worse than burning it after it’s published. It would be impossible in today’s world for book-burners to incinerate every copy of a book once it’s published. But a censorship petition seeks to suppress ideas before they reach the printing press.

No matter what our politics, we should resist the censorship of information and ideas in any form. Anyone who tries to suppress speech, deplatform an author, or pressure a publisher into canceling a book is like a villain straight out of Fahrenheit 451.

Are there forms of speech that are not and should not be protected? Yes, absolutely! Speech that threatens violence or incites people to lawlessness is indefensible. Speech that defames and unjustly destroys reputations is indefensible. Speech that harms or undermines the innocence of children is indefensible.

You may ask, “What about the people who signed that petition? Do they have a First Amendment right to try to cancel an author?” My answer: Yes, absolutely! And I will defend their right to do so, even as I disagree with them and criticize them for it. A petition is free speech, and the signers of the petition should be free to post their wrong-headed notions on the Internet.

In a free society, we need more speech, not less. We need arguments. We need counterarguments. We need bad ideas that will lead to better ideas. We need to hear ideas we don’t want to hear. We need information and history lessons and discussions and understanding. We need to listen and we need to speak. We need freedom, not censorship.

The petitioners call themselves “members of the writing, publishing, and broader literary community.” I saw a lot of booksellers, publicists, and librarians—and yes, a few who listed themselves as authors. But I didn’t see any signers of the stature of, say, Stephen King or Margaret Atwood on that petition. There’s good reason for that. Professional writers know how dangerous censorship is to their own creative freedom.

The First Amendment was written specifically to protect unpopular speech, speech that is in danger of being suppressed. It’s precisely the speech that sparks anger and controversy that must be defended. Speech that offends no one needs no protection.

The freedom to write and publish our ideas is part of our uniquely American heritage. We all have a duty to protect freedom of speech, including the speech of people with whom we disagree.

Here are a few lines from “America Has a Free Speech Problem,” New York Times Editorial Board, March 18, 2022:

“For all the tolerance and enlightenment that modern society claims, Americans are losing hold of a fundamental right as citizens of a free country: the right to speak their minds and voice their opinions in public without fear of being shamed or shunned.

“This social silencing, this depluralizing of America, has been evident for years, but dealing with it stirs yet more fear. It feels like a third rail, dangerous. For a strong nation and open society, that is dangerous.”

America does have a free speech problem. The freedom to write and publish is fragile, and it is under assault. Use it. Value it. And above all, defend it.

What C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien Thought of Walt Disney

September 18, 2022 · 1 Comment ·

By Jim Denney, author of Walt’s Disneyland and Your Writing Mentor C. S. Lewis

Above image: C. S. Lewis (top row, right, highlighted) with his class of undergraduate students, University College, Oxford University, in the Trinity Term 1917.

Late 2021 through early 2022 was a busy time in my life. I had books under contract, and I had an eye surgery in October and back surgery in February (both surgeries were life-changingly successful). During that time I worked on two exciting projects. One was the revised and updated edition of Walt’s Disneyland: It’s Still There if You Know Where to Look (a much-expanded edition of the hugely successful 2017 original). The other was a new book called Your Writing Mentor C. S. Lewis.

*The Walt Disney birthplace in Chicago, Illinois.*

As I studied the lives of both Walt Disney and C. S. Lewis, I was struck by the parallels between these two creative, influential men. C. S. Lewis (known to his friends as Jack) and Walt Disney lived lives that were almost exactly contemporaneous with each other. Lewis was born in November 1898, Walt in December 1901. Lewis died in 1963 at age sixty-four; Walt died in 1966 at age sixty-five. Walt and Jack both had very close and loving mothers (coincidentally, both mothers were named Flora). Walt and Jack both had emotionally distant fathers who didn’t give them understanding or approval.

*Illustration from* The Tale of Two Bad Mice by Beatrix Potter (1904)

Walt and Jack both grew up living in fantasy worlds of their own creation. As children, Walt and Jack both enjoyed drawing pictures of animals and making up stories about them. Both grew up reading fairy tales and fantasy stories, and were influenced by the charming “talking animal” stories of Beatrix Potter. Both enjoyed science fiction (and both were fans of Jules Verne and, later, Ray Bradbury).

