This speech is full of good stuff. Right off the bat Bradbury suggests something I wish I would have known when I started writing fiction in my teens: don’t write long in the beginning, but write a ton of short stories. Preferably one per week. At the end of the year, at least one of those stories should be good. “I defy you to write fifty-two bad ones,” he says.
He then goes on to suggest reading a lot of Roald Dahl, Guy de Maupassant, John Cheever, Richard Matheson, Nigel Kneale, Edith Wharton, Katherine Ann Porter, Eudora Welty, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. He calls John Collier “one of the greatest short story writers of this century and you’ve never even heard his name.”
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