by Ray Bradbury
WELLER: Have you encountered much professional jealousy from other writers because you are so prolific?
BRADBURY: Over the years when I have spoken at universities and colleges, rarely, rarely do the heads of departments meet me at the airport or the train station, because they all have a book in the bottom drawer of their desk that they haven’t finished. And when I show up, I remind them that they haven’t done their work. So when an English professor does meet me at the train or the jet, I know that they are okay and that they have a book that is published or is going to get published.
WELLER: In your early career, you faced a lot of rejection. How did you handle this?
BRADBURY: I figured the editors didn’t know what they were doing.
WELLER: Quite arguably, you are one of the most prolific authors of the twentieth century. This said, do you consider yourself a workaholic?
BRADBURY: No, I’m not.
WELLER: No?
BRADBURY: I love what I’m doing. There’s a difference.
WELLER: Do you write every day?
BRADBURY: For two hours. That’s all.
WELLER: Even on Sundays?
BRADBURY: Yes. Two hours. That’s all you need. If you love what you’re doing, it’s over in an hour. If I type as fast as I can, I can do fifteen hundred words in an hour, maybe more, two thousand words.
WELLER: But you haven’t always written this way. Certainly in the 1940s and ’50s you worked for more than two hours a day?
BRADBURY: That’s true. When I had my office on Wilshire Boulevard from the 1960s through the 1980s, I would go in around ten and work until four. But it’s not work. I’ve never worked a day in my life.
WELLER: Do you ever use a computer?
BRADBURY: Up until my stroke, I used a typewriter. An IBM Selectric.
WELLER: You’ve never worked on a computer? Have you ever owned one?
BRADBURY: A computer’s a typewriter. Why would I need another typewriter? I have one.
WELLER: Most would argue that a computer makes revising a whole lot easier. Not to mention spell check.
BRADBURY: I don’t correct.
WELLER: No?
BRADBURY: I’ve been writing for seventy years. If I don’t know how to spell by now …
WELLER: What role did your wife play over the years as an editor and critic of your work?
BRADBURY: Very important. If there was something wrong in my writing, she always caught it. I dedicated The Martian Chronicles to her. She typed the entire manuscript. We couldn’t afford a typist, of course. So she typed the whole thing.
WELLER: Who else have you relied on to read your work before it is published?
BRADBURY: Don Congdon, my agent in New York, has been the most important person. I married him the same week I married Maggie. He was an editor at Simon and Schuster in 1947. He wrote me and said, “I’m leaving my job as an editor and I’m becoming an agent. Do you need one?” And I said, “Only if it’s for a lifetime.” And he was with me throughout my entire career, until very recently. He passed away on November 30, 2009. He was wonderful. He was my best critic. I wrote for him, basically. When I wrote, he was my audience. He was never wrong. He never put me into a bad deal. He never wanted money instead of what was good for me. If a deal came up that had a lot of money connected to it, he always said, “What is this going to mean for your future? Are you going to be happy?” If I said “No,” then we didn’t do the deal.
He was so dear. I fell in love with him immediately when I met him in 1947. When he got a crew cut in the late 1940s, I got a crew cut. I so admired him. He was bright and fun. Early on, I went back to New York about once a year, and we shared this wonderful friendship.
WELLER: That sounds very rare. You hear creative people complain all the time about business relationships.
BRADBURY: And that’s wrong. You should be in writing because you are in love with it. Not because of money. I’m in theater and I’ve never made a penny. I’ve written thirty or forty plays. I’ve put them on myself. I used to say to my wife every five years or so, “Is this the year we open the window and throw the money out?” And she said, “You want to do another play?” I said, “Yeah,” and she said, “Open the window.” When I do a play I throw the money out and it never comes back. And I don’t expect it to.
WELLER: In your book Zen in the Art of Writing, you wrote that early on in your writing career you made lists of nouns as a way to generate story ideas, “the Jar, the Cistern, the Lake, the Skeleton,” and so on. Do you still do this?
