Image by Alan Light, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

It sounds like a third grade math prob­lem: “If Ray Brad­bury wrote the first draft of Fahren­heit 451 (1953) on a coin-oper­at­ed type­writer that charged 10 cents for every 30 min­utes, and he spent a total of $9.80, how many hours did it take Ray to write his sto­ry?” (If you’re doing the math, that’s great, but you might be in the wrong class.)

Bradbury’s com­po­si­tion of Fahren­heit 451 demon­strates two of the pro­lif­ic writer’s most insis­tent demands among his many prac­ti­cal nuggets of writ­ing advice: 1. Always write, all the time; a short sto­ry a week, as he told a writer’s sym­po­sium in 2001. And, as he told the same group, 2. “Live in the library! Live in the library, for Christ’s sake. Don’t live on your god­damn com­put­er and the inter­net and all that crap.”

Grant­ed, the library—and the school, and the office, and all the rest of it—now lives in the “god­damn com­put­er” for many of us. But Bradbury’s elab­o­ra­tion of why he end­ed up in the library in the ear­ly 1950s, specif­i­cal­ly the base­ment of UCLA’s Pow­ell Library, will be relat­able to any work­ing par­ent. As he wrote in 1982, he found him­self “twice dri­ven; by chil­dren to leave at home, and by a type­writer tim­ing device…. Time was indeed mon­ey.”

This was a dif­fer­ent time, so you’ll need to adjust the cur­ren­cy for 21st cen­tu­ry infla­tion. Also, Brad­bury had the 50s’ writer-husband’s pre­rog­a­tive to beg off the child­care. As he explains:

In all the years from 1941 to that time, I had done most of my typ­ing in the fam­i­ly garages… behind the tract house where my wife, Mar­guerite, and I raised our fam­i­ly. I was dri­ven out of the garage by my lov­ing chil­dren, who insist­ed on com­ing around to the win­dow and singing and tap­ping on the panes. 

Devot­ed father Brad­bury “had to choose between fin­ish­ing a sto­ry or play­ing with the girls. I chose to play, of course, which endan­gered the fam­i­ly income. An office had to be found. We couldn’t afford one.” Brad­bury did not write all of Fahren­heit 451 in the library base­ment. “He end­ed up with the novel­la ver­sion,” notes UCLA Mag­a­zine, “orig­i­nal­ly called The Fire­man and did not come back to it until a pub­lish­ing com­pa­ny asked if he could add more to the sto­ry.”

The speed at which Brad­bury wrote, both to save mon­ey and to get home to his chil­dren, did not cause him to get care­less. He looked back on the book 22 years lat­er with pride. “I have changed not one thought or word,” wrote Brad­bury in his intro­duc­tion. He did­n’t notice until lat­er that he had named main char­ac­ters after a paper com­pa­ny, Mon­tag, and pen­cil com­pa­ny, Faber.

Brad­bury told the mag­a­zine in 2002, “It was a pas­sion­ate and excit­ing time for me. Imag­ine what it was like to be writ­ing a book about book burn­ing and doing it in a library where the pas­sions of all those authors, liv­ing and dead, sur­round­ed me.” When it came to find­ing the book’s title, how­ev­er, sup­pos­ed­ly the tem­per­a­ture at which books burn, not only did the library fail him, but so too did the university’s chem­istry depart­ment. To learn the answer, and fin­ish the book, Brad­bury final­ly had to call the fire depart­ment.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

When François Truf­faut Made a Film Adap­ta­tion of Ray Bradbury’s Fahren­heit 451 (1966)

Ray Brad­bury Reveals the True Mean­ing of Fahren­heit 451: It’s Not About Cen­sor­ship, But Peo­ple “Being Turned Into Morons by TV”

Ray Brad­bury Gives 12 Pieces of Writ­ing Advice to Young Authors (2001)

Why Should We Read Ray Bradbury’s Fahren­heit 451? A New TED-Ed Ani­ma­tion Explains

Ray Brad­bury Explains Why Lit­er­a­ture is the Safe­ty Valve of Civ­i­liza­tion (in Which Case We Need More Lit­er­a­ture!)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness.

Note: Back in 2013, when Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize in Lit­er­a­ture, we pub­lished a post fea­tur­ing 20 short sto­ries writ­ten by Munro. Today, with the sad news that Alice Munro has passed away, at the age of 92, we’re bring­ing the orig­i­nal post (from Octo­ber 10, 2013) back to the surface–in part because you can still read the 20 sto­ries free online. Please find the sto­ries at the bot­tom of this post.

Call­ing her a “mas­ter of the con­tem­po­rary short sto­ry,” the Swedish Acad­e­my award­ed 82-year-old Alice Munro the Nobel Prize in Lit­er­a­ture today. It is well-deserved, and hard-earned (and comes not long after she announced her retire­ment from fic­tion). After 14 sto­ry col­lec­tions, Munro has reached at least a cou­ple gen­er­a­tions of writ­ers with her psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly sub­tle sto­ries about ordi­nary men and women in Huron Coun­ty, Ontario, her birth­place and home. Only the 13^th woman writer to win the Nobel, Munro has pre­vi­ous­ly won the Man Book­er Prize in 2009, the Gov­er­nor General’s Lit­er­ary Award for Fic­tion in Cana­da three times (1968, 1978, and 1986), and two O. Hen­ry Awards (2006 and 2008). Her region­al fic­tion draws as much from her Ontario sur­round­ings as does the work of the very best so-called “region­al” writ­ers, and cap­ti­vat­ing inter­ac­tions of char­ac­ter and land­scape tend to dri­ve her work more so than intri­cate plot­ting.

