There are a handful of authors whose storytelling and use of the English language made me want to be a writer, back when I was a kid. First it was the humor of Louis Sachar, Roald Dahl, and Norton Juster, the atmosphere of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkein, and Madeleine L'Engle. Later I would pick up Douglas Adams, Tom Stoppard, and Oscar Wilde; Peter S. Beagle, Grace Paley, and Kurt Vonnegut. But right in the middle, in those formative years when brains and bones ache from growth, was Ray Bradbury.
I lost my first copy (my parents' copy) of The Illustrated Man loaning it out to someone -- which is fine, books are owned the way cats are owned: at their own will. But it looked like this:
The stories in it were creepy and quiet and sad and joyful. Its characters and scenes were alive, as surely as the illustrated man's tattoos, given breath and motion by Bradbury's distillation of the language. I have always interacted with the world best through writing, and the patterns in his words expanded my idea of what writing could be. Reading that book at that age was a paradigm shift.
I based my youth around writing because of shifts like that, and realized in college, somewhere around my eighth writing workshop in four years, that I enjoy editing far more. I'm skiving off gainful freelance editing employment right now to write this post. I do what I do because of writers like Bradbury.
I'm not a fan of everything he ever wrote, and being from the Internet myself, I'm slightly personally offended by some of the cantankerous things he said about computers and digital communication. But the world is a more wondrous place for his having been in it.
Thank you, Mr. Bradbury.
4 comments:
That's the same cover they had at the Coral Springs library. His books actually made me go to the library.
I found my first book by Bradbury in the back seat of an abandoned, kudzu covered car. It was a worm eaten copy of Something Wicked This Way Comes and being that it was Easter Holiday, I started reading it that day, right there in the backseat.
Not less than a month later, I learned that Disney had made a movie based on it, and convinced my folks I had to see it.
I'm sure he would've loved that, E. From the LA Times' piece on him: "'Libraries raised me,' he said in a 2009 interview while trying to raise money for a library in Ventura County. 'I don't believe in colleges and universities.… When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn't go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.'
Bradbury wasn't kidding; libraries were his education … and his muse. He wrote his breakthrough novel, 1953's 'Fahrenheit 451,' on a rental typewriter in the basement of UCLA's Powell Library, pumping in a dime for every half hour of typing. (The book cost him nine bucks and change to write.)"
And Something Wicked is my very favorite story of his. I've never seen the film, though. I could never imagine that it'd live up to the pictures his words painted.
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