All my stories that are worth anything are based on some sort of personal metaphor.
When I was eight years old a little girl went into Lake Michigan, that I was playing with, and she never came out. What a mystery it was to hear about this thing called drowning, and death. And she stayed with me for 12, 13, 14 years, the memory of her disappearing into the lake. And when I was 22 I sat at the typewrite one day and remembered the story of this girl…
When I finished the short story I burst into tears. I realized that after ten years of writing I had finally written something beautiful.
I had turned a corner into my interior self. I wasn’t writing exterior stuff. I wasn’t writing for the right or the left or the in between. I was writing for me. And I discovered that was the way to go.
Ray Bradbury