The Bradbury Chronicles

On June 6, 2012, the writing world suffered a loss: Ray Bradbury died. This was not exactly a tragedy — the man was ninety-one, after all — but many of us felt a pang nonetheless, because Bradbury was such a writer’s writer: He was a writer other writers loved. And he had a lot to say on the craft. To honor him, I’m going to cobble together some of his writing wisdom here for you, along with my thoughts. (The italicized quotes are from Bradbury's Zen and the Art of Writing.)

I know you've heard it a thousand times before. But it's true — hard work pays off. If you want to be good, you have to practice, practice, practice. If you don't love something, then don't do it. 

There's a myth out there that you're either born with the Writing Gene or not. As Bradbury indicates here, this is simply not true. While there are personality traits that lend themselves to the writing lifestyle (more on this below), good writers are made, not born. Behind every bit of beautiful prose is a sweating author. This is a good news/bad news scenario: the good news is that the art is accessible to anyone who’s willing to put in the sweat equity. The bad news is that you are not an exception, and you will have to work just as hard as everyone else.

To the question “what does writing teach us?” Bradbury answers: First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and a privilege, not a right. We must earn life once it has been awarded us. Life asks for rewards back because it has favored us with animation. So while our art cannot, as we wish it could, save from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all.

The highly autobiographical "Dandelion Wine"

I read Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine to my son last year, and it was clear that Bradbury had some mortality issues — a common affliction for writers. Writing, for him, clearly was a comfort in this way: perhaps not an attempt to achieve immortality, precisely; but a way to milk every drop out of life he could, by living it and then reflecting on it.

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 slammed 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?

Print that out and tape it to your computer monitor. Read it every day. Act on it.

Another story about me and my dog took more than fifty years to surface. In "Bless Me, Father, for I Have Sinned," I went back in time to relive the beating I had given my dog when I was twelve, and for which I had never forgiven myself. I wrote the story to at last examine that cruel, sad boy and put his ghost, and the ghost of my much-loved dog, to rest forever.

What a writing prompt. Try it now: Recall some personal failure, something for which you've never forgiven yourself, and write it down. Make it a story. What was that person-who-was-you, but whom you hardly recognize for the appalling way she behaved, thinking?

Does this Muse look hungry to you?

It is my contention that in order to Keep a Muse you must first offer food.  ... Through a lifetime, by ingesting food and water, we build cells, we grow, we become larger and more substantial. That which was not, is. The process is undetectable. It can be viewed only at intervals along the way. We know it is happening, but we don't know quite how or why. Similarly, in a lifetime, we stuff ourselves with sounds, sights, smells, tastes, and textures of people, animals, landscapes, events, large and small. We stuff ourselves with these impressions and experiences and our reaction to them. Into our subconscious go not only factual data but reactive data, our movement toward or away from the sensed events. These are the stuffs, the foods, on which The Muse grows. This is the storehouse, the file, to which we must return every waking hour to check reality against memory, and in sleep to check memory against memory, which means ghost against ghost, in order to exorcise them, if necessary.

This fits my view that the curious person, the observant person, the self-aware person, is a natural writer. These are the personality traits I referred to above: Natural writers are observers: of others, of themselves, of the world. Writers find everything a little bit quirky, and feel compelled to examine those quirks a bit more closely. When we do this, we feed the muse. 

Another quote from Bradbury's, along those lines: We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.

The Martian Chronicles

Bradbury on the merits of speculative fiction: The children guessed, if they did not whisper it, that all science fiction is an attempt to solve problems by pretending to look the other way. ... There will always be problems. Thank God for that. And solutions. Thank God for that. And tomorrow mornings in which to seek them. Praise Allah and fill the libraries and art galleries of the world with Martians, elves, goblins, astronauts, and librarians and teachers on Alpha Centauri who are busy telling kids not to read science fiction or fantasy: "It'll turn your brains to mush!" 

And then from the halls of my Museum of Robots, in the long dusk, let Plato have the last word from the midst of his electro-machine-computerized Republic: 

"Go, children. Run and read. Read and run. Show and tell. Spin another pyramid on its nose. Turn another world upside down. Knock the soot off my brain. Repaint the Sistine Chapel inside my skull. Laugh and think. Dream and run and build." 

"Run boys! Run, girls! Run!" 

And with such good advice, the kids will run. And the Republic will be saved.

When I was a child, sci-fi and fantasy were still considered not-real-fiction, something kids and slightly-embarrassed adults read. A few books snuck into the classroom, if their authors had achieved enough gravitas: Orwell's Animal Farm and 1984, for example. 

Slowly, slowly, speculative fiction titles are finding their way onto assigned-reading lists: Lois Lowry's The Giver is standard, for example, as is L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time. My daughter was assigned Asimov's I, Robot, and her classmates were assigned Bradbury's own Fahrenheit 451. They key seems to be "old." If a book has stuck around for long enough, it attains "real book" status and teachers will assign it.

But where, I ask you, is Harry Potter? Why is The Hunger Games not assigned reading? How about Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, a cautionary dystopian at least as relevant as anything Orwell wrote? Speculative fiction is not only much more fun to read than high-lit (in many cases, anyway), it explores Big Themes with more gusto, and in a clearer way, than often overly-subtle literary fiction. Especially for young people, speculative fiction should occupy a good percentage of their shelf space and their reading time: that's how we'll raise enthusiastic readers and, dare I say, better thinkers.