Walt and Jack both had happy early childhoods, followed by miserable later childhoods. Both were nostalgic for the lost joys of their early childhood days. Walt’s happy childhood ended when his family moved from Marceline to Kansas City. Jack’s happy childhood ended at age nine when his mother died and his father bundled him off to an abusive boarding school in England.

Walt Disney and C. S. Lewis both created enduring works of children’s fantasy. And each created a famous talking mouse—Walt invented Mickey Mouse and Lewis created Reepicheep, the sword-fighting mouse of Narnia.

Walt and Jack both relied on their older brothers’ help for their success. Lewis’s brother Warnie was an ace two-fingered typist and typed all of Jack’s handwritten manuscripts. And Walt’s older brother Roy became Walt’s indispensable financier and business partner.

Both Walt and Jack were deeply patriotic men. Lewis volunteered to fight for King and Country in World War I. Walt altered his ID in an attempt to join the fight in World War I. (Walt’s transport ship arrived just after the war ended, but he served as a Red Cross ambulance driver in post-war France.)

You might think that, with all that C. S. Lewis and Walt Disney had in common, they might have been mutual admirers—but that was not the case.

Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs debuted in the United States in 1937 and in the United Kingdom in 1938. Lewis and his brother Warren went to see it soon after its U.K. release. A few months later, Lewis went to see it again, this time with his good friend (and fellow Oxford professor) J. R. R. Tolkien.

Coincidentally, Tolkien’s first novel The Hobbit had been published in September 1937, just three months before the American debut of Snow White. Both The Hobbit and Snow White dealt extensively with creatures from Germanic folklore known as dwarves (or, in Disney parlance, dwarfs). According to Germanic mythology, dwarves are short, stout human-like creatures who live and work in mountain caves. Dwarves have a talent for mining and fabricating objects out of precious metals and jewels.

*Dwarves from Germanic folklore, as depicted in the poem* Völuspá *by Lorenz Frølich (1895). Germanic dwarves are the only* true dwarves, according to J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis.

Until Tolkien introduced dwarves in The Hobbit and Disney introduced dwarfs in Snow White, these creatures from Germanic folklore were almost unknown in popular culture. Suddenly in 1937, both the literary world and the movie-going world became intensely aware of these stout, gruff little men who spent their lives mining for gems and gold—and occasionally battling dragons and witches.

C. S. Lewis would also use dwarves in the supporting cast of his Narnia tales, and he (like Tolkien) based his dwarves on ancient Germanic sources. In the tales of Tolkien and Lewis, dwarves were fierce, grim, and stoic—though they occasionally displayed a hint of whimsy. Disney’s dwarfs, by contrast, are anything but grim. They are jolly (with the exception of Grumpy) and play a largely comic role in Snow White. When Lewis and Tolkien watched the Disney version of Snow White, it was primarily the dwarfs themselves they hated. In their view, Disney had failed to capture the mythic nobility of the dwarves from Germanic folklore.

On January 11, 1939, Lewis wrote a letter to A. K. Hamilton Jenkin, a friend from his undergrad days at Oxford. In that letter, Lewis offered his impressions of Disney’s Snow White:

What did you think of Snowwhite and the vii Dwarfs? I saw it at Malvern last week. . . . Leaving out the tiresome question of whether it is suitable for children (which I don’t know and don’t care) I thought it almost inconceivably good and bad—I mean, I didn’t know one human being could be so good and bad. The worst thing of all was the vulgarity of the winking dove at the beginning, and the next worst the faces of the dwarfs. Dwarfs ought to be ugly of course, but not in that way. And the dwarfs’ jazz party was pretty bad. I suppose it never occurred to the poor boob that you could give them any other kind of music. But all the terrifying bits were good, and the animals really most moving: and the use of shadows (of dwarfs and vultures) was real genius. What might not have come of it if this man had been educated—or even brought up in a decent society?

*Dopey and Sneezy in a screenshot from the public domain trailer for Walt Disney’s* Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937).

Note that one of Lewis’s prime objections was to what he called “the dwarfs’ jazz party.” He was referring to the sequence where the dwarfs sing “The Yodel Song” (also known as “The Silly Song”), written for the film by Frank Churchill. During the song, the dwarfs take turns dancing with Snow White.

