Bradbury Speaks

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About Writing

My Demon, Not Afraid of Happiness (undated)

I have a strange and incredible muse that, unseen, has engulfedme during my lifetime. I have renamed my muse. In a FrederickSeidel poem, I found a perfect replacement, where he tells of"A Demon not afraid of happiness."

This perfectly describes the Demon that sits now on oneshoulder, now on the other, and whispers things that no oneelse hears.

My Demon warned me one night years ago when I sawsome glum theater at UCLA. Later I said to the director, "Youwant me to stick my wet finger in a wall socket for electrocution.Instead I will screw a brighter bulb in the same socket andlight the room."

So my Demon warned me off such encounters and providedinvisible material for my future life.

Dandelion Wine, for example, began as an essay in Gourmet magazine in 1953, and over the years my Demon tripped me,sprawling, into a novel to be read in American schools.

On my twenty-fourth birthday, I discovered Winesburg,Ohio, which is indeed not a novel but a short-story collectionby Sherwood Anderson. How fine, I thought, if someday Icould birth similar grotesques to inhabit Mars.

My Demon, provoked, secretly made travel plans to landfallMars, live there, and arrive at an unplanned novel, The MartianChronicles.

Green Shadows, White Whale resulted from my life in Ireland,when for eight months I wrote the screenplay of MobyDick for John Huston. At the time I thought I was not spongingin any of the green atmosphere or the characters of sad andbeautiful Ireland. But then one night, a year later, a voice spokein my head and said, "Ray, darlin'."And I said, "Who's that?"The voice said, "It's Nick, your cabdriver. Remember all thosenights of my driving you back from Kilcock to Dublin and describingthe mist and the fog and the rain along the way? Doyou remember that, Ray?""Yes," I said.Then the voice said withthe voice of my Demon, "Would you get up and put thatdown?"I got up, surprised, and went to my typewriter and beganto write a series of poems, essays, and one-act plays that fi-nally shared a San Francisco theater with Sean O'Casey.

Twenty years passed with more essays, poems, and stories,and I woke one morn to find in that litter Green Shadows,White Whale, a novel, complete and intact.

A short tale, "The Black Ferris,"melded itself into a screenplayfor Gene Kelly, and when Kelly couldn't find the moneyfor the film, I spent three years turning the screenplay into thenovel Something Wicked This Way Comes.

Then at last there is my late-on offspring From the Dust Returned,commenced when I drew skeletons, age six, to scare mycousins, continued in secret when I helped redecorate mygrandparents' house with Halloween broomsticks, and endedwith a gothic story, "Homecoming,"rejected by Weird Tales asneedful of Marley's ghost and lacking Poe. I sold the story toMademoiselle, and over the years it grew in rain and mist andarrived in fogs as a novel just last year.

What we have here, then, is a very unusual approach to writingand discovering, not knowing the outcome. To move ahead on a blind journey, running fast, putting down thoughts as theyoccur.

And along the way my inner voice advised:

If you must write of assassinations, rapes, and Ophelia suicides,speak the speech, I pray thee, poetry in your breath,metaphors on your tongue. Remember how glad Iago was tothink on Othello's fall. How, with smiles, Hamlet prepared hisuncle's death.

Shakespeare and my Demon schooled me so: Be not afraidof happiness. It is often the soul of murder.

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Excerpted from Bradbury Speaks: Too Soon from the Cave, Too Far from the Stars by Ray Bradbury
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