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Blog, Writing Craft

Ray Bradbury’s Hygiene of Writing Advice

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Listening to authors give interviews often helps us understand their process. That is to say, spur of the moment questions can be revealing. Author and speculative-fiction master Ray Bradbury has a wealth of great interviews that help listeners understand his approach to writing. Ray Bradbury’s writing concepts are both ideological and practical. Often times, understanding the spirit of his advice is what will push you toward success.

In this post, we are going to look at a transcript of a talk he gave on a specific approach to immersing oneself in the world of writing. The talk was published by The Narrative Art channel on YouTube, and I have published the transcript here. In this dialogue, he talks about the most important texts to consume if you are a budding author. It is certainly an interesting dissection of his process and his take on the “hygiene of writing” is enticing. If anything, I believe you can take something from his talk for your own writing.

Ray Bradbury and “The Hygiene of Writing” Transcript

“There’s a lot I want to say because I recognize the need many of you have to be writers, and you don’t want to do the wrong things. So for at least five minutes, I want to talk about the hygiene of writing for you so you won’t do anything wrong in the next year.

The first thing that comes to mind is the danger of writing novels to start. I don’t know how many of you are writing novels now. If they’re going well, you don’t have to listen to me. But the problem with novels is you could spend a whole year writing one, and it might not turn out well because you haven’t learned to write yet. The best hygiene for beginning writers—or intermediate writers—is to write a hell of a lot of short stories.

If you could write one short story a week, it doesn’t matter what the quality is to start, but at least you’re practicing. And at the end of a year, you have 52 short stories, and I defy you to write 52 bad ones. It can’t be done. At the end of 30 weeks, or 40 weeks, or the end of the year, all of a sudden, a story will come that’s just wonderful.

That’s what happened to me. I started writing when I was 12, and I was 22 before I wrote my first decent short story. That’s a hell of a lot of writing—millions of words—because I was doing everything wrong to start. Of course, I was imitating. I had so many heroes that I wanted to be like. I liked H.G. Wells, I loved Jules Verne, I loved Conan Doyle—Sherlock Holmes, for God’s sake. Jeeves, I loved Wodehouse.

Well, you can’t be any of those things, can you? You may love them, but you can’t be those. I loved Edgar Rice Burroughs—Tarzan, John Carter, Warlord of Mars. Good Lord, wonderful stuff. The Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum. You know, I always dreamt someday I could grow up and write an Oz book, but it’s not to be—not to be.

So the main thing I want to start with tonight is to get you to write more short stories. Then you’ll be in training. You’ll learn to compact things. You’ll learn to look for ideas. The psychological thing here is that every week, you’ll be happy. At the end of a week, you will have done something. But in a novel, you don’t know where the hell you’re going. At the end of a week, you don’t feel all that good. At the end of a month—I’ve been through novels. I waited until I was 30 before I wrote my first novel, and that was Fahrenheit 451. It was worth waiting for.

But I was fearful of novels. I recognized the danger of spending a year on something that might not be very good. And your second novel might not be very good, or your third one. But in the meantime, you could write 52 or 104 short stories, and you’re learning your craft. That’s the important thing.

Read people like Roald Dahl. Get his books of short stories. Get the short stories of G. de Maupassant. Get John Cheever, who has done some very good short stories over and above his novels. Richard Matheson, in my own field.

Nigel, an author named Nigel Kneale—K-N-E-A-L-E. Nigel Kneale. Read his short stories. John Collier—one of the greatest short story writers of this century. And you know you’ve never heard his name. Try and look him up. He’s out of print right now. I’m trying to get him back in print next year. John Collier, English writer. He wrote brilliant short stories that deeply affected me when I was 22 years old.

The more quality short stories you read from the start of the century—Edith Wharton’s short stories, save her novels till later. There are many women writers who influenced me. Katherine Anne Porter, her novellas, all of the short stories of Wharton. The Curtain Is Green by Eudora Welty. Wonderful short stories.

The more of these you can take in—and stay away from most modern anthologies of short stories, because they’re slices of life. They don’t go anywhere. They don’t have any metaphor. Have you looked at The New Yorker recently? Have you tried to read one of those stories? Didn’t it put you to sleep immediately? They don’t know how to write short stories.

Go read Washington Irving. Go read the short stories of Melville. Go read Edgar Allan Poe again. Go read Nathaniel Hawthorne, a writer of fantasy in the science fiction field. Many collections of short stories, because they all deal with metaphor.

And the sooner you recognize the ability of seeing a metaphor, and knowing how to write the metaphor, and to make collections of them, the better off you’ll be. Then you’ll be ready for the novel.

Maybe some of you here tonight are automatically good novelists. So I’m not talking to you. You’re fortunate that you were born that way. But I discovered along the way I was a collector of metaphors.