Is the song really “jazz”? No. The music has more of a Bavarian “oompah” sound, occasionally interrupted by a drum-and-cymbals crash from Dopey’s drum kit or a silly riff from Grumpy’s pump organ. I’ve listened to a lot of jazz, but never any jazz with yodeling. Lewis undoubtedly based his mistaken “jazz” impression on Dopey’s drumming.

Your Writing Mentor C. S. Lewis *by Jim Denney*

In October 1954, Jane Douglass, a woman from America, visited Lewis at Magdalen College, Oxford. She asked Lewis about the possibility of adapting his Narnia novels to other media, such as radio, television, and film. Lewis found the idea objectionable, saying, “Plays should be plays, poems, poems, novels, novels, stories, stories.” He considered the possibility of his Narnia tales receiving the Disney treatment absolutely horrifying, adding, “Too bad we didn’t know Walt Disney before he was spoiled, isn’t it?”

Though C. S. Lewis didn’t have a very high opinion of Walt, he was an avid fan of Walt’s friend, Ray Bradbury. In 1953, after reading Bradbury’s first two novels, The Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451, Lewis praised Bradbury as a writer of “real invention.”

If Lewis and Tolkien could have sat down with Walt for a long talk, I think they might have found they had a lot more in common than they realized.

Conquer Your Fear of Failure

December 23, 2018October 13, 2021 · Leave a comment ·

“You fail only if you stop writing.” —Ray Bradbury

In 1983, Margaret Atwood rented a fisherman’s cottage in the English seacoast village of Blakeney, Norfolk. She planned to spend the next six months writing her most ambitious novel yet — a complex and richly detailed dystopian tale.

Atwood soon realized she was unable to write. The sheer scope of her novel intimidated her. She spent her days bird-watching and her nights reading bad historical novels and nursing chilblains caused by the cold damp weather. She later referred to that time as “six months of futile striving.”

What was wrong? Why didn’t she write? Answer: She was blocked by fear of failure. Her vision of the novel loomed so large in her mind that she felt overwhelmed and paralyzed. She didn’t know where to begin.

Frustrated with herself for wasting months of valuable writing time, Atwood finally did what every successful writer must do in order to overcome the fear of failure: She wrote. She began producing bits and pieces of the story. She sketched in characters and wrote patches of dialogue. It didn’t all hang together at first, but that didn’t matter. After six months, she was finally writing again.

“I grasped the nettle I had been avoiding,” she later said, “and began to write The Handmaid’s Tale.” That novel later became her most successful and acclaimed work. Her advice to anyone who is paralyzed by the fear of failure: “Get back on the horse that threw you, as they used to say. They also used to say: you learn as much from failure as you learn from success.”¹

This was hardly Margaret Atwood’s first novel. She had already enjoyed a fifteen-year, five-novel career when she found herself blocked during The Handmaid’s Tale. So the fear of failure is not restricted to beginning and aspiring writers. Successful novelists often experience this fear as well. Like Margaret Atwood, you can conquer your fear of failure and go on to achieve your greatest work.

Embrace the Sense of Failure

The conquest of this fear begins with acceptance of the inevitability of failure. To write is to know failure. Most writers experience more failure than success, and we all strive to achieve a level of perfection that is probably unattainable.

Irish novelist Anne Enright describes a frustration most writers have felt — that of always aspiring to an artistic goal that is just beyond our reach: “I still have this big, stupid idea that if you are good enough and lucky enough, you can make an object that insists on its own subjective truth, a personal thing, a book that shifts between its covers and will not stay easy on the page, a real novel, one that lives, talks, breathes, and refuses to die. And in this, I am doomed to fail.”²

And English novelist Will Self said, “To attempt to write seriously is always, I feel, to fail. The disjunction between my beautifully sonorous, accurate and painfully affecting mental content and the leaden, halting sentences on the page always seems a dreadful falling short. . . . I prize this sense of failure — embrace it even. . . . To continue writing is to accept failure as simply a part of the experience.”³ As writers, we accept the inevitability of commercial failure, artistic failure, and even failed relationships.

One True Sentence

The fear of failure afflicts many writers soon after the publication of their first book. The writer thinks, “I fooled ’em once, but can I fool ’em again? What if I only have one book in me? What if I have no encore?”

