Photo by Alan Light
By now I’m sure you’ve heard that we lost one of the great titans of literature a few days ago: Ray Bradbury, the grand fabulist, visionary, prolific concoctor of enthusiastic, exuberant, far-sighted prose. Admittedly, I’ve read only a small fraction of his vast output, focusing on his longer works like Fahrenheit 451, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and Death Is A Lonely Business, but even so I can feel his influence, his imprint, in the skin of my own dark-fantastic stories.
As impacted by his fiction as I’ve been, however, it’s Bradbury’s nonfiction, specifically his collection of essays on writing known as Zen in the Art of Writing, that’s raising the hair on the back of my neck these days.
Because lately I’ve been thinking a lot about attitude. As in, how the right attitude about his work can usher a writer through the occasionally tumultuous and volatile terrain of story-telling. And how that attitude can carry-over and color his view of his life. To say Bradbury’s attitude toward both was ecstatic is certainly true, but still the word seems too meager to encompass the size of his passionate curiosity as a man of this world and a creator of “other-worlds” to be seen by our collective mind’s eye.
This passion is immediate, right there in the preface: “Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces together. Now, it’s your turn. Jump!”
Throughout the essays in his book Bradbury implores writers to work with zeal and gusto. Joy. To first, be excited, to be a “thing of fevers and enthusiasms.” He poses these questions: “How long has it been since you wrote a story where your real love or real hatred somehow got onto the paper? When was the last time you dared release a cherished prejudice so it slammed the page like a lightening bolt? What are the best and worst things in your life, and when are you going to get around to whispering or shouting them?”
There’s energy in these words, encouragement, and obviously some provocation, like a finger poking you in the chest a little too hard. But there’s also a deep sincerity here; I think it infuses every piece he’s ever written, and I find the mixture pretty intoxicating. Maybe that sounds a bit overheated, but this book affected me, and perhaps it’s because I broke it open at a moment in my writing when I needed to hear certain things said without equivocation.
Like this: “The other six or seven drafts are going to be pure torture. So why not enjoy the first draft, in the hope that your joy will seek and find others in the world who, reading your story, will catch fire too?”
Isn’t that what any writer wants to achieve?
And also this: To reach a point where “…you might easily find a new definition for Work. And the word is Love.”
Thank you, Mr. Bradbury. It’s sad to say good bye, but thank you for the life you’ve led. No doubt you’ll lead one just as fantastic in the after…