Ray Bradbury's "The Long Rain," or Spontaneous Composition
I mentioned in my first essay on writing that I was an English Major in college. So, I was trained to be able to look at pieces of other writer's work and critique it, meaning learning to analyze the themes and ideas within a piece of work, be it a piece of prose or verse, and explain how they're woven in.
In other words--and I've said this before--I learned to look for things that are likely not there, but make it sound as if they are through persuasive prose. (Or, I learned to bullshit on paper).
I did that successfully to get good grades, but I was really interested in looking at a piece of work to figure out how it "worked." Being a would-be writer in those days, I was looking for evidence of the process to see how other writers approached fiction writing.
The first writer I recall doing this with was my hero, Ray Bradbury.
In a lecture he gave in 2001, Bradbury talked about the many methods he used to generate material, inspiration, and ideas for his own fiction writing. One method he advocated for in the course of the lecture (about 36 minutes in), was "Word Association":
"Go to the typewriter and just type any old thing that comes into your head. Start out. Word association. And by god, maybe by the bottom of the page or the second page, some characters will take over, and they begin to write."
Ray was a firm believer in the unconscious mind as the source of all true, original creativity. If a writer was to do their best work, the only way to do it was to sit down and go at it with no preplanning or forethought. Doing otherwise, to his way of thinking, could only produce either lackluster or contrived pieces of work. "Don't think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity," he once said.
Instead, he believed (and practiced) in beginning with a little seed of an idea and letting it grow into the story it was meant to be in the moment, as you were writing it. Ray was, to use George R.R. Martin's now famous analogy, the consummate "Gardener."
Now, like all would-bes, I didn't completely believe him. I didn't believe that this method would, or could, work, having been taught the only way to write was to plan it all out and then work at it.
This disbelief continued until I read a story of his called "The Long Rain," (available in two of his most famous books, The Illustrated Man and R is for Rocket.)
"The Long Rain," is an SF short story about a platoon of soldiers who get stranded on a fictionalized version of the planet Venus. On this fictionalized Venus, it rains continuous, so much so that being out in the ever-present deluge acts similarly to how people act when they're stuck in the sun too long--their minds, and their sanity, start going the way of the Dodo. Knowing this, the head of this platoon, a Lieutenant, attempts to lead the platoon to a building called a Sun-Dome, the only refuge from the rain they know of, and in typical Bradbury style, the attempts to do so result in cruel setback after cruel setback.
(It's a classic example of Bradbury following both the try/fail cycle pattern many writers employ to make their stories compelling and of one of Kurt Vonnegut's rules for writing a good short story, "Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your characters are, make awful things happen to them, in order that the reader may see what they're made of.")
I'm not going to write here about whether or not this story counts as SF. That's a topic for another essay. (Besides, to the Hard SF nerds out there, I know the answer is no.) I'm merely going to talk about how it shows off Ray's method of composition. The clearest evidence of this comes right at the beginning of the story (which any decent MFA professor--another future topic--would likely have told him to revise):
"The rain continued. It was a hard rain, a perpetual rain, a sweating and steaming rain; it was a mizzle, a downpour, a fountain, a whipping at the eyes, an undertow at the ankles; it was a rain to drown all rains and the memory of rains. It came by the pound and the ton, it hacked at the jungle and cut the trees like scissors and shaved the grass and tunneled the soil and molted the bushes. It shrank men's hands into the hands of wrinkled apes; it rained a solid glassy rain, and it never stopped."
That's the first paragraph; three long, listical, metaphor-laden sentences open this piece, with no characters introduced. Yet two other things have been set up. First, we have a setting: a jungle. Wherever we are (and note we're not even informed that we're on Venus yet), we know that it's some place similar to a rainforest, an enviroment that's carpeted with persistent precipitation. Second, we're introduced to our antagonist: the enviroment itself. Similar almost to how Jack London made the enviroments he sent his protagonists of his into, like in "To Build a Fire," Bradbury personifies the most dominate feature of his story's mileu, the rain, into an unintentional protagonist, thereby creating a meancing force that cannot be defeated, like a human foe, but foe that you can either survive or be broken by.
Nevertheless, even with the threat established, we still have no reason to fear it.
Then, Ray writes this:
""How much farther, Lieutenant?"
"I don't know. A mile, ten miles, a thousand."
"Aren't you sure?"
"How can I be sure?"
"I don't klike this rain. If we only knew how far it is to the Sun Dome, I'd feel better."
"Another hour or two from here."
"You really think so, Lieutenant?"
"Of course."
"Or are you lying to keep us happy?"
"I'm lying to keep you happy. Shut up!""
All of a sudden, some characters enter stage right. Initially, Bradbury doesn't clarify how many of them there are. In the end there turn out to be four characters: one unnamed Man, Pritchard, Simmons, and the Lieutenant. Not only do these characters take over the narrative, but you immediately begin to fear for their lives. Having already established the menace of the monsoon they're trapped in is, he then gives us these people. Moreso, they're lost people whose lives are now at risk because they can see that this rain has its dangers, which we don't fully know of, but if we keep reading on, we'll find out what they are.
In the space of a page--first introducing our setting, our antagonist, and then our protagonists--Bradbury manages to do what it often takes beginning writers a long time learn (if they lack a natural sense of story and plot): create a conflict. We find ourselves, in "The Long Rain," on the ground with this people, trying to survive this demoralizing environment, and Bradbury keeps us hooked by making us ask a single question: will they make it?