Suspense writer James L. Rubart, author of Rooms and Book of Days, recalls that after his first book was well-received by critics and readers, he worried that it was a fluke — and that his second novel might not measure up. “The response to Rooms was so strong that I was definitely nervous when Book of Days came out. That whole ‘I only have one book in me’ thing. But a lot of people liked Book of Days better.”

In fact, Rubart says, his mastery of the writing craft increased in demonstrable ways with each new novel. “It took me six years to write Rooms,” he recalls, “two years to write Book of Days, five months to write The Chair, ten weeks to write Soul’s Gate . . . and I’m on pace to finish the novel I’m working on right now in six weeks.”⁴

Wendell Berry is a farmer, antiwar activist, novelist, and poet. He remembers the sense of unease he felt after his first book was published. He has learned to embrace that uneasy feeling and to anticipate the unknown adventures ahead. “I am discomforted,” he says, “by the knowledge that I don’t know how to write the books that I have not yet written. But that discomfort has an excitement about it, and it is the necessary antecedent of one of the best kinds of happiness.”⁵

hemingway1939 — *Ernest Hemingway, 1939*

In A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway recalled the twinge of self-doubt he felt as he contemplated a new story:

I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, “Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.” So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that you knew or had seen or had heard someone say.⁶

Don’t fear that you have no more stories or books in you. You have barely scratched the surface of all the stories your soul contains. Over time, you have learned and grown as a writer. Relax in the confidence and mastery you have gained from that achievement — and prepare to conquer even greater challenges in the future. Trust your unconscious mind, your talent, your training, and your experience. Then sit down in front of your screen or your blank page and write the truest sentence you know.

Fail Early, Fail Often

Web writer Diogenes Brito says that he wrestles with a number of fears every time he sets out to write — fear of the blank page, fear of the unknown, fear of being judged, and fear of losing control. But one fear that no longer troubles him is the fear of failure. Brito says he overcame that fear thanks to one of his university professors:

When I was in Stanford’s design program, a professor named Dave Beach had everyone raise jazz hands to the sky. He then instructed us to jump and cheer, “I failed!” I have never forgotten that moment. “Fail early, fail often” was the mantra. The goal was to build up an immunity to failure, so that fear of it would never hold you back. Like [computer scientist] Dick Karpinski says, “Anything worth doing is worth doing badly — at first.” I remember that, and it keeps me from freezing up. The enemy of creativity is fear, so I keep going, no matter what.⁷

If you live by the maxim, “Fail early, fail often,” you can write without fear of failure. Train yourself to view failure not as an objective reality but as a false label people impose on a learning experience. Instead of telling yourself, “How horrible — I’ve failed,” simply shrug and say, “Well, that didn’t work. Lesson learned. What should I try next?” Make up your mind to learn from your failures and you’ll stop being afraid.

_________________

Margaret Atwood, “Falling Short: Seven Writers Reflect on Failure,” The Guardian, June 22, 2013, http://m.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/jun/22/falling-short-writers-reflect-failure.
Anne Enright, “Falling Short: Seven Writers Reflect on Failure,” The Guardian, June 22, 2013, http://m.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/jun/22/falling-short-writers-reflect-failure.
Will Self, “Falling Short: Seven Writers Reflect on Failure,” The Guardian, June 22, 2013, http://m.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/jun/22/falling-short-writers-reflect-failure.
James Rubert, “Focus On Freedom: Q&A with Author James Rubert,” SimplyFaithful.com, July 30, 2012, http://simplyfaithful.com/2012/07/30/focus-on-freedom-qa-with-author-james-rubart/.
Lawrence Block, Writing the Novel: From Plot to Print (Cincinnati: Writer’s Digest Books, 1985), 3.
Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition (New York: Scribner, 2009), 22.
Diogenes Brito, “Fear of the Blank Page,” Uxdiogenes.com, March 10, 2013, http://uxdiogenes.com/blog/fear-of-the-blank-page.

Discover the uninhibited creative power to write faster and more brilliantly than ever before. Read Writing in Overdrive: Write Faster, Write Freely, Write Brilliantly by Jim Denney.

Trade paperback edition $7.75.

Kindle edition $3.99.

