Listen to the Echoes

by Ray Bradbury

  I know writers who wait around for months or years for an idea to come through something they lived. You can’t do that! Things happen to you every day right in front of you. Simple, everyday things. I was thinking the other day about the old problem we all have: You sit down at a formal dinner with all these people and you think, “Now whose bread is that? Whose fork is that?” And you wait for someone else to take the first fork and the first bun. So I thought the other day at dinner with some people, I said, “What if no one ever moved? What if the first person didn’t take the bun or the fork? And they all sat there?” There’s your short story.

  WELLER: So your prescription of one thousand poems, one thousand essays, and one thousand short stories—is that all it takes to help generate ideas?

  BRADBURY: Even then, there’s no guarantee that it will spark. God gave me the ability to react to the junk in my head. But I can at least teach you to collect and be curious.

  WELLER: What do you like best about the writer’s life?

  BRADBURY: It’s different every day. In 1936, I went to see Blackstone the magician at the Orpheum Theatre here in Los Angeles. As you know, I loved him when I was a boy and saw him perform several times when I lived in Waukegan. When I saw him in 1936, in Los Angeles, I ordered myself onstage.

  WELLER: How do you order yourself onstage?

  BRADBURY: He asked the audience for volunteers, and I ran up before he had a chance to choose someone. He was putting a half-dollar into a bottle, and it was my job to hold the bottle. He hit the bottle with the half-dollar and it suddenly appeared inside. And then he shook the bottle and brought it out to show the audience. As he did this, I could smell whiskey on his breath. I realized then that if you can find work that’s different every day of your life, you’ll never have to drift. How horrible it must be to be onstage two or three times a day for a year! Doing the same thing! It would drive you crazy! Smelling his breath was a portent of a future I didn’t want. It was based on boredom. So writing, to me, has been so wonderful because it’s been different every day for seventy years.

  WELLER: What do you think your role is as a writer? Is it to entertain? To inspire? To instruct?

  BRADBURY: All of those things. And I have to help you through things. If I can get your attention and you have anything bubbling to the surface, if I can help you surface it, so you can go on the next day and be better, that’s my job. Increasingly, in the last few years with a lot of my stories, all I want to do for the rest of my life is make people happy. And that’s why fantasy is wonderful. Too much reality is depressing. It leaves you with a terrible disability.

  WELLER: Many writers write realistic stories.

  BRADBURY: No, no. That’s too easy. I could do that tomorrow. I know enough about people. Maggie and I stayed at La Siesta Villas in Palm Springs. Thirty years ago, there was a young man and his wife tending the place, and we thought they were a little peculiar. They were probably taking dope of some sort, I don’t know. Anyway, she went to her doctor one day and had X-rays taken and she had incurable cancer. You know what happened? He packed up and left home and never came back.

  WELLER: He left her in the lurch?

  BRADBURY: Yeah. So you say to me, I don’t know life. I do know about life. I can make lists of terrible things. But instead I look at the lists and I say, okay, what can I do over here then?

  WELLER: Who says you don’t know anything about life?

  BRADBURY: People say, they read my stories. They read Dandelion Wine, they don’t read it well enough, because all the darkness is there. And Something Wicked, it’s all about life, it’s all about death. So when people say to me, “You don’t know about life,” I know about life. I know all these things. I choose not to write about them. I couldn’t write that short story about that woman with cancer. It would depress people so terribly.

  WELLER: Does negative criticism of your work hurt you?

  BRADBURY: No. I try not to pay attention. Just get your work done.

  WELLER: If your first draft, as you often say, is primarily your subconscious speaking to the page, do you intellectualize in the rewriting stages?

  BRADBURY: Sure. I go through and cut. Most short stories are too long. When I wrote the novel Something Wicked This Way Comes, it was a hundred and fifty thousand words. So I went through and cut out fifty thousand. It’s important to get out of the way of yourself. Clean the kindling away. The rubbish. Get it out of the way. Make it clear.

  WELLER: You are a fast writer. Are you a fast editor?