Each time I read (and reread) this story, I can almost see Ray typing it as I read each sentence like it's a live-writing experience as if he were writing it to see whether or not his stranded characters would make it themselves. That beginning alone shows that at times, fiction writing can at least begin in a spontaneous manner.
I've since gone on to use this technique a few times (it doesn't always work for me, but sometimes it does). In fact, the story I'm writing right now began in this manner, and by putting one word after another, I've slowly been able to discover my characters, my plot, and therefore my story as I go along.
In other words--and I've said this before--I learned to look for things that are likely not there, but make it sound as if they are through persuasive prose. (Or, I learned to bullshit on paper).
I did that successfully to get good grades, but I was really interested in looking at a piece of work to figure out how it "worked." Being a would-be writer in those days, I was looking for evidence of the process to see how other writers approached fiction writing.The first writer I recall doing this with was my hero, Ray Bradbury.
In a lecture he gave in 2001, Bradbury talked about the many methods he used to generate material, inspiration, and ideas for his own fiction writing. One method he advocated for in the course of the lecture (about 36 minutes in), was "Word Association":
"Go to the typewriter and just type any old thing that comes into your head. Start out. Word association. And by god, maybe by the bottom of the page or the second page, some characters will take over, and they begin to write."
Ray was a firm believer in the unconscious mind as the source of all true, original creativity. If a writer was to do their best work, the only way to do it was to sit down and go at it with no preplanning or forethought. Doing otherwise, to his way of thinking, could only produce either lackluster or contrived pieces of work. "Don't think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity," he once said.
Instead, he believed (and practiced) in beginning with a little seed of an idea and letting it grow into the story it was meant to be in the moment, as you were writing it. Ray was, to use George R.R. Martin's now famous analogy, the consummate "Gardener."
Now, like all would-bes, I didn't completely believe him. I didn't believe that this method would, or could, work, having been taught the only way to write was to plan it all out and then work at it.
This disbelief continued until I read a story of his called "The Long Rain," (available in two of his most famous books, The Illustrated Man and R is for Rocket.)
(It's a classic example of Bradbury following both the try/fail cycle pattern many writers employ to make their stories compelling and of one of Kurt Vonnegut's rules for writing a good short story, "Be a Sadist. No matter how sweet and innocent your characters are, make awful things happen to them, in order that the reader may see what they're made of.")
I'm not going to write here about whether or not this story counts as SF. That's a topic for another essay. (Besides, to the Hard SF nerds out there, I know the answer is no.) I'm merely going to talk about how it shows off Ray's method of composition. The clearest evidence of this comes right at the beginning of the story (which any decent MFA professor--another future topic--would likely have told him to revise):
That's the first paragraph; three long, listical, metaphor-laden sentences open this piece, with no characters introduced. Yet two other things have been set up. First, we have a setting: a jungle. Wherever we are (and note we're not even informed that we're on Venus yet), we know that it's some place similar to a rainforest, an enviroment that's carpeted with persistent precipitation. Second, we're introduced to our antagonist: the enviroment itself. Similar almost to how Jack London made the enviroments he sent his protagonists of his into, like in "To Build a Fire," Bradbury personifies the most dominate feature of his story's mileu, the rain, into an unintentional protagonist, thereby creating a meancing force that cannot be defeated, like a human foe, but foe that you can either survive or be broken by.
Nevertheless, even with the threat established, we still have no reason to fear it.
Then, Ray writes this:
""How much farther, Lieutenant?"
"I don't know. A mile, ten miles, a thousand."
"Aren't you sure?"
"How can I be sure?"
"I don't klike this rain. If we only knew how far it is to the Sun Dome, I'd feel better."
"Another hour or two from here."
"You really think so, Lieutenant?"
"Of course."
"Or are you lying to keep us happy?"
"I'm lying to keep you happy. Shut up!""
All of a sudden, some characters enter stage right. Initially, Bradbury doesn't clarify how many of them there are. In the end there turn out to be four characters: one unnamed Man, Pritchard, Simmons, and the Lieutenant. Not only do these characters take over the narrative, but you immediately begin to fear for their lives. Having already established the menace of the monsoon they're trapped in is, he then gives us these people. Moreso, they're lost people whose lives are now at risk because they can see that this rain has its dangers, which we don't fully know of, but if we keep reading on, we'll find out what they are.
In the space of a page--first introducing our setting, our antagonist, and then our protagonists--Bradbury manages to do what it often takes beginning writers a long time learn (if they lack a natural sense of story and plot): create a conflict. We find ourselves, in "The Long Rain," on the ground with this people, trying to survive this demoralizing environment, and Bradbury keeps us hooked by making us ask a single question: will they make it?
Each time I read (and reread) this story, I can almost see Ray typing it as I read each sentence like it's a live-writing experience as if he were writing it to see whether or not his stranded characters would make it themselves. That beginning alone shows that at times, fiction writing can at least begin in a spontaneous manner.
I've since gone on to use this technique a few times (it doesn't always work for me, but sometimes it does). In fact, the story I'm writing right now began in this manner, and by putting one word after another, I've slowly been able to discover my characters, my plot, and therefore my story as I go along.
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