Write Better. Write Faster. Be Unconscious

July 20, 2017October 13, 2021 · Leave a comment ·

“Every day I try to be in communication with the universe in an unconscious way.”
—Paulo Coelho

Steinbeck-1963-PublicDomain — *John Steinbeck, 1963*

Writing faster and writing better is not a matter of techniques or shortcuts or writing secrets. Sure, there are a few tricks you can learn that will increase your writing speed at the margins: You can eliminate time-wasting habits, use voice dictation software instead of typing, and so forth. I talk about these tricks in my books, and they can help you become a faster writer. But these tricks won’t make you more a more brilliant writer.

There’s only one writing insight you can learn that will make you a faster and more brilliant writer: You must learn to write unconsciously.

In other words, you must learn to write in flow or in the zone. Great writing does not involve thinking. Great writing comes from a deeper part of us than the conscious intellect. It comes from the unconscious mind.

John Steinbeck, in a 1962 letter to an aspiring writer, said, “Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down.” Steinbeck warned the young writer not to stop and edit or rewrite while in the creative process. “Rewrite in process,” he said, “is usually found to be an excuse for not going on. It also interferes with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material.”

When you are first drafting (or “fast drafting,” as I prefer to call it), always move forward, never look back. By writing freely and quickly and without inhibitions, you tap into the writer’s most powerful engine of imagination, the unconscious mind.

UrsulaLeGuin-PhotoByGorthian-2008 — *Ursula LeGuin, 2008. Photo: Gorthian*

Ursula K. Le Guin has described her writing process as “a pure trance state. … All I seek when writing is to allow my unconscious mind to control the course of the story, using rational thought only to reality check when revising.”

In Becoming a Writer, Dorothea Brande talks about a creative faculty we all possess, though few of us are aware of it — ”The higher imagination, you may call it; your own endowment of genius, great or small; the creative aspect of your mind, which is lodged almost entirely in the unconscious.”

Brande underscores the fact that this faculty is the UN-conscious mind, not the SUB-conscious mind, because “sub-” suggests that which is low and inferior. Far from being inferior to the conscious mind, Brande says, the unconscious “has a reach as far above our average intellect as it has depths below. . . . The unconscious must be trusted to bring you aid from a higher level than that on which you ordinarily function.” In fact, she says, “the root of genius is in the unconscious, not the conscious, mind.”

One of Dorothea Brande’s most famous disciples, Ray Bradbury, often said that conscious thought is poisonous to the creative process, and that true creativity springs from the unconscious mind. In a 1975 speech, he said, “I have had a sign by my typewriter for the better part of twenty years, now, which says, ‘Don’t think.’ I hate all those signs that say ‘Think.’ That’s the enemy of creativity. . . . Intellect can help correct. But emotion, first, surprises creativity out in the open where it can be pinned down!”

RayBradb-CommderOfOrdreDesArtsEtDesLettres2009 — *Ray Bradbury receiving the Commander of Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, 2009. Photo: Caleb Sconosciuto.*

What is the unconscious mind? Where in the brain is it located? Is it in the right brain or the murky region of the limbic system? Is the unconscious, creative mind the result of the synergistic functioning of many regions of the brain working together? Or does the function of the unconscious mind extend beyond the boundaries of the brain? Is it a creative activity of the immortal human spirit — a human reflection of the creativity of God?

I don’t know. No one knows. The term unconscious mind is a convenient label for a phenomenon we can’t explain. We don’t need to know where the unconscious mind is located or how it works, but I can tell you this from my own personal experience:

The unconscious mind is the key to unlocking our incredible creative powers.

Discover the uninhibited creative power to write faster and more brilliantly than ever before. Read Writing in Overdrive: Write Faster, Write Freely, Write Brilliantly by Jim Denney.

Trade paperback edition $7.75.

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Ray Bradbury and Groucho Marx

February 8, 2017October 13, 2021 · 2 Comments ·

I recently discovered that Ray Bradbury made an appearance with Groucho Marx on the 1950s quiz show You Bet Your Life. At age thirty-five, Ray had two novels and a short story collection to his credit (The Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451, and The Golden Apples of the Sun), as well as the screenplay for John Huston’s motion picture Moby Dick. It’s an entertaining TV appearance from May 24, 1956. Among other things, we learn how Ray Bradbury met his wife. Ray is on-screen during the first eight minutes of the program. Enjoy.