by Maria Popova
“Man has always been
half-monster, half-dreamer.”
Beloved science fiction
author Ray Bradbury, whom we lost earlier this year, would’ve been 92
today. A passionate advocate of doing what you love andwriting with joy, Bradbury was the subject David L. Wolper’s 1963
documentaryRay
Bradbury: Story of a Writer, in which he shares a wealth of insight on writing, some advice on perseverance, and his singular lens on the storyteller’s task.
Enjoy.
Speaking to a group of
students, Bradbury offers some priceless, timeless advice on the life of purpose:
The first year I made nothing, the second year I made nothing, the third
year I made 10 dollars, the fourth year I made 40 dollars. I remember these. I
got these indelibly stamped in there. The fifth year I made 80. The sixth year
I made 200. The seventh year I made 800. Eighth year, 1,200. Ninth year, 2,000.
Tenth year, 4,000. Eleventh year, 8,000 …
Just get a part-time job! Anything that’s half way decent! An usher in a
theater … unless you’re a mad man, you can’t make do in the art fields! You’ve
gotta be inspired and mad and excited and love it more than anything else in
the world!
It has to be this kind of, ‘By God, I’ve gotta do it! I’ve simply gotta
do it!’ If you’re not
this excited, you can’t win!
A writer’s past is the most important thing he has. Sometimes an object,
a mask, a ticket stub — anything at all — helps me remember a whole experience,
and out of that may come an idea for a story. So I’m a packrat — I’ve kept
everything I’ve ever cared about since childhood.
On the practicalities of
making a living with writing:
A story sells itself — but not when it’s sitting in the files. A writer
needs an agent to go out into the marketplace and sell his wares.
On driving — which I, as a
sworn lifelong non-driver, particularly enjoyed, and which Bradbury revisited
four decades later in a rare 2003 audio interview:
I never learned to drive. As a kid, I saw too many fatal accidents and I
grew up hating the idea. Automobiles slaughter 40,000 people a year, maim a
hundred thousand more, and bring out the worst in men. Any society where a
natural man — the pedestrian — becomes the intruder, and an unnatural men encased
in a steel shell becomes his molester, is a science fiction nightmare.
On storytelling:
A story should be like a river, flowing and never stopping, your readers
passengers on a boat, whirling downstream through constantly refreshing and
changing scenery.
On the necessity of
shifting mental tasks, taking creative breaks, and making“no effort of a direct nature” on the
creative problem at hand:
Painting fulfills a need to be non-intellectual. There are times when we
have to get our brains out in our fingers.
I’m a storyteller — that’s all I’ve never tried to be. I guess in
ancient times, I would’ve been somewhere in the marketplace, alongside the
magician, delighting the people. I’d rather delight and entertain than anything
else.
On the perils and promise
of space exploration and our the
relationship between technological progress and human nature in general:
We live in a time of paradox — man is confronted with a terrifying,
magnificent choice: destroying himself utterly to the atom, or survive utterly
with the same means. Man has always been half-monster, half-dreamer. The very
real fear is that now he’ll destroy himself just as he’s about to attain his
dreams. Today we stand on the rim of space — man is about to flow outwards, to
spread his seed to far new worlds — if he can conquer the seed of his own self-destruction. But man, at his
best, is a mortal, and from his beginnings, he has dreamed of reaching the
stars. I’m convinced he will.
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