  BRADBURY: No. The way I edit myself is this: I type my first draft quickly. Very impulsively. I get out of the way of myself. A few days later, I retype the whole thing, and my subconscious, as I retype, gives me new words. Maybe it’ll take retyping it many times until it is done. Sometimes it takes very little revision work. I don’t know how it works for other people, but that’s how it works for me.

  WELLER: How do you know when a piece of writing is finished?

  BRADBURY: Again, it’s all instinct. If you read enough and write enough, you train yourself to know these things.

  WELLER: What time of day do you do most of your writing? Are you a morning writer? A night writer?

  BRADBURY: All the time. I get up every morning not knowing what I’m going to do. I usually have a perception around dawn when I wake up. I have what I call “the theater of morning” inside my head. And all these voices talk and when they come up with a good metaphor, then I jump out of bed and run and trap them before they’re gone. So that’s the whole secret: to do things that excite you.

  WELLER: You also take naps.

  BRADBURY: And I always have. That way I have two mornings!

  WELLER: And what about writing at night?

  BRADBURY: Yes. Sometimes I get so excited with ideas I can’t fall asleep. In Paris, at three in the morning—there’s something about Paris—one night I stayed up all night and I wrote parts of three or four different stories. Incredible. Well, the city is so beautiful. God, I hope to go back one day. I miss it terribly.

  WELLER: Do you make outlines or plot your stories out?

  BRADBURY: No, never. You can’t do that. It’s just like you can’t plot tomorrow or next year or ten years from now. When you plot books you take all the energy and vitality out of them. There’s no blood. You have to live it from day to day and let your characters do things.

  WELLER: You have told me on several occasions that a writer must not mess with his younger self. That is, don’t go back and rewrite previously published material. Yet there seems to be a contradiction here. You edited and, in some cases, rewrote stories in The October Country that originally appeared in your first book, Dark Carnival. Another example of this is the stage play of Fahrenheit 451. You added a few scenes to the stage version that were not in the novel. How do you respond to this apparent contradiction?

  BRADBURY: I only add things or rewrite when the characters demand it. In other words, they came to me like Constance did after I was finishing Death Is a Lonely Business. She said, “I don’t want to be dead.” She was in my typewriter, so I retyped her and she came back. I killed her off in the first book. So when the characters come to me and say this, then I make changes. But I don’t stand over my books and try to change them with my intellect.

  WELLER: What about the rewriting process? A story like “The Homecoming” went through several different incarnations. It first appeared in the October 1946 issue of Mademoiselle. Then it was published in 1947 in Dark Carnival. You reworked it for the 1955 collection The October Country, and then it appeared again in a slightly different version in 2001’s From the Dust Returned. Weren’t you “messing with your younger self” each time you altered this tale?

  BRADBURY: Well, that was a long time ago. I was only twenty-five or twenty-six when I wrote that story. I really didn’t know how to write back then, I was just learning. I had to learn how to relax. I worried about myself too much back then. That’s very dangerous. As the years went by, the stories
got better when I got off my own back. So I had to rewrite “The Homecoming,” but I was very careful when I did it. When you’re rewriting like that, you can only run a damp rag over a story. That’s all. It’s like that old quote about love affairs from Oscar Wilde, “Love will die if held too tightly, love will fly if held too lightly.”

  WELLER: Do you ever reread your old books and short stories once they’ve been published?

  BRADBURY: Every so often, late at night, I come downstairs, open one of my books, read a paragraph and say, “My God.” I sit there and cry because I haven’t done any of this. It’s a God-given thing, and I’m so grateful, so, so grateful. The best description of my career as a writer is, “At play in the fields of the Lord.” It’s been wonderful fun, and I’ll be damned where any of it came from. I’ve been very fortunate.