Now, I don’t know how I can teach you to recognize the metaphor when you see it. But what you’ve got to do from this night forward is stuff your head with more different things from various fields. Hygienically speaking, I’ll give you a program to follow every night—a very simple program for the next thousand nights.

Before you go to bed every night, read one short story. That’ll take you 10 minutes, 15 minutes. Then read one poem a night from the vast history of poetry. Stay away from most modern poems—it’s crap. It’s not poetry. It’s not poetry. Lines that look like poems? Go ahead and do it, but you’ll go nowhere.

But read the great poets. Go back and read Shakespeare. Read Alexander Pope. Read Robert Frost. But one poem a night. One short story a night. One essay a night for the next 1,000 nights, and from various fields—archaeology, zoology, biology, all the great philosophers of time, comparing them. Read the essays of Aldous Huxley. Read Loren Eiseley, a great anthropologist.

Maybe you’ve never heard of him—Loren Eiseley, E-I-S-E-L-E-Y. He was head of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. He became my friend 40 years ago. I read an essay of his in Harper’s, “The Fire Apes,” which was so brilliant I wrote him a fan letter.

I said, “Dear Dr. Eiseley, ‘The Fire Apes’ is the finest essay written in the last 20 years in any American magazine. Why don’t you write a book?” He wrote back and said, “Hey, that’s an idea. I think I will write a book.” And he wrote 17 books. But I was his papa, even though I was 15 years younger.

So reread all the books of Loren Eiseley. They’re crammed with pomegranate ideas. That’s why I want you to read essays in every field—on politics, analyzing literature. Pick your own.

But that means every night before you go to bed, you’re stuffing your head with one short story, one poem, and one essay. At the end of a thousand nights, Jesus God, you’ll be full of stuff, won’t you? You’ll be full of ideas and metaphors, along with your perceptions of life and your own personal experiences, which you put away—and what you see in your friends and relatives.

You want all these things to go in. And the more metaphors you can cram yourself with, they’ll bounce around inside your head and make new metaphors. That’s why you’re doing this. But you’ve got to be able to recognize one when you see one.

So hygienically speaking, you’ve got two things to do. If you feel you have to do a novel in spite of what I said, go do it. But in the meantime, write a hell of a lot of short stories. And then every night, do these three things with the short story, the poem, and the essay. And you’re well on your way to being more creative.

Conclusion

In considering Ray Bradbury’s writing advice, we have to understand the practical nature of what he is telling us as writers. If you want to become a better writer, you have to read more; and, his advice is asking you to focus on the classics when it comes to form and structure. If you understand the basics then you can play with the template, you can evolve your own writing, and you can certainly experiment with writing concepts.

Works Cited

“Ray Bradbury on the Dangers of Starting with a Novel.” The Narrative Art. June 13, 2016. Web, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWBF4R6MW-k

Blog, Book Reviews

Ray Bradbury’s ‘The Halloween Tree’: A History of Death

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We have talked a great deal about Ray Bradbury on this blog. We have discussed his stories, his style, and how the themes of his books have affected so many people. With that said, it can be hard to pinpoint the books we may deem as critical. I have my list. Yet, with such a wide catalogue, which books would you choose? Something Wicked this Way Comes for sure has staying power, as does Fahrenheit 451. Nevertheless, I may point to another book to put in the pantheon of the greats: The Halloween Tree. The novel is about a group of boys on Halloween night who venture through time and history. Joined by their guardian and guide, Mr. Moundshroud, they see many historical accounts of Samhain and early onset Halloween. In this post, we are going to look at the importance of Bradbury’s death-laden novel The Halloween Tree.

Summary

In the novel, a group of boys are taken on an adventure to save their sick friend. Throughout their adventure, they see different eras and civilizations. The purpose of this, according to their ghastly guide Mr. Moundshroud, is to show the boys the importance of Halloween. Of course, it is more than a holiday, they are told, and it is in fact a way of life. They go from the early days with Cro-Magnon men, to the Celtic rituals in the hills. They span it all across time. The story is dark and there are moments of sheer terror in cornfields and Notre Dame Cathedral. In the end, the boys learn about Halloween and must make a dark sacrifice to save their ailing friend.


The importance of The Halloween Tree

Ray Bradbury’s The Halloween Tree is a nostalgic novel. Not that Bradbury wrote the novel in 1972, but that it also has the vibes of early-Midwest Halloweens. The town in the story is inviting, and the trees are changing into beautiful blooms of color. The boys trod on broken, uneven sidewalks from house to house in the cool autumn night. It is a wistful story.

Likewise, the novel pulls you right in to imagining your younger self dressed up on a cold Halloween night. Even though you did not travel through history, you learned a great deal about what Halloween meant on those evenings. The joy, the excitement, and the satisfaction of dressing up as something else. At my current age, Halloween is a sort of curiosity, like folklore, that lives in our very being. It is a haunted day, but it is not haunted by ghosts and goblins. Rather, it is haunted by historical context and meaning.

The Halloween Tree cements this idea in every way.

Consider this: in the story, the boys only begin to understand the full context of Halloween night as they explore experiential settings. The performative stunts of dressing in costume become clearer as almost every boy is given an explanation for their dress-up choice: mummies, ghosts, and even ape-men. Regardless, the history lesson is just the icing on the cake. As this is a fabulous book about friendship, adventure, and the fear of death hiding in nearby shadows.

Similarly, The Halloween Tree reminded me that dark stories can have educational qualities. Yet they can still give us insight into the story’s characters. While the history of death and Halloween in the novel is fitting, it is also important to the overall thrust of the story and its themes. These themes are anything from childhood memories to the power of the afterlife.

The novel is a formative text about growing up on the most precious night of the year for a child. It is a bildungsroman piece about realizing that we are all in this together. This is exemplified by the boys’ willingness to give up a year of their life to save their friend Pipkin. It also exemplifies the tradition of Halloween as a night of fun, adventure, and camaraderie.


Conclusion

I love The Halloween Tree very much. Though I also feel like I missed out on it when I was younger. I recall watching the movie in an upstairs bedroom where my brothers and I slept on a single queen-sized mattress on the floor. We had an ancient television and a VCR player that poorly played any film put into its maw. At the time, I didn’t care for the film adaptation of The Halloween Tree (1993). I thought it looked cheesy and poorly done. But, I hadn’t hit a point in my life where I could see a film for more than what appeared on the screen superficially.

Moreover, The Halloween Tree is most reminiscent of Bradbury’s Something Wicked this Way Comes (1962 ). That novel is a dark fantasy story about two friends who venture to an October carnival that is far more menacing and wicked than anything they could have possibly imagined. It is a dark and mysterious work that pushed me into writing fiction. It simply made all the right moves at exactly the right time in my life. The moodiness, the ugliness, and the beauty of growing older were all on the page, and I was very receptive to weird fiction and dark fantasy stories.

Yet, I still remember feeling a strange touch of evil about the The Halloween Tree as a movie. There was a certain darkness that enveloped each scene, and the character of Moundshroud unsettled me greatly. But, as I got older, I realized the book was far more adult in presentation, as it was trying to convey both historical context, and the theme of death even in its fantastical telling.

Truly, The Halloween Tree is something only Ray Bradbury could conjure up in the world of his fantastical mind.

Blog, Book Reviews

Ray Bradbury’s ‘The Halloween Tree’: Life, Death, and Darkness

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We have talked a great deal about Ray Bradbury on this blog. We have discussed his stories, his style, and how the themes of his books have affected so many people. With that said, it can be hard to pinpoint the books we may deem as critical. I have my list. Yet, with such a wide catalogue, which books would you choose? Something Wicked this Way Comes for sure has staying power, as does Fahrenheit 451. Nevertheless, I may point to another book to put in the pantheon of the greats: The Halloween Tree. The novel is about a group of boys on Halloween night who venture through time and history. Joined by their guardian and guide, Mr. Moundshroud, they see many historical accounts of Samhain and early onset Halloween. In this post, we are going to look at the importance of Bradbury’s death-laden novel The Halloween Tree.

Summary

In the novel, a group of boys are taken on an adventure to save their sick friend. Throughout their adventure, they see different eras and civilizations. The purpose of this, according to their ghastly guide Mr. Moundshroud, is to show the boys the importance of Halloween. Of course, it is more than a holiday, they are told, and it is in fact a way of life. They go from the early days with Cro-Magnon men, to the Celtic rituals in the hills. They span it all across time. The story is dark and there are moments of sheer terror in cornfields and Notre Dame Cathedral. In the end, the boys learn about Halloween and must make a dark sacrifice to save their ailing friend.


The Importance of The Halloween Tree

Ray Bradbury’s The Halloween Tree is a nostalgic novel. Not that Bradbury wrote the novel in 1972, but that it also has the vibes of early-Midwest Halloweens. The town in the story is inviting, and the trees are changing into beautiful blooms of color. The boys trod on broken, uneven sidewalks from house to house in the cool autumn night. It is a wistful story.

Likewise, the novel pulls you right in to imagining your younger self dressed up on a cold Halloween night. Even though you did not travel through history, you learned a great deal about what Halloween meant on those evenings. The joy, the excitement, and the satisfaction of dressing up as something else. At my current age, Halloween is a sort of curiosity, like folklore, that lives in our very being. It is a haunted day, but it is not haunted by ghosts and goblins. Rather, it is haunted by historical context and meaning.

The Halloween Tree cements this idea in every way.

Consider this: in the story, the boys only begin to understand the full context of Halloween night as they explore experiential settings. The performative stunts of dressing in costume become clearer as almost every boy is given an explanation for their dress-up choice: mummies, ghosts, and even ape-men. Regardless, the history lesson is just the icing on the cake. As this is a fabulous book about friendship, adventure, and the fear of death hiding in nearby shadows.

Similarly, The Halloween Tree reminded me that dark stories can have educational qualities. Yet they can still give us insight into the story’s characters. While the history of death and Halloween in the novel is fitting, it is also important to the overall thrust of the story and its themes. These themes are anything from childhood memories to the power of the afterlife.

The novel is a formative text about growing up on the most precious night of the year for a child. It is a bildungsroman piece about realizing that we are all in this together. This is exemplified by the boys’ willingness to give up a year of their life to save their friend Pipkin. It also exemplifies the tradition of Halloween as a night of fun, adventure, and camaraderie.


Conclusion

I love The Halloween Tree very much. Though I also feel like I missed out on it when I was younger. I recall watching the movie in an upstairs bedroom where my brothers and I slept on a single queen-sized mattress on the floor. We had an ancient television and a VCR player that poorly played any film put into its maw. At the time, I didn’t care for the film adaptation of The Halloween Tree (1993). I thought it looked cheesy and poorly done. But, I hadn’t hit a point in my life where I could see a film for more than what appeared on the screen superficially.

Moreover, The Halloween Tree is most reminiscent of Bradbury’s Something Wicked this Way Comes (1962 ). That novel is a dark fantasy story about two friends who venture to an October carnival that is far more menacing and wicked than anything they could have possibly imagined. It is a dark and mysterious work that pushed me into writing fiction. It simply made all the right moves at exactly the right time in my life. The moodiness, the ugliness, and the beauty of growing older were all on the page, and I was very receptive to weird fiction and dark fantasy stories.

Yet, I still remember feeling a strange touch of evil about the The Halloween Tree as a movie. There was a certain darkness that enveloped each scene, and the character of Moundshroud unsettled me greatly. But, as I got older, I realized the book was far more adult in presentation, as it was trying to convey both historical context, and the theme of death even in its fantastical telling. Truly, The Halloween Tree is something only Ray Bradbury could conjure up in the world of his fantastical mind.

What do you think? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

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Eeriness and imagination in “The October Country” by Ray Bradbury

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“That country whose people are autumn people, thinking only autumn thoughts. Whose people passing at night on the empty walks sound like rain. . . .”

Darkness is a pervasive element in many genres of fiction. This includes the overt gothic fiction of the turn of the century to more modern literature whose horror lies at the heart of their themes. These stories often features horrific hardships and truly bleak moments (Jodi Picoult, Cormac McCarthy, Anne Proulx). Some books balance between these two subtleties. One such book is Ray Bradbury’s October Country, which is a wonderfully dark short-story collection from the master of fiction himself.

Summary

To begin, there are a variety of short stories in this collection that all typically range from scary, to upsetting, to sad. Bradbury covers many themes in this collection, but these stories are a little different in execution from his usual fare, as we find that each story has a sort of macabre edge to them.

These stories include:

  • A bullied dwarf who uses a funhouse mirror to make himself look taller.
  • A man whose skeleton is out to get him.
  • A man who revisits tragedy in his hometown by the lake.
  • A crowd of people with a morbid interest in accidents.
  • A family of monsters that return to their home in Illinois.

These trappings give us an invite into both Bradbury’s approach to storytelling and his insular, yet worldly outlook. the horror always starts with wonder and then becomes something far more haunting.

Conclusion

Much like The Halloween Tree or Something Wicked this Way Comes, Bradbury’s October Country gives way to not only fantastical flights of imagination, but excellent moments of tenderness and loss.

Bradbury’s writing is dear to me for its absolute strangeness and fantastical ventures into imagination. As showcased in this book, his stories are also grounded in reality and then some horrific strangeness comes through to upset the reality of the scenario. For example, the ending of “The Lake” takes the reader to a supernatural conclusion but the reality of the loss is still there. In this way, Bradbury ties both our hearts and our minds to the story.

Book Blurb

From Goodreads: “Ray Bradbury’s second short story collection is back in print, its chilling encounters with funhouse mirrors, parasitic accident-watchers, and strange poker chips intact. Both sides of Bradbury’s vaunted childhood nostalgia are also on display, in the celebratory ‘Uncle Einar,’ and haunting ‘The Lake,’ the latter a fine elegy to childhood loss. This edition features a new introduction by Bradbury, an invaluable essay on writing, wherein the author tells of his ‘Theater of Morning Voices,’ and, by inference, encourages you to listen to the same murmurings in yourself. And has any writer anywhere ever made such good use of exclamation marks!? (Illustrated by Joe Mugnaini.)”

Reviews

On Goodreads, October Country has 4.12 out of 5 stars with 19,085 ratings and 1,739 reviews. Of the five-star reviews, there are 7,287, while there are 107 one-star reviews.

Five-star reviews state that October Country is great for a “crisp, autumn morning” and is rife with “brilliant creativity in the realms of the occult.” Additionally, reviewers state that the book is filled with “solid pulp.” One-star reviews state that the book is “boring” and that it was “out there in left field.” Likewise, other reviewers felt that the stories were “melodramatic” and the writing styel was not for them.

Works Cited

Bradbury, Ray. The October Country. Ballantine Books, 1955.

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“There Will Come Soft Rains” by Ray Bradbury: Nature and Destruction

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Much of post-apocalyptic fiction has the same vision: blighted landscapes of fog and destruction. Dripping trees and fell houses. A sound somewhere in the distance of machinery ticking or the clinking of long-dead technology. In “There Will Come Soft Rains” by Ray Bradbury, the author introduces us to an automated house. One that is futuristic and ready to make life better for a lovely family.

Yet, the world has moved on and all that remains is the house itself in landscape of a dismantled future.

Today on the blog we examine one of Bradbury’s finest short stories that highlights the effects of technology run amok and the death of humanity.

Summary
The House Wakes Up

To begin, the story starts with a house coming back online for its daily routine. It tells the reader that the date is “Aug. 4, 2026.” The house prepares to do its work. Bradbury writes: “The morning house lay empty. The clock ticked on, repeating and repeating its sounds into the emptiness. Seven-nine, breakfast time, seven-nine!” Now awake, its work entails making breakfast, cleaning, and organizing. However, through all of this, there are no human inhabitants as “no doors slammed, no carpets took the soft tread of rubber heels.”

A New Arrival

Next, an alarming scene occurs in the morning when the family dog arrives, only to find itself alone and leaden with radiation sickness.

As such, Bradbury tells us that the “dog frothed at the mouth, lying at the door, sniffing, its eyes turned to fire” and that it “ran wildly in circles, biting at its tail, spun in a frenzy, and died.” Having laid in the “parlor for an hour … The dog was gone.”

“In the cellar, the incinerator glowed suddenly and a whirl of sparks leaped up the chimney,” the author states.

The Poem

Then, the house recites a poem around nine o’clock in the evening. The poem, “There Will Come Soft Rains,” by Sara Teasdale plays into the theme of the story.

“There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white;

Robins will wear their feathery fire,
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn
Would scarcely know that we were gone.”

Cleansed in Fire

A fire consumes the house at this point, as a “falling tree bough crashed through the kitchen window.” It smashes a bottle of cleaning solvent on the stove. The house burns to the ground in a great, smokey catastrophe.

As the story finishes, Bradbury writes that the dawn “showed faintly in the east” and among “the ruins, one wall stood alone.” The wall itself repeats the date–August 5, 2026–over and over again.

Analysis
Ray Bradbury lecturing to an audience

Firstly, in analyzing “There Will Come Soft Rains” by Ray Bradbury, we have a multi-layered thematic exploration happening in this story. To begin, and perhaps the most obvious, is the reliance on technology to make life easier. Seemingly perfect, the house prepares and takes care of both the needs and wants of the now-deceased family. However, this reliance on technology is ultimately humanity’s folly, as nuclear war as eradicated everybody on Earth. Thus, the house has nobody left to care for.

Secondly, we have a story of nature’s perseverance. For example, the author cites Teasdale’s poem in the story on purpose. The poem itself discusses the goings-on of birds, frogs, and spring. which informs the reader of nature’s ambivalence to humanity’s warfare and violence. Later in the story, a gust of wind causes a branch to fall into the house. A reading of this is that such an action is nature’s power asserting itself over humanity’s rule. Therefore, nature subsumes humanity and is the dominant force, regardless of the power of a nuclear weapon or the technological superiority of a house.

Lastly, we have a house bathed in fire. I assume the relation to the world being bathed in its own destruction also links together. The house is a remnant of a humanity that could only destroy itself and thus the house must also be destroyed. Pairing this with nature, we can see how there was no chance for humanity to flourish when it is dead set on destruction.

Works Cited

Bradbury, Ray. “There Will Come Soft Rains.” The Martian Chronicles, Doubleday, 1950, pp. 164-169.

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Crafting Prose Like Ray Bradbury, Exploring His Unique Style

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To write prose like Ray Bradbury, one must focus on the subject in intense detail. By doing so, they can describe it using imagery and senses to generate a clear image. Bradbury, a science-fiction author and prolific short-story writer, wrote many classics in multiple genres. These include stories from the science-fiction classic Fahrenheit 451 to the horror-driven bildungsroman in Something Wicked this Way Comes.

He has been described as terse and flowery (purple prose). And, he has always been engaging, regardless of his stylistic limitations. In calling him both terse and flowery, we see a critical contrast in his writing. He is both and he is neither. I think it comes down to which book you are reading. It also comes down to which Bradbury-era you are reading (more flowery early on and terser later).

In order to write like Bradbury, we are going to analyze Bradbury’s style. Then, we will decide what parts we can emulate or experiment with in our own writing!

Bradbury’s style

“And Ghost and Mummy and Skeleton and Witch and all the rest were back at their own homes, on their own porches, and each turned to look at the town and remember this special night they would never in all their lives ever forget ….” – Ray Bradbury | The Halloween Tree

Over-description

The most apparent stylistic choice that Bradbury makes is often over-description to draw a clear image in the reader’s head. If you want to write like Ray Bradbury, you have to use extreme detail in description. For example, in The Halloween Tree, Bradbury describes a row of the dead who were left in a catacomb because they “couldn’t pay the rent on their graves…” with acuteness.

Bradbury describes: “The boys looked and saw that some of the ancient people were dressed like farmers and some like peasant maids and some like businessmen in old dark suits, and one even like a bullfighter in his dusty suit of lights. But inside their suits they were all thin bones and skin and spiderweb and dust that shook down through their ribs if you sneezed and trembled them” (Bradbury).

In this example we have the execution of polysyndeton. This is a stylistic choice in which multiple conjunctions are placed in order to change the rhythm and flow of the sentence. Heminway and Vonnegut employ this practice often. Often, it makes the writing sound rushed or speedy description. This fits well into the idea of Bradbury’s over-description. He is packing in so much information that he wants to see it clearly—no questions asked.

Ray Bradbury and his wife Maggie
Ray Bradbury and his wife Maggie | By Los Angeles Times
A poetic style

Moreover, Bradbury has often considered himself a poet first and foremost, and in a variety of interviews talking about his start as an author, often described his writings in poetic terms. At least, that is how he describes the language he uses to describe the worlds he presents to readers. As such, he frequently likes to use copious amounts of similes and metaphors (and all other manner of figurative language) to describe his characters and settings.

Using Similes and Metaphors

In order to write prose like Ray Bradbury, you have to remember that a simile is a comparison that uses “like” or “as,” to compare two or more things, while metaphors make comparisons between two or more things to create a clearer picture for the reader.

Similes

In The Veldt, Bradbury tells the tale of family, technology, and the cost of being a rotten parent. To tell this story, Bradbury uses a variety of similes and metaphors to execute his description. For instance, in using similes, Bradbury compares the smell of the Veldt to a variety of different elements: “The hot straw smell of lion grass, the cool green smell of the hidden water hole, the great rusty smell of animals, the smell of dust like a red paprika in the hot air” (Bradbury).

The smell of dust like red paprika immediately makes me sniff and feel the burn in my nose. It’s effective. Moreover, Bradbury’s use of simile is further demonstrated in his short story The Pedestrian, where he describes a late night walk by one of the last pedestrians in society. He writes, “… and with a final decision made, a path selected, he would stride off, sending patterns of frosty air before him like the smoke of a cigar” (Bradbury).

The image of a man in a coat with plumes of smoke puffing out before him is a stark one, as we’ve all been there—strolling on a cold evening with your breath out ahead. But the image is clear and we know it when we read it on the page.

Metaphors

Moreover, in The Crowd, a story about a crowd’s fascination with the accidents of others, Bradbury writes that the main character, Spallner, looks up at the crowd after an auto-accident and has difficulty comprehending why they are gathered round.

He states that, “he was curious as a man under deep water looking up at people on a bridge,” which compares his current state (auto-accident) to a more alien world, in two unlike things further compare their worlds (Bradbury).

Likewise, during the accident, Bradbury writes that Spallner was battered inside the car when he writes that he was “forced back and forth in several lightning jerks,” which compares Spallner’s movements to that of the ferociousness of lightening.

ray bradbury signing a book next to robert bloch
World Fantasy Con III 1977 | Ray Bradbury Signing Next to Robert Bloch

Furthermore, he states of the lush surroundings in the jungle of yesteryear: “The jungle was high and the jungle was broad and the jungle was the entire world forever and forever” (Bradbury). Of course, the jungle could not be the entire world forever and ever literally; but, the contrast between the infinite of time and the size of the jungle is noted.

Conclusion

Bradbury is a master craftsman and spent much of his career perfecting his style; however, many of his writerly moves stay the same. In order to write prose like Ray Bradbury, you have to mindful of his moves as a writer. He loves to describe in great swaths of quickly-moving action. He loves to use similes and metaphors to draw comparisons between unknown worlds to the world we know all too well.

One exercise to try in order to craft prose like Ray Bradbury, is to employ his stylistic choices in one of your own stories. See if you can describe your world similar to his world. Ask yourself: What works? What doesn’t? And then spend your time revising by including over-description, metaphors, and similes.

Works Cited

Bradbury, Ray. The Halloween Tree. Knopf, 1972.

Bradbury, Ray. “A Sound of Thunder.” The Golden Apples of the Sun, Doubleday, 1953, pp. 83-93.

Bradbury, Ray. “The Veldt.” The Illustrated Man, Bantam Books, 1951, pp. 18-30.

Bradbury, Ray. “The Pedestrian.” The Stories of Ray Bradbury, Alfred A. Knopf, 1980, pp. 283-288.

Bradbury, Ray. “The Crowd.” The October Country, Ballantine Books, 1955, pp. 161-172.

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Ray Bradbury’s “The Lake”: Processing Trauma Through Writing

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I was Up North with my family last week and we spent time down by the water (Burt Lake and Lake Michigan). Sitting in the sand one night, I watched my wife walk along the shore looking for Petoskey stones. She didn’t find any, but she did remind me of Ray Bradbury’s short story “The Lake” from his collection The October Country, which has so much to do with the water and the memories we make in life–traumatic or not. In this post, I would like to talk about Ray Bradbury’s short story “The Lake” and how it can help us with processing trauma through writing.

Summary
A Boy On the Beach

To begin, the story is about a boy named Harold. One day, Harold is playing on the beach in September, getting the last few swims in before the summer is finally over.

As Harold states of the season:

“One by one the places slammed their covers down, padlocked their doors, and the wind came and touched the sand, blowing away all of the million footprints of July and August. It got so that now, in September, there was nothing but the mark of my rubber tennis shoes and Donald and Delaus Arnold’s feet, down by the water curve” (Bradbury).

Harold’s friend Tally, with whom he builds sand castles on the beach, goes swimming but does not return from the lake itself. Harold panics and calls her name. However, she is gone. The lake is unchanged.

Understanding Loss

“Water is like a magician,” Harold tells us. “Sawing you in half. It feels as if you were cut in two, part of you, the lower part, sugar, melting, dissolving away. Cool water, and once in a while a very elegantly stumbling wave that fell with a flourish of lace” (Bradbury).

Harold, internally, admits his love for Tally–in only the way a child could: “It was that love that comes before all significance of body and morals. It was that love that is no more bad than wind and sea and sand lying side by side forever. It was made of all the warm long days together at the beach, and the humming quiet days of droning education at the school” (Bradbury).

Tally has drowned, and Harold’s regret, wonder, and sadness plague him into adulthood. As an adult, Harold and his wife Margaret travel to his hometown, as he had moved away as a child, and they walk by the lake. It is there that a lifeguard finds the body of a ten-year-old girl. Harold asks the man to see the body to confirm his suspicions, and with some sorrow the lifeguard obliges.

“The beach was deserted. There was only the sky and the wind and the water and the autumn coming on lonely. I looked down at her there” (Bradbury).

It was Tally. Dead. Ten years on in some mysterious way. Harold takes this closure and is able to move on from his trauma as a different person.

Analysis
Death and Memories

“The Lake” is a story about death and memories. More so, it is a story about childhood trauma and how that can plague us as adults. In processing trauma through writing, Bradbury creates a robust world. Memory removes Harold from his own past. Later, it confronts him again.

But, what is more, Trauma is communal. Yet we do not know this fact. Especially here in America, trauma is a rustic individualist experience. We bare our own hurt and losses, whether that be the loss of someone we love or the loss of innocence.

“And now in the lonely autumn when the sky was huge and the water was huge and the beach was so very long, I had come down for the last time, alone” (Bradbury).

In other words, Harold is alone in his experience. How does he explain loss (irrevocable loss) to those around him? It seems as though summertime pals are here and gone. His love existed for only as long as he was by the water. Then she disappeared.

Harold embodies all of us and those far-reaching memories of trauma that are far more than skin deep. How do you address death as a child? And isn’t it easier to just walk away? But, of course, it’s not. It’s too dangerous to let pain wade in your subconscious.

Leaving Trauma Behind

As Harold tells us: “I lengthened my bones, put flesh on them, changed my mind for an older one, threw away clothes as they no longer fitted, shifted from grammar to high-school, to college. And there was a young woman in Sacramento. I knew her for a time, and we were married. By the time I was twenty-two, I had almost forgotten what the East was like.”

Harold sheds his skin in the end. Yet, at the end of the story, he reminds us that our subconscious doesn’t simply vanish. In fact, our experiences don’t simply abandon us like shallow memories.

Harold and his wife walk through his boyhood town and see “echoes” of faces.

“When we walked through the town together I saw no one I recognized. There were faces with echoes in them. Echoes of hikes on ravine trails. Faces with small laughter in them from closed grammar schools and swinging on metal-linked swings and going up and down on teeter-totters. But I didn’t speak. I walked and looked and filled up inside with all those memories, like leaves stacked for autumn burning” (Bradbury).

After seeing Tally’s body, Harold becomes whole, different, but still whole. He has accepted what happened to him and is better for it.

