The copy I read, bought from Summer’s Stories for $1.
I recently read Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man, a collection of 19 short stories written as only Bradbury can write them. I thought I’d share some of the lessons I learned, in no particular order.
Space is full of wonder, and Mars is Fairie-Land.
Space isn’t full of balls of gas and bunches of rocks and barren planets. It’s not about trajectories and techno-babble. No, it’s full of wonder. Try to remember that next time you watch Battlestar Galactica.
More than that, there’s a tension between mankind’s desire to sterilize everything and the romance and mystery of life. If you don’t believe me, read how Edgar Allen Poe leads armies of witches and monsters against spacemen in “The Exiles.”
Not everything has to be explained.
Rockets fly. An ancient city lies dormant, waiting. All the blacks escaped to Mars mid-1900. Some guy has the ability to create images for you to experience. Dead writers rule on Mars. Tattoos tell the future. Holographic lions hunt for you.
Is any of this explained? Just enough for the story to work.
Mystery is more than all right. It’s required. And it’s not a cop-out. It’s the point.
The Single Idea is more than enough.
If you play with your idea, let it wander about and show you the nooks and crannies of where it lives, you’ll have plenty of story. If it rains on Venus all the time, go with that. Show it. What is the landscape like, the storm, the Sun Domes, the psychological effect on man?
A single idea, fully explored, will sink deep into the mind of your reader.
Make us feel.
A clever idea isn’t enough. It’s sterile. (See my first lesson.) Show us how it feels. How does being a million miles from everything, stuck in a metal tube called a rocket, feel. What is the joy of your spaceman father returning, the worry of him being drawn back to space?
One of Bradbury’s best methods is to find a single object and imbue it with the main emotion of the story–like boxes of Havana cigars that hold both a sense of pleasure lost and an ominous foreboding. (Seriously. Read “The Fox and the Forest.”)
Your view of technology is not as important as your view of humanity.
Bradbury’s not a great writer because his view of the future is particularly accurate. I think he struck out on about every prediction in The Illustrated Man. (I don’t think he was trying to be accurate.) He’s a great writer because humanity doesn’t change, and he understood humanity–its evil impulses and sins, its goodness and dreams.
The future isn’t paradise, but it’s not necessarily hell. It’s both, because we’re both angels and demons.
Your stories don’t have to be preplanned; they need to be good.
I had the feeling, though I couldn’t prove it, that Bradbury began with an idea and just started writing, not exactly sure where the ending was. Everything seemed introduced organically. From a strictly practical point of view, things were sometimes a bit meandering.
But, that discovering was part of the pleasure. In fact, the places a story lingered tended to be the reason the story sank into my mind.
Don’t forget the simple pleasures.
The characters in the stories look at the sky and dream. They remember the old swimming holes. They imagine good food or a long drag on a cigarette. They wash dishes on the night the world ends.
Because, for Bradbury, it wasn’t about saving the world. It was about remembering the soul.
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