  chapter eleven

  SCIENCE FICTION

  SOMETIME IN THE EARLY 1980S, RAY AND MAGGIE BRADBURY TOOK a trip to Washington, DC. A terrific storm had rolled in over the city as the couple, along with some friends, made their way back to their hotel after a night on the town. It was after midnight, and they decided to stop and peer through the glass doors of the Air and Space Museum. Ray pressed his nose to the glass, and just as his eyes started to make out faint details of silhouetted flying machines in the dark gallery, lightning flashed across Washington. In that crack of an instant, Ray spotted Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis, the aircraft the great aviator used to become the first to cross the Atlantic. All went dark and a rumble of thunder followed. Then, another bolt of lightning, and the lobby of the museum was again momentarily illuminated. In the glow, Ray and Maggie could see the Wright Brothers’ plane, the Flyer, hanging by wires from the ceiling. Then, again, darkness. Followed by more thunder. Another whip-snap of lightning-flash and Ray and Maggie glimpsed the Apollo 11 capsule, the very vehicle used to carry the astronauts safely back to Earth after the first manned mission landed on the moon. In those brief milliseconds of stormy glow, Ray and Maggie were looking at the entire, sweeping history of aviation. As the rain fell, both husband and wife stood in the downpour with tears streaking down their cheeks.

  The flying machines inside the Smithsonian are now antiques, much like the technology in Bradbury’s science fiction. As Frank Darabont, the writer and director of The Shawshank Redemption, once said, “I’ve always thought of him as a poet … a poet of the Rocket Age. And I don’t mean rockets with boosters and O-rings, I’m talking about rockets with tail fins that look like Art Deco sculptures.”

  Bradbury is, in some ways, the original steam punk, the contemporary sub-genre of science fiction that employs the antiquated rust and rivet and whirligig technology of Victorian times. He writes about the future with an eye squarely on the past.

  Technology is simply a means to an end for Bradbury—its authenticity and accuracy secondary to his constant emphasis on the human condition. He was always the stepbrother to the science fiction community, the man who dared put an atmosphere on Mars; the writer who never bothered to explain the inner workings of his time machines. To hell with it.

  John W. Campbell, the legendary editor of Astounding Science Fiction, often credited with launching the hardware-heavy golden era of science fiction in the late 1930s, only published one Bradbury story. His fellow sci-fi scribes embraced him with a shrug. His technology was laughable, but he had, without question, a way with words.

  Yet today, it is often said that there are the “ABCs” of science fiction. Asimov, Bradbury, and Clarke.

  And while Ray Bradbury has often been deemed an outsider in the field he helped establish, he has outsold his alphabetical brethren many times over.

  WELLER: Let’s talk about some of your science fiction contemporaries. What are your opinions of Ursula K. Le Guin?

  BRADBURY: I met her years ago. She’s a very good writer. She has a wonderful style. She does things that tend to be more fantastic.

  WELLER: Do you think you had an influence on her writing at all?

  BRADBURY: Oh, I don’t think so. We’re about the same age. I don’t think there is any influence one way or another. It’s like myself and Arthur Clarke. I’d known him, oh, almost fifty years, but he writes a different sort of science fiction: he’s more technical. We were good friends, but I haven’t read in that field for fifty years. I don’t want to be influenced by my friends, just in case I’ve got an idea that’s similar, I don’t want to be upset, or think I shouldn’t do it.

  WELLER: How did you meet Arthur C. Clarke?

  BRADBURY: He came to visit me around 1952. He published a book about space travel with the Book-of-the-Month Club, and I invited him over to the house one night. My wife was visiting her mother and father, so I cooked him some hamburgers and gave him some wine. He and I got on very well together.

  When 2001: A Space Odyssey came along in 1968, I went to the premiere at Warner Brothers with Chuck Jones, Arthur Clarke, and my wife Maggie. The film was four hours long. When HAL destroys the astronauts on board the ship, they are in mummy cases. They are asleep going across the universe and you don’t know those people. So when HAL kills them, it’s not important. I keep telling people that if, when they made that film, they spent ten minutes on the characters so when HAL kills them it actually matters, it would be a much better movie. But he kills people you don’t know, so it doesn’t count. Stanley Kubrick never learned screenplays. 2001 was terrible. It had no real plot. No characters. But it was a brilliant exercise in photography and music.

