Sundays with Ray Bradbury

A new series featuring reflections on writing from the famed writer.

“I can imagine all kinds of worlds and places, but I cannot imagine a world without Bradbury.” — Neil Gaiman

Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) had a remarkable writing career. Author and screenwriter, here is a partial list of his writing projects:

Novels

• 1950 The Martian Chronicles
• 1953 Fahrenheit 451
• 1957 Dandelion Wine
• 1962 Something Wicked This Way Comes
• 1972 The Halloween Tree
• 1985 Death Is a Lonely Business
• 1990 A Graveyard for Lunatics
• 1992 Green Shadows, White Whale
• 2001 From the Dust Returned
• 2003 Let’s All Kill Constance
• 2006 Farewell Summer

Collections

• 1947 Dark Carnival
• 1951 The Illustrated Man
• 1953 The Golden Apples of the Sun
• 1955 The October Country
• 1959 A Medicine for Melancholy
• 1959 The Day It Rained Forever
• 1962 The Small Assassin
• 1964 The Machineries of Joy
• 1965 The Vintage Bradbury
• 1966 Twice 22
• 1969 I Sing The Body Electric!
• 1975 Ray Bradbury
• 1976 Long After Midnight
• 1980 The Last Circus and the Electrocution
• 1980 The Stories of Ray Bradbury
• 1983 Dinosaur Tales
• 1984 A Memory of Murder
• 1988 The Toynbee Convector
• 1990 Classic Stories 1
• 1990 Classic Stories 2
• 1996 Quicker Than The Eye
• 1997 Driving Blind
• 1997 The Golden Apples of the Sun and Other Stories
• 1998 A Medicine For Melancholy And Other Stories
• 1998 I Sing The Body Electric! And Other Stories
• 2002 One More for the Road
• 2003 Bradbury Stories
• 2004 The Cat’s Pajamas: Stories
• 2005 A Sound of Thunder and Other Stories
• 2007 Now and Forever: Somewhere a Band is Playing & Leviathan ’99
• 2007 Summer Morning, Summer Night
• 2009 We’ll Always Have Paris: Stories
• 2010 A Pleasure To Burn

There are a couple of Bradbury quotes I want to include in my book The Protagonist’s Journey: Character Driven Screenwriting and Storytelling:

“Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations.”

“Stand aside, forget targets, let the characters, your fingers, body, blood, and heart do.”

You can see why I like those quotes!

Like many Bradbury observations, they float around online without attribution to the original source. Therefore, I recently picked up Zen in the Art of Writing written by Bradbury and am reading through it to see if I can find those two observations on the craft..

As I began with the book, it occurred to me: Why not share Bradbury’s wisdom with Go Into The Story readers? Hence, a new series: Sundays with Ray Bradbury. Today: From the preface of Zen in the Art of Writing , “The Joy of Writing,” p. 2.

If you are writing without zest, without gusto, without love, without fun, you are only half a writer. It means you are so busy keeping one eye on the commercial market, or one ear peeled for the avant-garde coterie, that you are not being yourself. You don’t even know yourself. For the first thing a writer should be is — excited. He should be a thing of fevers and enthusiasm. Without such vigor, he might as well be out picking peaches or digging ditches; God knows it’d be better for his health.

How long has it been since you wrote a story where your real love or your real hatred somehow got onto the paper? When was the last time you dared release a cherished prejudice so it is the page like a lightning bolt? What are the best things and the worst things in your life, and when are you going to get around to whispering or shouting them?

Zest. Gusto. Love. Fun. I wonder how many people associate any of those words with their writing? Over the years, I have read, watched, or listened to thousands of interviews with professional writers and the words I more frequently hear are… Persistence. Grind. Struggle. Work.

Both are true, of course, work and fun. However, too much of the focus on the former can make the latter disappear.

How to inject fun into our writing? I believe that is what Bradbury suggests in the second paragraph above: Dare to put something of your authentic self into the stories you write. Love. Hatred. Prejudice. Best things. Worst things. By writing characters with which you have a personal connection, the emotions at play in the scenes you write ought to make for a lively creative experience.

Takeaway: If as Bradbury says, “You don’t even know yourself,” take that as a challenge. Ponder who you are. Get as curious about yourself as you do about your characters. Then look for narrative elements in the story you are writing which reflect something personal to you. Play around by projecting some key dynamics in your own psyche onto the playing field of the story.

It likely will make the writing experience a more intimate one, trafficking in your own feelings as expressed in and through your story’s characters.

It may also make the work of writing… a bit more fun.

To learn more about Ray Bradbury, check out this website: raybradbury.com.

For previous Sundays with Ray Bradbury articles, go here.