BRADBURY: Yeah. But not as much, because it just automatically happens now. I don’t have to write it down. But in the old days I knew I had to dredge my subconscious, and the nouns did this. I learned this early on. Three things are in your head. First, everything you have experienced from the day of your birth until right now. Every single second, every single hour, every single day. Then, how you reacted to those events, whether it was disastrous or joyful. So there are two things you have in your mind to give you material. Then, you have all the art experiences you have had that are separate from the living experiences: the things you’ve learned from other writers, artists, poets, film directors, and composers. So that’s all in your mind as a fabulous mulch, and you have to begin to cause it to come out. So how do you do that? By making lists of nouns and then asking yourself, “What does each noun mean?” You can go and make up your own list right now, and it would be different than mine. It’s your own list of nouns. The night. The crickets. The train whistle. The basement. The attic. The tennis shoes. The fireworks. The fire balloons. All these things are very personal.
Then, when you get the list down, that’s when you begin to word-associate around it. You ask, “Why did I put this word down? What does it mean to me? Why did I instantly put this noun down and not some other word?” Do this and you’re on your way to being a good writer. You must pour everything out that’s in your subconscious. Too many people are writing for the outside world. You can’t write for other people. You can’t write for the left or the right, this religion or that religion, or this belief or that belief. You have to write the way you see things. I tell people, “Make a list of ten things you hate and tear them down in a short story or poem. Make a list of ten things you love and celebrate them.” When I wrote Fahrenheit 451 I hated book burners and I loved libraries. So there you are.
WELLER: Okay, so you’ve made a list of nouns, very personal words that come from the depths of your subconscious, then you word-associate around the noun. As a writer, where do you go from there?
BRADBURY: You begin to write little pensées about your nouns—pensées are a particularly French form of writing. It’s prose poetry. It’s evocative. It tries to be metaphorical. Saint-John Perse published four or five huge volumes of them on beautiful paper with lovely type that were purchased by a few eccentrics all over the world. Each page had a single paragraph on it. I could never afford one because they must have been twenty or thirty dollars, fifty-five years ago. But he influenced me because I read him in the bookstore, and I started to write short, descriptive paragraphs, one hundred to two hundred words each, and in them I began to examine my nouns. And then I’d bring some characters on to talk about that noun and that place, and all of a sudden I had a story going.
I started doing this when I was fifteen, sixteen years old. I used to do the same thing with photographs that I did with nouns. I would rip photographs out of Coronet magazine. It was put out by Esquire. I’d take the photographs and I’d write little prose poems about the photographs. Certain pictures evoked in me things from my past. When I look at the paintings of Edward Hopper, it does this. He did those wonderful townscapes of empty cafés, empty theaters at midnight with maybe one person there. The sense of isolation and loneliness is fantastic. So I’d look at those landscapes and I’d fill them with my imagination. So I wrote little pensées to go with these pictures and I put them away. I still have them. This was the beginning of bringing out what was m
e. I wasn’t writing for this market or that market, I was writing from within.
WELLER: Can you cite an example of a pensée in your own work?
BRADBURY: The description of the fog horn in the short story, “The Fog Horn.” The paragraph describing the dinosaur in “A Sound of Thunder.” Those are good examples.
WELLER: You had a number of influences as a writer. Did you ever meet any of your literary heroes?
BRADBURY: I met Eudora Welty at a writers’ conference in Santa Barbara. And she was lovely. I was able to tell her that I loved her. I discovered her stories when I was twenty-two years old, and she influenced me, along with John Collier. Those two shaped my life.
WELLER: What stories of Welty’s do you recall were an influence?
BRADBURY: Her book of short stories called A Curtain of Green.
WELLER: What was it about that book that shaped you as a writer?
BRADBURY: It’s very odd. It’s very strange. It was like a book written by a crazy lady. It appealed to something that was crooked in me.
WELLER: In hindsight, can you think of any stories you’ve written that had that sort of crookedness?
BRADBURY: It’s hard to say because you blend it in a way with the influence of John Collier and it grows fuzzy. It’s like John Collier knocked her up and they gave me the baby.
WELLER: So if there’s a crookedness to Welty, what was it about Collier that intrigued you?
