Zen in the Art of Writing: Essays on Creativity by Ray BradburyWhat is creativity?
How is a story born, germinated and cultivated before it is jotted down on a notebook’s page?
What is a writer’s life like?
This book embodies the answers to questions like these, in a melodious manner!
Zen In the Art of Writing is a beautiful book brimming with nostalgia of the golden summers and darkness of the eerie thing at the top of the stairs. Chapters flow and drift and pulsate with raw enthusiasm and passion towards art of words.
The book is organized in twelve generous chapters - a collection of creative essays peppered with snippets of memoir and plenty of zest, gusto.
Here are the pointers and quotes I extracted from reading the book. Read on!
#1 WRITE WITH ZEST & GUSTO
• Zest. Gusto. How rarely one hears these words used. How rarely do we see people living, or for that matter, creating by them. Yet if I were asked about the most important items in a writer’s make-up, the things that shape his material and rush him along the road to where he wants to go, I could only warn him to look at his zest, see to his gusto.
• If you are writing without zest, without gusto, without love, without fun, you are only half a writer.
• For the first thing a writer should be is - excited. He should be a thing of fevers and enthusiasms.
• Life is short, misery sure, mortality certain. But on the way in your work, why not carry those two inflated pig bladders labeled zest and gusto.
#2 WRITE DIRECT WITHOUT THINKING
• Run fast, stand still. This, the lesson from lizards. For all writers. Observe almost any survival creature, you see the same. Jump, run, freeze. In the ability to flick like an eyelash, crack like a whip, vanish like steam, here this instant, gone the next – life teems on earth.
• In quickness is truth. The faster you blurt, the more swiftly you write, the more honest you are. In hesitation is thought. In delay comes the effort for a style, instead of leaping upon truth which is the only style worth deadfalling or tiger-trapping.
• Run fast, leap up, turn on the light, but whatever you do, don’t look up. If you look up before you get the light on, it will be there. The Thing. The terrible Thing waiting at the top of the stairs. So run, blind; don’t look.
#3 WRITE DAILY
o We must take arms each and every day, perhaps knowing that the battle cannot be entirely won, but fight we must, if only a gentle bout. The smallest effort to win means, at the end of each day, a sort of victory.
o Remember that pianist who said that if he did not practice every day, he would know, if he did not practice for two days, the critics would know, after three days, his audiences would know.
A variation of this is true for writers. Not that your style, whatever that is, would melt out of shape in those few days.
But what would happen is that the world would catch up with and try to sicken you. If you did not write everyday, the poisons would accumulate and you would begin to die, or act crazy, or both.
You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.
o I wrote at least a thousand words a day every day from the age of twelve on.
o For ten years I wrote one short story a week, somehow guessing that a day would finally come when I truly got out of the way and let it happen.
#4 WORD ASSOCIATIONS
o It was only when I began to discover the treats and tricks that came with word association that I began to find some true way through the minefields of imitation. I finally figured out that if you’re going to step on a live mine, make it your own. Be blown up, as it were, by your own delights and despairs.
o In my early twenties I floundered into a word-association process in which I simply got out of bed each morning, walked to my desk, and put down any word or series of words that happened along in my head.
o I would then take arms against the word, or for it, and bring on an assortment of characters to weigh the word and show me its meaning in my own life. An hour or two hours later, to my amazement, a new story would be finished and done. The surprise was total and lovely. I soon found that I would have to work this way for the rest of my life.
o First I rummaged my mind for words that could describe my personal nightmares, fears of night and time from my childhood, and shaped stories from these.
o I began to put down brief notes and descriptions of loves and hates... I circled around summer noons and October midnights, sensing that there somewhere in the bright and dark seasons must be something that was really me.
#5 MAKE LISTS OF NOUNS & ADJECTIVES
o Along through those years, I began to make lists of titles, to put down long lines of nouns. These lists were the provocations, finally, that caused my better stuff to surface. I was feeling my way towards something honest, hidden under the trapdoor on top of my skull.
o I was beginning to see a pattern in the list, in these words that I had simply flung forth on paper, trusting my subconscious to give bread, as it were, to the birds.
o I went on making lists, having to do not only with night, nightmares, darkness, and objects in attics, but the toys that men play with in space, and the ideas I found in detective magazines.
o I began to run through those lists, pick a noun, and then sit down to write a long prose-poem essay on it. Somewhere along the middle of the page, or perhaps on the second page, the prose-poem would turn into a story.
o It began to be obvious that I was learning from my lists of nouns, and that I was further learning that my characters would do my work for me, if I let them alone, if I gave them their heads, which is to say, their fantasiesm their frights.
o And the stories began to burst, to explode from my memories, hidden in the nouns, lost in the lists.
