People ask me if I ever thought of writing a children's book. I say 'If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children's book' but otherwise the idea of being conscious of who you're directing the story to is anathema to me because in my view fiction is freedom and any restraints on that are intolerable.
Life is a very orderly thing but in fiction there is a huge liberation and freedom. I can do what I like. There's nothing that says I can't write a page of full stops. There is no 'should' involved although you wouldn't know that from literary reviews and critics.
I have more freedom when I write fiction but my memoirs have had a much stronger impact on my readers. Somehow the 'message ' even if I am not even aware that there is one is conveyed better in this form.
Fiction is such a world of freedom it's wonderful. If you want someone to fly they can fly.
More than fantasy or even science fiction Ray Bradbury wrote horror and like so many great horror writers he was himself utterly without fear of anything. He wasn't afraid of looking uncool - he wasn't scared to openly love innocence or to be optimistic or to write sentimentally when he felt that way.
A writer of fiction lives in fear. Each new day demands new ideas and he can never be sure whether he is going to come up with them or not.
As a novelist I mined my history my family and my memory but in a very specific way. Writing fiction I never made use of experiences immediately as they happened. I needed to let things fester in my memory mature and transmogrify into something meaningful.
I had passed through the entire British education system studying literature culminating in three years of reading English at Oxford and they'd never told me about something as basic as the importance of point of view in fiction!
They should hold themselves absolutely upon the immovable foundation of truth and nature whereby alone they can save themselves from misapprehensions and from the danger of being entirely carried away from reality into mere dreams and fictions.
And I grew up on a steady diet of science fiction especially apocalyptic and postapocalyptic fiction.