S is for Short Story:
What Ray Bradbury Taught Me about Writing and Life
What Ray Bradbury Taught Me about Writing and Life
In 1962 I turned ten. For my birthday, Joanie, the girl next door, gave me a copy of R is for Rocket, a book by an author named Ray Bradbury. Like everyone in those days, Joanie knew that rockets were the future, where people would blast off into the black velvet of space and have unbelievable adventures. She also knew I loved rockets. To her it was a given that I would grow up to be an astronaut. Joanie knew all my dreams: we had been friends nearly our whole lives.
I had learned to read at an early age, and my mother partly credited the clunky mahogany box of our TV for this. Long before I started kindergarten I could recognize phrases such as “New and Improved,” “Better Tasting,” “Longer Lasting,” and the names of most of the major cigarette brands.
My favourite books were from Winston Science Fiction (no relation to the cigarette), a 1950s series for teenagers that featured novels by well-known writers and colourful cover art that looked realistic and fantastical at the same time. Although I was several years younger than Winston’s target audience, I read some of these books a dozen times, memorizing their plots and dreaming of the days when I too would fly through outer space.
I began reading my brand-new R is for Rocket book as soon as I got it home. It opened with the introduction of a young man, named Chris like me, who was about to leave home to go off to rocket school. I could hardly wait to see what was going to happen to Chris as he made his way into the space corps.
The second chapter shifted settings. There was no mention of Chris, only a conversation between two people whose son is taking off on a spaceship that evening. I was confused. Chris didn’t have two parents in the first chapter, just a mother. The third chapter was set in a lighthouse, a story told by the young lighthouse keeper’s assistant as they are attacked by a sea monster. Well, I thought, the young man must be Chris, but what was he doing in a lighthouse? What had happened to his rocket career? Maybe he was stranded on some watery planet, like Venus.
As I moved through the fourth chapter, a light was beginning to glow. I wasn’t reading just one story: each chapter was actually a totally different one. I would never find out what had happened to Chris. It felt like Mr. Bradbury had been playing some kind of trick on me. What kind of author would make me have to learn about new characters and situations just when I was getting to know the old ones?
By the time I finished a time-travel tale called “A Sound of Thunder,” I understood: each story was like a whole book, but with the extra stuff taken out. It was as if the author had removed the vastness of space between the stars, leaving only the densely packed points of light.
Short stories are a view from a train window as you race by – no backstory or future; only what you see. They can end with an answer or a question. Or they can just end. The settings from the previous stories stay in your mind but are never again as immediate or insistent as the new ones that are taking their place.
I read as many of Ray Bradbury’s books as I could find, although I was not ready for much of what he wrote. After I figured out that the plots in the R is for Rocket stories were all separate, I encountered a group of stories that were linked together in The Martian Chronicles. The book is not quite a novel, but not quite a short-story collection. Reading this as a teenager I found it hard to understand the structure. I would have to be much older before that was possible.
Before I realized that it was also the structure of a life.
Do we really wish for a single plotline to last all our lives? Is it only children who believe in such continuity, or do we carry this longing through to adulthood? Surely things like happiness, adventure and heartbreak do not flow together in an unbroken stream but can flash by in disparate instances that exist for a moment and are gone. Love itself would have a hard time making a case for absolute constancy. What if life is a succession of scenes, to be absorbed by us, each one in its own time? Maybe at some point we will find a key to link them into a coherent plot. Maybe not.
Shortly after Joanie gave me the R Is for Rocket, my parents told me that we were moving away. I was devastated. I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else or going to any other school or having any other friends. I had been raised, taught, and protected by the community that surrounded me, and everything I knew and valued came from inside it. I did not want to leave.
But leave I did, and although in later years Joanie and I nodded at each other occasionally in the halls at high school, our childhood friendship did not survive. My adolescence was ragged and disappointing, and it took me down paths that led away from anything I could have imagined. Unlike the fictional Chris, I never got to rocket school.