BRADBURY: He was very weird too. He was always strange. A brilliant strange. And I met him at long last. I got his autograph on a book in 1952, and he became a friend. I went to a Christmas party because I knew he was going to be there along with his wife. And the whole evening, his wife didn’t let him talk. So I spent Christmas Eve with John Collier, and all I heard him say at the end of the evening was “Goodnight, folks.” I wrote a poem about that. It’s in one of my books of poetry.
WELLER: Tell me about your encounter with John Steinbeck.
BRADBURY: I was traveling in Mexico with my friend Grant Beach in the fall of 1945. I was twenty-five years old, and we visited Mexico City. We stayed overnight in a private home owned by the people who owned one of the biggest hotels in Cuernavaca. The home was occupied by girls from Smith College most of the year, but they were on vacation, so all the rooms were available. My Aunt Neva’s partner, Anne Anthony, told us about the place. She was a photographer for National Geographic and was in Mexico City at the same time. So we stayed at the house and had a nice room.
The first morning I was there, a dog ran into the breakfast room, a big sheepdog with one blue eye and one brown eye, and sat in front of me. The dog was followed by a tall man who came in after him. He sat down in front of me, and it was John Steinbeck. I went into shock. He was drunk at breakfast. Tipsy. Happy drunk. Steinbeck was there making a film, The Pearl, based on his book of the same title. I was too shy and I was too stunned at meeting him. So I didn’t get an autograph or anything.
Then the strangest thing happened. Anne Anthony was staying in the room next to Steinbeck, and they shared a bathroom. She had strung some of her photos up to dry in the bathroom, and Steinbeck said to her, “I know what you’re up to! You crept into our room last night and took pictures of me and my girlfriend and you’re going to blackmail us.” Anne was incensed. He kept saying, “I know what you’re up to! I know what you’re up to!” He wouldn’t let her off the hook. Then he says, “Who owns that station wagon out in front of the house?” Well, it was Anne’s station wagon, and Steinbeck says, “That was my station wagon three months ago in Hollywood. It’s a wreck. They sold you a heap of junk.” And it was true! He said, “Where’d you buy that? I’ll tell you the name of the dealer in Hollywood.” He gave the address, and Anne said, “Yes, that’s where I bought it.” So she bought Steinbeck’s second-hand car. He’d got it in a wreck and he got rid of it. The dealer repaired it and sold it to Anne. It was an incredible coincidence.
WELLER: How did Steinbeck influence you?
BRADBURY: Steinbeck’s story “Chrysanthemums,” which I read when I was eighteen, helped me discover how to write objectively. In that story, Steinbeck doesn’t tell us anything about the woman’s thoughts, but when she sees the chrysanthemums on the highway, thrown out by that salesman, we know damn well what she’s got to be thinking. She thought she moved that young man by giving him the love with her flowers, but then, driving into town, she looks out and there on the highway are the chrysanthemums. It breaks her heart. But Steinbeck didn’t have to say it. He described it so well that it breaks our heart! The lesson is, you don’t have to tell the thoughts, just tell the action. You must learn to describe things so that readers will know what a character is thinking without the writer having to tell them.
WELLER: The Grapes of Wrath is also an important book to you. Why?
BRADBURY: In The Grapes of Wrath, every other chapter is a description, a metaphor, prose poetry, it’s not plot. I read that book and I learned to ponder, to philosophize, to make images. So every other chapter doesn’t move the plot, it moves ideas all to themselves. I subconsciously borrowed that structure from Steinbeck when I wrote The Martian Chronicles. Every other chapter in The Grapes of Wrath describes the land, or the highway, or the individuals, a whole chapter on the camps out in California, a whole chapter on Route 66. The bridge chapters in The Martian Chronicles are pure Steinbeck.
Thirty years after The Martian Chronicles was published, a young fan wrote to me and said, “Mr. Bradbury, has anyone ever told you that maybe you were influenced by The Grapes of Wrath? I read The Grapes of Wrath the other day and said, ‘My God, this is a lot like The Martian Chronicles.’ Did you read The Grapes of Wrath when you were a young man?” And I wrote back and said, “Yes! You’re right! I read him when I was nineteen. He became part of my life and my soul.” Isn’t that a great story? I wrote that fan back and thanked him and said, “You’re the only one that’s discovered this.”