  When it was over, we staggered out of the theater, and I said to Arthur Clarke and Chuck Jones, “Let’s go to a bar where all the young people will show up. This film is a twenty-four-beer film. People gotta drink a lot of beer and sit there and try to explain it to each other.” So we went to the nearest bar, and it was full of young people, nattering and badgering each other, saying the film meant this, the film meant that. They were saying what I said they’d be talking about. I said to Arthur that night, the film needs two hours cut, at least. And the next week they cut at least an hour out of it.

  I went to see the film again, and it was still too long. I timed one scene where there’s a press conference and they reveal two items: it was seven minutes long. Oh my God! The actors talked forever about nothing! There’s no reason for that. There’s nothing brilliant. There’s no metaphor. Nothing startling. The film had a lot of scenes like that: scenes that went on too long. I could go through it with an editor and cut the film myself, and tomorrow it would be a brilliant movie. All you need is ninety minutes. You don’t need three hours.

  WELLER: Let’s talk about some of the other science fiction writers who were occasionally part of the Los Angeles Science Fiction Society with you in the late 1930s. Robert Heinlein was one of your mentors. What are your memories of him?

  BRADBURY: Heinlein was a big influence. He was a humanist. He wrote stories about real people, instead of mechanical stories. He was a vast influence. He was older than me, and when I met him in the Science Fiction Society, he had already been published and made a name for himself. I went up to his house in Laurel Canyon in the Hollywood Hills, and he let me stand behind him and watch him while he typed his stories. He was very strict. He didn’t speak to me for years because I didn’t join the army.

  There was a science fiction convention at the Century Plaza Hotel about twenty-five years ago, and I gave a speech and Heinlein was in the audience, but I didn’t know it. And during my speech I praised Bob because he sold my first short story. And when my speech was over, I was down mainly with the fans, and I felt a hand on my shoulder and it was Heinlein, and we made up after all those years.

  WELLER: What are your memories of the writer A.E. van Vogt?

  BRADBURY: He came to meetings of the science fiction society. He helped invent Scientology and Dianetics. He helped promote L. Ron Hubbard. He taught classes in Dianetics. We were totally different writers, and he wrote different science fiction. I couldn’t learn from him for the same reason I co
uldn’t learn from Isaac Asimov. They wrote scientific stuff and technological stuff that to me was boring.

  WELLER: You knew Isaac Asimov. What do you think of his work? It hails from a different school of science fiction than your writing.

  BRADBURY: Asimov was a scientific genius and he wrote in a drier kind of style. I recognize his genius, but he was too technical. He told you how to build a rocket. I didn’t want to know. I wanted to know how to fly one! He wrote super-galactic stuff that I never knew how to write. But he was a very nice man, very shy. Did I tell you about his encounter with me and Gorbachev?

  WELLER: Briefly. The day you had lunch with Gorbachev?

  BRADBURY: And Gorbachyova. I was invited by Gorbachev for lunch at the Soviet Embassy in Washington, DC, in 1990. I had a copy of The Martian Chronicles with me in Russian. After I talked to him, I talked to his wife Raisa Gorbachyova, and I gave her a copy of my book. Well, Asimov, who was just ahead of me, it turns out, had one of his books too, but he was too shy to give it to her. That’s the kind of guy he was. And he saw this and ran back and gave his book to Gorbachyova. I thought it was so sweet. For a learned man, for an intellectual man, he is so much brighter than I will ever be. He had an incredible IQ, but he was like Woody Allen.

  One of the great moments that day at lunch was when Gorbachev made a little speech, and I was sitting with Eugene McCarthy, the politician who ran for president (I helped him with his campaign twenty-five or thirty years ago), and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. In the middle of his speech, Gorbachev said, “I want to mention the fact that today there are two people here because my daughter loves them and we invited them, and they are Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury.” Isaac was at the next table and I looked over at him, and Douglas Fairbanks looked at me and gave me a big wink, and Mr. McCarthy applauded. My whole body blushed! What a day it was. When I went back to my hotel later, I went into the main desk and said, “Get me out of here, I’m leaving.” They said, “Well, you’re supposed to leave tomorrow.” I said, “Yeah, but I’m so happy, I want to go home to my wife and my cats.” So I went home early. You can’t beat leaving like that. Gorbachev was so sweet. He was a very nice man.