Tribute to Mr. Ray Bradbury

I chose to write about a blog by Kasia Cieplak-Mayr von Baldegg, of the Atlantic, titled “Ray Bradbury Struggled for Years before He Got Famous.” The blog is a small tribute to Ray Bradbury, a great science fiction writer and author of the “The Martian Chronicles” and “Fahrenheit 451” who died recently. More importantly, the blog contains a 25 minute documentary video; a short biography where he talks about his thought process as he embarks on a project, and about his own philosophy on work.

I love reading biographies of great people who leave a “footprint” in my path. And Ray is, undoubtedly, one of them. Ray was a much disciplined man. At the age of 17 he already knew what he wanted to do. He was extremely focused, passionate, and excited about his work. He believed that we must be excited about what we do in order to succeed. And he meant it, in deed, the first and the second year of his career he made nothing; the third year he made 10 dollars. He continued to make a meager income and by the eleventh year he made 8,000 dollars. When asked about how he survived on such a small income, his answer was clever and swift, “Just get a part-time job! Anything that's half way decent! An usher in a theater ... unless you're a mad man, you can't make do in the art fields.”

Ray was fascinated by technology and of the contradiction it presents. He laments, for instance, that atomic energy beats cancer but also kills [humans], and airplanes carry passengers or bombs. In other words, there’s a darker side to technology – a side that much amused Ray. In fact, he says that he never starts out writing a story; it comes to him through observation and association – like during a walk or a ride by the river. Or what he likes to call, “giving the subconscious time to think.” It’s during one of those bike rides along the Venice that he observes a telephone box on the telephone network. And so he develops a plot for a story, “Dial Double Zero.” The plot is about a grating voice of an intelligent being that lives in the telephone network – almost like a computer virus that propagates when you call from an “infected” phone.

As we mourn Mr. Ray Bradbury, the take home lesson from this short video for me is: “It doesn’t have to be the greatest; it just has to be you.”

References:

Baldegg,. K., C., M. (2012). Ray Bradbury Struggled for Years before He Got Famous. Business Insider, Retrieved June 5, 2012, from http://www.businessinsider.com /financial-advice-for-struggling-artists-from-ray-bradbury-2012-6

Watch a 25 Minutes Video Documentary of Ray Bradbury