I will let Bradbury have the last word:

The Appeal of the Supernatural

Since the beginning of times, humans have been fascinated with the supernatural. What may have started as a possible explanation for natural phenomena before the birth of science has remained a subject of interest in both fiction and non-fiction. Storytelling has always provided a great vehicle to explore that which we cannot see or explain, and writers’ imaginations have run wild with possibilities. But what may have once been a niche in the wide world of literature seems to be rapidly becoming mainstream. Just take a look at all the books, movies and TV shows that deal with supernatural elements in a variety of genres and subgenres: horror, science fiction, psychological suspense, fantasy, time travel, magical realism, children’s fiction and more recently, comedy and romance. It’s apparent that in the last decade, supernatural fiction has soared. (Though technically there is not one specific genre called “supernatural fiction,” I will use this term to differentiate any fiction with make-believe elements from fiction based on the real world.)

The most common, and most recent, examples of the incredible rise and success of supernatural fiction are Harry Potter and Twilight. The latter alone has sold 116 million copies and the movies have allegedly cashed two billion dollars. No wonder so many writers, publishers and producers are paying serious attention to the metaphysical! 


But as we all know, supernatural fiction was born way before Harry Potter and Edward Cullen came into the picture (or in this case, into the paper.) If we look at the history of storytelling, we’ll find legends and fairy tales in every culture; all dealing with magical creatures, talking animals, witches or mythological gods who interact with humans or by themselves. Even the Bible is filled with supernatural phenomena!


Most modern fantasy/horror tales stem from three iconic figures. In the early 19th century, an 18-year-old girl came up with the idea of a man formed by an amalgam of body parts from dead people and brought back to life. The girl was Mary Shelley and the novel was Frankenstein. From a short story contest and a dream that inspired this young writer, the horror and science fiction genres were born. But the sad tale of Victor Frankenstein’s monster is not limited to horror fiction. It has also been rendered in comedies and cartoons.

Fred Gywne portrayed a jolly Frankenstein-like character in the 60’s sitcom The Munsters.

From folkloric tales and legends came shapeshifters such as the werewolf to capture the popular imagination. This moon-devoted creature has been rendered in a variety of ways, from the tragic tales of The Werewolf of Paris and An American Werewolf in London, to the 80’s comedy Teen Wolf and the romantic Jacob Black in the Twilight Saga. It’s interesting to see how this classical archetype has been repeatedly portrayed as the vampire’s nemesis. 

In the comedy-horror film, An American Werewolf in London (1981), David Naughton is an innocent American tourist who gets bitten by a werewolf in England. Like most lycanthropes in fiction, he goes through a painful transformation and acquires an insatiable appetite for human flesh that dooms him to a tragic ending.

David Naughton shocked by his werewolf transformation.

Third, but not least, is the infamous vampire. Initially borrowed from oral mythology and archaic superstitions, this archetypical figure has never been more popular. It is alleged that the inspiration for Count Dracula came from a real person, Vlad the Impaler, a Romanian prince from the 15th century who cruelly killed thousands of his own people. In 2005, author Elizabeth Kostova brought us The Historian, a novel that explores the possibility that this historical character may in fact have been the feared Dracula and may still be alive. The range of vampires in literatures is so wide that it can satisfy any taste. If you crave the Gothic antihero dwelling in dark dungeons and coffins, you can turn to Bram Stocker’s Dracula. If you enjoy the flamboyance and decadence of a more sensual vampire, you might be pleased with Anne Rice’s Lestat de Lioncourt. But if you’re weakness is the “lost soul” tormented by his own nature, you will most likely find this archetype in the most recent vampire renditions. The birth of the repressed and introspective vampire can probably be attributed to another one of Rice’s creations, the melancholic Louis de Pointe du Lac from The Vampire Chronicles. Many claim that the virginal vegetarian vampire, Edward Cullen, is a direct descendant from Louis.

Two  different depictions of a vampire. Tom Cruise as the self-indulgent and narcissistic Lestat, and Brad Pritt as Louis, the paternal vampire with a conscience.

Recurring themes revolving these three iconic characters are power, strength, repressed sexuality, sensuality, forbidden love, suicide, sacrifice and possession (sexual or by killing/eating/drinking the victim’s blood.) This last theme is a major element of children’s literature. How many wolves and witches haven’t set out to feed of children’s tender flesh? Likewise, aliens and zombies throughout the history of literature have gained strength from us tasty humans.

Another appeal of the supernatural is the ability to build alternative/parallel worlds that may or may not represent utopian societies for the writer and his/her audience. In these worlds, cataclysmic contests between good and evil prevail (whereas the real world has several shades of gray and it’s harder to “take a side.”) So am I right in thinking that in this way, fantasy/science fiction is simpler than real life?

In this epic battle of good vs. evil, it’s not difficult to pick sides.

From what I’ve observed, supernatural fiction can be divided in three large categories (correct me if I’m wrong):

1. A human in a fantastic world.
2. A fantastic character in the real world.
3. Fantastic creatures in fantastic worlds.

To me, it’s easier to identify with number two.

In Ghost (1990), a man gets killed in front of his fiancée but stays on earth as a ghost to protect his beloved. The film, starring Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze, is considered one of the most romantic stories of all times.

Which type of supernatural fiction do you prefer?

I know people who flat-out refuse to read or watch any fiction that isn’t rooted in the real world. It’s not my preferred kind of fiction, either, but I have on occasion enjoyed reading or watching these types of stories. Still, the popularity of the supernatural puzzles me. Do writers/directors have a legitimate interest in these subjects, or are they following a trend? Do writers believe in the things they write about? If the young adult market has become so large, what are adults reading? And here’s the last question for those immersed in this kind of fiction: are people reading supernatural fiction because it’s available everywhere, have they developed a taste for it because of its popularity, or have they always had a genuine interest in the esoteric world?