Or can you?
While maybe he is talking about the content of the stories being bad, poor plot, crap characters, ect. I find something else hidden within the words. Was Bradbury speaking on the idea that practice makes perfect? I’m sure the overused cliche has been in our lives probably since the day we were born, but how much truth does it actually yield?
Within my own experiences, even if I fought against practice as much as I could, the last six years have only continuously expanded vocabulary, expanded character control, expanded themes, and easy plot arches that expand much further than the first stories that I have ever written.
So what I feel Bradbury is trying to say is that even though sometimes your writing won’t be what you want it to be, the ability to write and the action that you are partaking in is nearly as important as the story itself. Bad stories can always be rewritten, torn apart, mixed with others and molded into perfection. Good stories need a decent polish before they can be thrown out into the world as we know it.
You can’t do anything with a story you haven’t written except stare and wish that it had the words to speak for itself.
B. E. McLaughlin 