Why Ray Bradbury Matters to Me
"Don't Think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity...You can't try to do things. You simply must do things."
~Ray Bradbury
Anyone reading this who follows me on Twitter likely noticed the frenzy of tweets and retweets I sent out to commemorate the occasion. (If you didn't, that's fine. That's probably a sign that you have a life.) In addition, my fifth article for tor.com also debuted on the day, celebrating the underlying optimism many consider his masterpiece, his dystopian science fiction novel, Fahrenheit 451.
Bradbury was, and remains, one of the seminal influences on my writing. Those who've read some of my stuff probably wouldn't know that by looking at it. I never went through an imitative phase where I tried to write like Bradbury--because I knew from reading his work that I could never write like him. His prose is rhapsodic, lyrical, and laden like a minefield with metaphor. I've always veered towards a more lucid, but hopefully elegant, style. Still, his influence looms in my mind to this day, particularly regarding his philosophy of writing.
(But, I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me begin at the beginning.)
My initial introduction to Ray Bradbury was not as a writer through his work, but as a person.
When I was 14, I came across a video of a lecture he gave at Point Loma Nazarene University's Writer's Symposium by the Sea back in 2001, followed by a half-hour conversation/interview (see those videos below).
He was two years removed from having suffered a stroke, so he ambled to the podium to speak with the aid of a four-pronged cane. He was nearing his 81st Birthday, whited-haired, bespectacled with thick lenses, and looking simultaneously vigorous and fragile--as a stroke survivor would. Yet, when this octogenarian began to speak, I was enthralled.
When I started reading his work, my love for the man grew tenfold. Bradbury's work, both as a novelist and a short story writer, proved a long-held belief of mine to be true: it was possible for a writer, whose main interest was telling an arresting story, to simultaneously be an amazing prose stylist. Just as an example, read this opening passage from his short story, "The Long Rain," one of the tales included in his famous collection, The Illustrated Man:
"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."
One metaphor after another, coming at you—like raindrops in a cloud burst. There's a rhythm, a cadence, a meter underlining each of those sentences.
I had long harbored dreams of writing stories of the fantastic and the speculative, but the messages that I got from my high school teachers (and later on, my college professors), was that in order to be a "real writer," one could only write about either the here-and-now or about the recent past. In other words, taking the adage of "write what you know," to it's absurd, logical extreme. Anything other than that was material suitable only for "children's fiction" or "hack writers." Bradbury proved this to be false.
Since discovering Bradbury, I've found other writers who have also served to bolster the idea that you don't need to write quotidian realism in order to be a real writer. Authors like Ursula K. Le Guin, Harlan Ellison, and Neil Gaiman each have that same poetical ear for the music of prose, and like Bradbury, they too wrote stories of the fantastic.
Bradbury was one of the authors who advocated for the practice of writing every day. "If you want to be good," he wrote, "you have to practice, practice, practice." This is advice with which some authors take umbrage, given that the modern writer's life can be anything but gentle. However, it's a method that I always make an effort to practice, in theory (though I don't always succeed in doing so, in reality), and there's good reason for doing so. In addition to enabling one's self to always stay "in-touch" with one's craft, making a habit of writing everyday—or as near as one can manage—instills a discipline and a devotion to this art.
Additionally, Bradbury also strongly advocated for the philosophy of only doing work that you care about—not just care about, but deeply love. "If you don't love something," he wrote, "then don't do it." Like all people of course, Bradbury recognized that life can sometimes be hard (he struggled as a writer for years), and sometimes we must do what we have to do instead of doing what we want to do. (You can see him talk briefly about this in the video below.) However, when it comes to the work one loves, one should only create that for which one is most passionate. Otherwise, what's the point? Why devout yourself to finishing work that, by the end of it, you don't even want to read? Not only should you love what you do, but you also find it fun. Sure, every kind of work carries its own form of drudgery, but you should also find what you're doing fun enough that you'd rather be doing it than anything else.
When Bradbury died, on June 5, 2012, at the age of 91 (and would've been 92 that August), the news was a shot to gut. It was the same feeling one experiences when one loses a grandparent, a wonderful uncle, or dear old mentor. I was sad, not only because I would never get the chance to meet the man, but also because I would never get to thank him for his work and his inspiration. Without Bradbury, I wouldn't be doing this. I wouldn't have learned not only what kind of attitude one needs in order to be a good, disciplined writer but also that the desires to write the kinds of stories I wanted to write was legitimate.
Bradbury is gone, but he lives on in his work and in the lives of people, like yours truly, who were impacted by it. Bradbury's dream was to "live forever," and so long as people continue to read what he wrote, he will.
