Ray Bradbury was born Aug. 22, 1920 and lived a creative and productive life until 2012.
In honor of Bradbury’s birthday, the Prometheus Blog is reprinting an interview I did with the acclaimed and bestselling storyteller in the mid-1980s – one of the interviews I found most stimulating and satisfying during my six-decade career as a journalist, arts reporter and critic.
Among the questions I asked Bradbury:
What inspired him to write his classic novel Fahrenheit 451, later inducted into the Prometheus Hall of Fame?
Why did it take him only two weeks to write?
Why and how did the legendary storyteller rewrite Network, an Academy Awardwinner for Best Picture – after its release?
And perhaps most lasting in his reply, what lessons from his own against-the-odds life did Bradbury offer other writers?
A lifelong fan of Bradbury’s haunting stories and his classic cautionary novel Fahrenheit 451, I found Bradbury to be one of the most inspiring and creative talents that I ever had the good fortune to meet and interview.
While some parts of the interview, published as a feature profile Dec. 13, 1985, in The Columbus Dispatch, now seem dated or in the category of “what might have been” (for instance, Bradbury’s version of Little Nemo never got filmed), a good bit of Bradbury’s life story and good advice seems just as relevant today.
Bradbury passed in 2012 at the age of 91, but his inspiring development as a storyteller offers enduring lessons for aspiring writers – and a reminder for his legions of fans of his poetic and very American spirit.
Here is the first part of my profile, based on that memorable interview with Bradbury:
Don’t worry.
Don’t think.
Get it done.
Those three rules have been posted above Ray Bradbury’s typewriter for four decades.
And “getting it done” is precisely what the prolific author and movie writer has been doing all those years, writing some 500 short stories, poems, screenplays and stage plays.
A VERSATILE AND BUSY AUTHOR
Yet, with all his achievements, the award-winning author of The Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451 is not one to rest on his laurels.
He’s busier than ever this year (1985), having written a half-dozen scripts for his Home Box Office anthology series, Ray Bradbury Theatre, and for the new network TV anthology revival of The Twilight Zone.
Bradbury also just published his first novel in 22 years: Death is a Lonely Business, a murder mystery written in the style and in tribute to Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, James Cain and Ross MacDonald.
The man launched his Hollywood career 30 years ago by turning Melville’s Moby Dick into a screenplay for director John Huston.
Since then, Bradbury has seen most of his major novels and stories turned into movies or TV miniseries.
Perhaps most successful were Fahrenheit 451 and Something Wicked This Way Comes. Perhaps least successfully was the TV production of The Martian Chronicles, starring Rock Hudson, which received mixed reviews.
Bradbury is now writing another screenplay, based on the Little Nemo cartoon strip, for the producer of The Empire Strikes Back.
THE SECRETS OF HIS SUCCESS
Whew! Where does he find the time?
What is the secret of Bradbury’s success?
“Playing instead of ‘working’ and relaxing instead of worrying,” Bradbury answered with a friendly smile, pointing to the sign above his typewriter.
“The way you qualify yourself for work you want to do is by playing at its for years and years,” said Bradbury, his cheerful countenance overshadowed only by his healthy head of long white hair.
“You want to be a poet? Write a poem every day for the next five years. You want to be a writer? You write every single day for the next five or 10 years.
“Then your false sense of insecurity vanishes, and you discover that your real sense of insecurity is: What you don’t know about poetry or writing. And then you go and change that.”
“I’ve never worked a damn day in my life,” he added, grinning slyly.
“I’m always enjoying. I’m always creating. I’m always living at the top of my lungs. I’ve played through life because I love what I do.”
MAKING HIS OWN MAGIC
That is how the modern-day Master of the Magical and the Mysterious learned to make his own magic. For the man who brewed up A Medicine for Melancholy and Dandelion Wine didn’t begin by writing masterpieces.
Too poor to attend college, Bradbury used local libraries as his tuition-free university.
“I never went to college,” he said.
“I went to the library every day, and I graduated from the library when I was 28 years old.”
Bradbury has learned from both his successes and his failures.
After graduating from Los Angeles High School, he had no car, few clothes, and had to live with his parents.
So Bradbury, to support himself, hawked newspapers on the streets, earning about $10 a week – and in his spare time, wrote.
“I started writing when I was 12, and everything I wrote was bad for 10 years. It was dreadful,” Bradbury said.
THE START OF HIS CAREER
His first story appeared in Weird Tales, a science fiction pulp magazine of the 1940s, when he was 20 years old.
It was his first sign of success, but Bradbury wasn’t satisfied.
Then, when he was 22, Bradbury realized that he had written his first good short story: “The Lake,” later reprinted in his short-story collection, The October Country.
He wept for joy.
“That’s when I knew I was a writer,” he recalled.
Bradbury added that he loves to write and he urges everyone to love the work they do, too – “or go do something else.”
Sometimes it’s not easy to do what one loves to do, Bradbury admitted, recalling that he had to overcome fears of rejection in order to submit his early stories to major magazines.
Finally, at the urging of a friend, he submitted three of his short stories to Collier’s, Mademoiselle and Charm magazines in August 1945.
What happened, Bradbury proudly revealed, was “three sales in three days by an unknown writer with no agent.”
Coming up on the Prometheus Blog: Part two of the Bradbury interview
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