I leave you now at the bottom of your own stair, at half after midnight, with a pad, a pen and a list to be made. Conjure the nouns, alert the secret self, taste the darkness. Your own Thing stands waiting way up there in the attic shadows. If you speak softly, and write any old word that wants to jump out of your nerves onto the page…
#6 WRITING A STORY
• The history of each story, should read like a weather report: Hot today, cool tomorrow. This afternoon, burn down the house. Tomorrow, pour cold critical water upon the simmering coals.
• My stories have led me through my life. They shout, I follow. They run up and bite me on the leg—I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go, and runs off.
That is the kind of life I've had. Drunk, and in charge of a bicycle
• All good stories are one kind of story, the story written by an individual man from his individual truth.
• Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations. Plot is observed after the fact rather than before. It cannot precede action. It is the chart that remains when an action is through
#7 CREATING CHARACTERS
Find a character like yourself, who will want something, or not want something, with all his heart. Give him running orders. Shoot him off. Then follow as fast as you can go. The character, in his great love, or hate, will rush you through to the end of the story.
#8 PERSONAL OBSERVATION
o It is the personal observation, the odd fancy, the strange conceit that pays off.
#9 FEEDING THE MUSE
o It is my contention that is order to Keep a Muse, you must first offer food. How can you feed something that isn’t yet there is a little hard to explain…
o The fact is simple enough. Throughout a lifetime by ingesting food and water, we build cells, we grow, we become larger, and more substantial. That which was not, is. The process is undetectable. It can be viewed only as intervals along the way. We know it is happening, but we don’t quite know, how or why.
o Similarly, in a lifetime, we stuff ourselves with sounds, sights, smells, tastes, and textures of people, animals, landscapes, events, large and small. We stuff ourselves with these impressions and experiences and our reaction to them. Into our subconscious go not only factual data but reactive data, our movement toward or away from the sensed events.
o These are the stuffs, the foods, on which The Muse grows. This is the storehouse, the file, to which we must return every waking hour to check reality against memory, and in sleep to check memory against memory, which means ghost against ghost, in order to exorcise them, if necessary.
o What is The Subconscious to every other man, in its creative aspect becomes, for writers, The Muse. They are two names for one thing. But no matter what we call it, here is the core of the individual we pretend to extol, to whom we build shrines and hold lip services in our democratic society. Here is the stuff of originality. For it is in the totality of experience reckoned with, filed, and forgotten, that each man is truly different from all others in the world. For no man sees the same events in the same order, in his life. One man sees death younger than another, one man knows love more quickly than another.
o My muse has grown out of a mulch of good, bad and indifferent.
#10 GETTING IDEAS
o When people ask me where I get my ideas, I laugh. How strange – we’re so busy looking out, to find ways and means, we forget to look in.
#11 WHAT TO READ?
• Read poetry every day of your life
o Read poetry every day of your life. Poetry is good because it flexes muscles you don't use often enough. Poetry expands the senses and keeps them in prime condition. It keeps you aware of your nose, your eye, your ear, your tongue, your hand. And, above all, poetry is compacted metaphor or simile. Such metaphors, like Japanese paper flowers, may expand outward into gigantic shapes. Ideas lie everywhere through the poetry books,
• Read books of essays
o Here again, pick and choose, amble along the centuries
o You are, in effect, dropping stones down a well. Every time you hear an echo from your Subconscious, you know yourself a little better. A small echo may start an idea. A big echo may result in a story
o In your reading, find books to improve your color sense, your sense of shape and size in the world.
o Why all this insistence on the senses? Because in order to convince your reader that he is there, you must assault each of his senses, in turn, with color, sound, taste, and texture. If your reader feels the sun on his flesh, the wind fluttering his shirt sleeves, half your fight is won. The most improbable tales can be made believable, if your reader, through his senses, feels certain that he stands at the middle of events. He cannot refuse, then, to participate
• Read those authors who write the way you hope to write, those who think the way you would like to think. But also read those who do not think as you think or write as you want to write, and so be stimulated in directions you might not take for many years
#12 HOW MANY BOOKS TO READ?
• "I ate them like salad, books were my sandwich for lunch, my tiffin and dinner and midnight munch. I tore out the pages, ate them with salt, doused them with relish, gnawed on the bindings, turned the chapters with my tongue! Books by the dozen, the score and the billion. I carried so many home I was hunchbacked for years. Philosophy, art history, politics, social science, the poem, the essay, the grandiose play, you name 'em, I ate 'em. And then . . . and then . . ."