WELLER: When people ask you to name your favorite writers, George Bernard Shaw is usually right near the top of your list. What influence has Shaw had on your writing?
BRADBURY: Oh, a lot, once I really knew his work. I didn’t begin to read him until I was in my thirties, and especially when I got to know Charles Laughton. Charlie introduced me to a lot of Shaw’s stuff. Then I discovered his prefaces. Right now I’m reading the book of his letters to H.G. Wells and H.G. Wells’ responses. It’s just wonderful stuff. No matter what Shaw did, he had a way of writing that was so original and so fresh, you could read a book of his musical criticism and, a hundred years later, you don’t know any of the people, but it’s fascinating reading.
WELLER: What makes it timeless?
BRADBURY: His imagination. His way of looking at things. His way of being serious with his tongue in his cheek. He was very light, but very serious.
WELLER: I’d like to talk about Leigh Brackett. She was, arguably, your greatest writing mentor. What did she teach you about the craft?
BRADBURY: She was my teacher. I imitated her, of course. She had those beautiful short stories in Planet Stories about John Stark, they were all Edgar Rice Burroughs par excellence. In other words, she could write better than Burroughs. She took the same sort of things he did: the fighting man of Mars, the gods of Mars, the Martian stories, but gave them that extra ambiance, style, and imagination, and that’s how she got the job writing The Big Sleep for Howard Hawks.
WELLER: How did you meet her?
BRADBURY: When I joined the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society in 1938. A few years after I joined, she became a member, along with Robert Heinlein, Henry Kuttner, Jack Williamson, and, of course, Forry Ackerman, who was the founder of the group. We all met every Thursday evening in the Brown Room at Clifton’s Cafeteria in downtown LA. Joining that group changed my life completely. I found a group of people who were almost as weird as I was. Forry Ackerman loaned me the money to go to the First World Science Fiction Convention in New York in 1939. He also paid for my magazine, Futuria
Fantasia. But Leigh Brackett was the most important. She was my great teacher. We met every Sunday at Muscle Beach in Venice, and she read my bad stories and I read her good ones.
WELLER: Did you ever have romantic feelings for her?
BRADBURY: The funny thing was, my hair was longer than hers, so people thought I was girlish and people thought she was mannish. We were a real couple, huh? And if I hadn’t met Maggie, we might have wound up having a love affair—we were very close to having a love affair quite often. I think we both sensed that an affair might hurt our friendship. You have to discuss these things with people. You meet certain girls along the way and then you sit down and have a serious discussion. Are we going to wind up in bed? And if we do, is that going to hurt us? Do we want the friendship more? And if you’re smart, you pick the friendship.
WELLER: Brackett really helped hone your early short story writing. Your wife Maggie once told me that she thought, of all the mediums you have worked in, from poetry to screenplays to novels, you were best at the short story. Am I mistaken, or do you prefer reading short stories to reading novels?
BRADBURY: Yeah. It’s my real appetite. I know short stories.
WELLER: Do you think that it’s an issue of patience? They call it attention deficit disorder these days.
BRADBURY: Yeah. Turn an asset out of a liability. I think it’s true. My attention is not there. So you write what you can write. You write short stories.
WELLER: The question you get asked most often is, “Where do you get your ideas?” What advice do you give young writers when it comes to coming up with original characters and stories?
BRADBURY: You have to have a lot of antennae. The prescription I give to students is this: Read an essay a night for a thousand nights, one poem a night for a thousand nights, one short story a night for a thousand nights, and at the end of a thousand nights, you have three thousand metaphors in your head, and they become your antennae. So it makes it easy for you to come up with ideas. That’s where the ideas come from. The addition of your life plus the metaphors you have ingested makes for a very rich mixture in your head. But if you’re not doing that, what the hell is in your head, except your experiences? That’s not enough. You can’t wait for life to happen, you have to make it happen.