Of that region she loves, Munro has said: “It means some­thing to me that no oth­er coun­try can—no mat­ter how impor­tant his­tor­i­cal­ly that oth­er coun­try may be, how ‘beau­ti­ful,’ how live­ly and inter­est­ing. I am intox­i­cat­ed by this par­tic­u­lar land­scape… I speak the lan­guage.” The lan­guage she may have learned from the “brick hous­es, the falling-down barns, the trail­er parks, bur­den­some old church­es, Wal-Mart and Cana­di­an Tire.” But the short sto­ry form she learned from writ­ers like Car­son McCullers, Flan­nery O’Connor, and Eudo­ra Wel­ty. She names all three in a 2001 inter­view with The Atlantic, and also men­tions Chekhov and “a lot of writ­ers that I found in The New York­er in the fifties who wrote about the same type of mate­r­i­al I did—about emo­tions and places.”

Munro was no young lit­er­ary phenom—she did not achieve fame in her twen­ties with sto­ries in The New York­er. A moth­er of three chil­dren, she “learned to write in the sliv­ers of time she had.” She pub­lished her first col­lec­tion, Dance of the Hap­py Shades in 1968 at 37, an advanced age for writ­ers today, so many of whom have sev­er­al nov­els under their belts by their ear­ly thir­ties. Munro always meant to write a nov­el, many in fact, but “there was no way I could get that kind of time,” she said:

Why do I like to write short sto­ries? Well, I cer­tain­ly did­n’t intend to. I was going to write a nov­el. And still! I still come up with ideas for nov­els. And I even start nov­els. But some­thing hap­pens to them. They break up. I look at what I real­ly want to do with the mate­r­i­al, and it nev­er turns out to be a nov­el. But when I was younger, it was sim­ply a mat­ter of expe­di­en­cy. I had small chil­dren, I did­n’t have any help. Some of this was before the days of auto­mat­ic wash­ing machines, if you can actu­al­ly believe it. There was no way I could get that kind of time. I could­n’t look ahead and say, this is going to take me a year, because I thought every moment some­thing might hap­pen that would take all time away from me. So I wrote in bits and pieces with a lim­it­ed time expec­ta­tion. Per­haps I got used to think­ing of my mate­r­i­al in terms of things that worked that way. And then when I got a lit­tle more time, I start­ed writ­ing these odd­er sto­ries, which branch out a lot.

Whether Munro’s adher­ence to the short form has always been a mat­ter of expe­di­en­cy, or whether it’s just what her sto­ries need to be, hard­ly mat­ters to read­ers who love her work. She dis­cuss­es her “stum­bling” on short fic­tion in the inter­view above from 1990 with Rex Mur­phy. For a detailed sketch of Munro’s ear­ly life, see her won­der­ful 2011 bio­graph­i­cal essay “Dear Life” in The New York­er. And for those less famil­iar with Munro’s exquis­ite­ly craft­ed nar­ra­tives, we offer you below sev­er­al selec­tions of her work free online. Get to know this author who, The New York Times writes, “rev­o­lu­tion­ized the archi­tec­ture of short sto­ries.”

“Voic­es” - (2013, Tele­graph)

“A Red Dress—1946” (2012–13, Nar­ra­tive—requires free sign-up)

“Amund­sen” (2012, The New York­er)

“Train” (2012, Harper’s)

“To Reach Japan” (2012, Nar­ra­tive—requires free sign-up)

“Axis” (2001, The New York­er — in audio)

“Grav­el” (2011, The New York­er)

“Fic­tion” (2009, Dai­ly Lit)

“Deep Holes” (2008, The New York­er)

“Free Rad­i­cals” (2008, The New York­er)

“Face” (2008, The New York­er)

“Dimen­sion” (2006, The New York­er)

“Wen­lock Edge” (2005, The New York­er)

“The View from Cas­tle Rock” (2005, The New York­er)

“Pas­sion” (2004, The New York­er)

“Run­away” (2003, The New York­er)

“Some Women” (2008, New York­er)

“The Bear Came Over the Moun­tain” (1999, The New York­er)

“Quee­nie” (1998, Lon­don Review of Books

“Boys and Girls” (1968)

Relat­ed Con­tent:

29 Free Short Sto­ries from Some of Today’s Most Acclaimed Writ­ers: Mar­garet Atwood, David Mitchell & More

Kurt Von­negut Offers 8 Tips on How to Write Good Short Sto­ries (and Amus­ing­ly Graphs the Shapes Those Sto­ries Can Take)

Hear Neil Gaiman Read Aloud 15 of His Own Works, and Works by 6 Oth­er Great Writ­ers: From The Grave­yard Book & Cora­line, to Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven & Dick­ens’ A Christ­mas Car­ol

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness