A few Christmases ago I treated myself to a copy of Ray Bradbury’s collection of essays about the writing called Zen and the Art of Writing. It remains one of the most joyful books I have ever read. I could say inspirational but it has become a tired word in the media. So let’s just say that Ray Bradbury is wonderful; in every sense of the word. I have never read a short story writer with his range, humanity and ability to surprise.
Ray Bradbury worked through the power of word association. He collected ideas for stories in the form.of words or simple phrases creating stories almost by chasing the ideas through the tales which evolved as he wrote on.
“I have never listened go anyone who criticised my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the rooom.”
Think about The Veldt one of Bradbury s most famous tales originally begun as “The playroom” and captured though the word association of ” Africa. Hot sun. Vultures. Dead meat. Lions.” Apparently the tale took about 120 minutes as “an explosion of idea.” Given ” shelter” by his “intuitive self” for years…
Now think of Bradbury and his wife walking on a beach and coming across the broken bones of Venice pier. ” what’s that dinosaur doing lying here on the beach?”asked Bradbury. …If his wife “wisely” gave him no answer then the sound of the ‘Santa Monica foghorn’ the night later gives Bradbury his answer. He decided that the lonely dinosaur had heard the foghorn, assumed it was another dinosaur calling from the deep past and he had died subsequently on the shore of a broken heart when he realised it was only a foghorn.
The foghorn story was filmed two years later and marked the beginning of Bradbury’s association with John Huston.