I had lunch with the great Ray Bradbury on the Disney lot in ’84, a week or two before the debut of Something Wicked This Way Comes. (The chat was facilitated by veteran Disney publicist Howard Green.) I especially recall Bradbury talking about how writing was pure joy to him, and how banging out three or four pages was always the high point of his day.
“Pure joy?,” I remember saying to myself. “In what parallel universe?” Doing HE is actually fun most of the time, and when it isn’t it’s not too difficult. But in the bad old typewriter days I equated writing with digging ditches. “I don’t care how successful Bradbury is,” I muttered. “Is he taking…what, happiness pills? Writing is pain. He’s just spewing.”