Conclusion

We as writers can glean quite a bit from this short story. Trauma can be hard to face or even understandable as it relates to our own person sometimes. Facing these psychological cuts can help us overcome our own shortcomings and the horrible memories that plague us in the dead of night.

Processing trauma through writing frees us from the toxins of personal experience and allows us to cherish the better memories we have created. In this way, writing about pain and hurt is reflective and helps us see our memories from a different perspective–who we were versus who we are now.

“The Lake” is an exceptional short story, and it is written by a master of the craft. But, a master plagued by his own pain as well, regardless of how autobiographical the piece is in reality, as by conveying trauma through a medium of fiction, the writer can transform themself (or the reader) in meaningful ways.

Works Cited

Bradbury, Ray. “The Lake.” The October Country, Ballantine Books, 1955, pp. 58-64.

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Ray Bradbury’s “Kaleidoscope”: Imminent terror and futility

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I have had a host of stories follow me around after I’ve read them (I think we all have). These stories typically follow me because they’ve unsettled me in some way or another. One of which is “Cold Equations” by Tom Godwin. Another is “A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor. And yet another is “Kaleidoscope” by Ray Bradbury.

I was thinking tonight that there are few authors who really nail that first book with immediate style. J. K. Rowling, for me, has a perfect first book in Harry Potter, and J.R. Tolkien masterfully demonstrated his storytelling ability with The Hobbit. Bradbury himself capitalized on his talent with both The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man. Even early in his career, he was one of the most lyrical and inventive craftsman of his time (possibly ever).

In his early works, you see the same kind of intense creativity as you do in his later collections, such as Driving Blind (1997). He was a permanent talent. For this post, we will focus on “Kaleidoscope,” which serves as an excellent example of his talent. It also features the cosmic wonder of space paired with the intense horror of death.

Spoilers ahead.

Summary

“Kaleidoscope” concerns a group of astronauts who are sucked out of their spaceship on a trip through space. The accident involves a meteor and the rocket the astronauts were riding in. Bradbury’s voice regarding the incident is unmistakable.

“The first concussion cut the rocket up the side with a giant can opener. The men were thrown into space like a dozen wriggling silverfish. They were scattered into a dark sea; and the ship, in a million pieces, went on, a meteor swarm seeking a lost sun” (Bradbury).

In the space of mere moments, the men face the absolute terror of an imminent death. They have to come to grips with their own mortality…very quickly. The true terror of their situation is that they must face their death alone, with only each other’s voices for company. The vastness of space ahead of them.

Bradbury tells us that they “fell as pebbles fall down wells,” and that they “were scattered as jackstones are scattered from a gigantic throw.” What is truly haunting is that they were reduced to “voices, disembodied and impassioned, in varying degrees of terror and resignation.”

Some of them fail to come to grips with the tragedy, while others grin and bare it if only to understand their place among the stars. Though we learn of all the men’s fates, the audience is centered on Hollis’s own thoughts. Even at the end of the story, we get his internal dialogue, and he alone realizes that he will disintegrate in Earth’s atmosphere.

“They were all alone. Their voices had died like echoes of the words of God spoken and vibrating in the starred deep. There went the captain to the Moon; there Stone with the meteor swarm; there Stimson; there Applegate toward Pluto; there Smith and Turner and Underwood and all the rest, the shards of the kaleidoscope that had formed a thinking pattern for so long, hurled apart” (Bradbury).

In the end, all of them meet their demises in space (or the atmosphere). The story finishes with a little boy and his mother looking up to see a shooting star (Hollis’s disintegrating body). The mother leans in and tells the young boy to, “Make a wish.”

Analysis

I read this story when I was probably 17 or 18 years old and it really upset me at first. I think paired with H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard (my author choices at the time) was smart, though, because they all focused on futility in theme. “Kaleidoscope” has futility in its DNA. In fact, because it comes from the collection The Illustrated Man, the reader can understand its fascination with death. The collection has a lot of death and carnage and futile gestures throughout woven throughout.

But there’s something else the story is trying to tell us, too. In the following section, Hollis thinks about his relationship with another character, Lespere, and the complexity of life in the face of death.

He tells us that they “came to death by separate paths and, in all likelihood, if there were lands of death, their kinds would be as different as night from day.” Moreover, he states that, “The quality of death, like that of life, must be of an infinite variety, and if one has already died once, then what was there to look for in dying for good and all, as he was now?” (Bradbury).

Hollis finds that even though futility and chance are rich in their lives, there is still hope and time to make amends, or at least change in oneself to do better. In one moment, he thinks, he is giving advice, and in the very next he is uncapable of grasping with his own meanness. But such is life. This is the tragedy and triumph of “Kaleidoscope,” and I think it’s a great reminder that even in the briefest moments of life, we can still be the people that we want to be through gratitude, respect, and compassion for others.

Works Cited

Bradbury, Ray. The Illustrated Man. “Kaleidoscope.” Simon and Shuster. 2012.