How to Learn More in the Next Year Than You Have in the Last Decade
A guide to a Bradbury Education.
Photo by Septumia Jacobson on Unsplash
Ray Bradbury believed that “You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers.”
Meanwhile and on another continent, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien were academics in every sense of the word.
Do you need a formal advanced education — such as a Masters of Fine Arts — to be a writer? This question always makes me a little crazy, because the answer is so obvious.
You know you don’t, because there are lots of writers who prove that it’s not necessary every day.
But there’s more to that Bradbury quote: “The library, on the other hand, has no biases. The information is all there for you to interpret. You don’t have someone telling you what to think. You discover it for yourself.”
In the great, ongoing debate — to MFA or not to MFA— hardly anyone talks about the fact that it isn’t a choice between an expensive, formal education and no education at all.
It’s a choice between that university degree and undertaking a Bradbury Education. That is, creating a do-it-yourself voyage of discovery. Lots of writers do this instinctively just by living interesting lives, reading hungrily, and learning without putting any kind of label on it.
But just like some people sign on for a few semesters of dedicated university study, maybe you’d like to create your own Bradbury Education.