And my friendship with Joanie became a strand of narrative woven somewhere into my collection. Those stories would not play out as a novel with one narrative arc, but as a cat’s cradle of plotlines and settings, each with new settings and characters to learn. Not a short story collection, not a novel, but something in between.
I had learned to read at an early age, and my mother partly credited the clunky mahogany box of our TV for this. Long before I started kindergarten I could recognize phrases such as “New and Improved,” “Better Tasting,” “Longer Lasting,” and the names of most of the major cigarette brands.
My favourite books were from Winston Science Fiction (no relation to the cigarette), a 1950s series for teenagers that featured novels by well-known writers and colourful cover art that looked realistic and fantastical at the same time. Although I was several years younger than Winston’s target audience, I read some of these books a dozen times, memorizing their plots and dreaming of the days when I too would fly through outer space.
I began reading my brand-new R is for Rocket book as soon as I got it home. It opened with the introduction of a young man, named Chris like me, who was about to leave home to go off to rocket school. I could hardly wait to see what was going to happen to Chris as he made his way into the space corps.
The second chapter shifted settings. There was no mention of Chris, only a conversation between two people whose son is taking off on a spaceship that evening. I was confused. Chris didn’t have two parents in the first chapter, just a mother. The third chapter was set in a lighthouse, a story told by the young lighthouse keeper’s assistant as they are attacked by a sea monster. Well, I thought, the young man must be Chris, but what was he doing in a lighthouse? What had happened to his rocket career? Maybe he was stranded on some watery planet, like Venus.
As I moved through the fourth chapter, a light was beginning to glow. I wasn’t reading just one story: each chapter was actually a totally different one. I would never find out what had happened to Chris. It felt like Mr. Bradbury had been playing some kind of trick on me. What kind of author would make me have to learn about new characters and situations just when I was getting to know the old ones?
By the time I finished a time-travel tale called “A Sound of Thunder,” I understood: each story was like a whole book, but with the extra stuff taken out. It was as if the author had removed the vastness of space between the stars, leaving only the densely packed points of light.
Short stories are a view from a train window as you race by – no backstory or future; only what you see. They can end with an answer or a question. Or they can just end. The settings from the previous stories stay in your mind but are never again as immediate or insistent as the new ones that are taking their place.
I read as many of Ray Bradbury’s books as I could find, although I was not ready for much of what he wrote. After I figured out that the plots in the R is for Rocket stories were all separate, I encountered a group of stories that were linked together in The Martian Chronicles. The book is not quite a novel, but not quite a short-story collection. Reading this as a teenager I found it hard to understand the structure. I would have to be much older before that was possible.
Before I realized that it was also the structure of a life.
Do we really wish for a single plotline to last all our lives? Is it only children who believe in such continuity, or do we carry this longing through to adulthood? Surely things like happiness, adventure and heartbreak do not flow together in an unbroken stream but can flash by in disparate instances that exist for a moment and are gone. Love itself would have a hard time making a case for absolute constancy. What if life is a succession of scenes, to be absorbed by us, each one in its own time? Maybe at some point we will find a key to link them into a coherent plot. Maybe not.
Shortly after Joanie gave me the R Is for Rocket, my parents told me that we were moving away. I was devastated. I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else or going to any other school or having any other friends. I had been raised, taught, and protected by the community that surrounded me, and everything I knew and valued came from inside it. I did not want to leave.
But leave I did, and although in later years Joanie and I nodded at each other occasionally in the halls at high school, our childhood friendship did not survive. My adolescence was ragged and disappointing, and it took me down paths that led away from anything I could have imagined. Unlike the fictional Chris, I never got to rocket school.
And my friendship with Joanie became a strand of narrative woven somewhere into my collection. Those stories would not play out as a novel with one narrative arc, but as a cat’s cradle of plotlines and settings, each with new settings and characters to learn. Not a short story collection, not a novel, but something in between.