#13 ON UNHEALTHY CRITICISM
• l have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room.
#14 FINDING THE MULTIPLE SELVES THROUGH WRITING
• From the time I was twelve until I was twenty-two or -three, I wrote stories long after midnight— unconventional stories of ghosts and haunts and things in jars that I had seen in sour armpit carnivals, of friends lost to the tides in lakes, and of consorts of three in the morning, those souls who had to fly in the dark in order not to be shot in the sun.
• There are one hundred stories from almost forty years of my life contained in my collected stories. They contain half the damning truths I suspected at midnight, and half of the saving truths I re-found next noon. If anything is taught here, it is simply the charting of the life of someone who started out to somewhere—and went. I have not so much thought my way through life as done things and found what, it was and who I was after the doing. Each tale was a way of finding selves. Each self found each day slightly different from the one found twenty-four hours earlier.
#15 ON SURPRISES
o I began to learn the nature of such surprises, thank God, when I was fairly young as a writer. Before that, like every beginner, I thought you could beat, pummel, and thrash an idea into existence. Under such treatment, of course, any decent idea folds up its paws, turns on its back, fixes its eyes on eternity, and dies.
o I came on the old and best ways of writing through ignorance and experiment and was startled when truths leaped out of bushes like quail before gunshot. I blundered into creativity as blindly as any child learning to walk and see. I learned to let my senses and my Past tell me all that was somehow true.
#16 METAPHORS
o Every story is a metaphor.
o Indirection is everything. Metaphor is the medicine.
#17 BE THE KEEPER OF YOUR THEATRE OF IDEAS
o We are all science-fictional children dreaming ourselves into new ways of survival. We are the reliquaries of all time. Instead of putting saints' bones by in crystal and gold jars, to be touched by the faithful in the following centuries, we put by voices and faces, dreams and impossible dreams on tape, on records, in books, on tv, in films. Man the problem solver is that only because he is the Idea Keeper.
o The time, indeed is theatrical. It is full of craziness, wildness, brilliance, inventiveness; it both exhilarates and depresses. It says either too much or too little.
o That's the great secret of creativity. You treat ideas like cats: you make them follow you. If you try to approach a cat and pick it up, hell, it won't let you do it. You've got to say, "Well, to hell with you." And the cat says, "Wait a minute. He's not behaving the way most humans do." Then the cat follows you out of curiosity: "Well, what's wrong with you that you don't love me?"
#18 DO NOT WRITE WITH SELF CONSCIOUSNESS
o To try to know beforehand is to freeze and kill.
Self-consciousness is the enemy of all art, be it acting, writing, painting, or living itself, which is the greatest art of all.
o Each tension seeks its own proper end, release, and relaxation.
No tension, it follows, aesthetically as well as practically, must be built which remains unreleased. Without this, any art ends incomplete, halfway to its goal. And in real life, as we know, the failure to relax a particular tension can lead to madness.
o For, please understand, if you poison me, I must be sick.
And only by being truly sick is that one can regain health.
Teach me how to be sick then, in the right time and place, so that I may again walk in the fields and with the wise and smiling dogs know enough to chew sweet grass
o I ask for no happy endings. I ask only for proper endings based on proper assessments of energy contained and given detonation.
o I was rich and didn't know it. We all are rich and ignore the buried fact of accumulated wisdom.
So again and again my stories and my plays teach me, remind me, that I must never doubt myself, my gut, my ganglion, or my Ouija subconscious again
#19 ON EDITING
o I've tried to teach my writing friends that there are two arts: number one, getting a thing done; and then, the second great art is learning how to cut it so you don't kill it or hurt it in any way. When you start out life as a writer, you hate that job, but now that I'm older it's turned into a wonderful game, and I love the challenge just as much as writing the original, because it's a challenge. It's an intellectual challenge to get a scalpel and cut the patient without killing.
o The main thing is compression. It really isn't cutting so much as learning metaphor—and this is where my knowledge of poetry has been such a help to me. There's a relationship between the great poems of the world and the great screenplays: they both deal in compact images. If you can find the right metaphor, the right image, and put it in a scene, it can replace four pages of dialogue.
#20 ZEN IN THE ART OF WRITING
• The mantra is: WORK RELAXATION DON’T THINK
And work itself, after awhile, takes on a rhythm. The mechanical begins to fall away. The body begins to take over. The guard goes down. What happens then?
RELAXATION
And then the men are happily following my last advice:
DON'T THINK
• It can be done. It is done, every day of every week of every year. Athletes do it. Painters do it. Mountain climbers do it. Zen Buddhists with their little bows and arrows do it.
#21 QUANTITY OVER QUALITY
o One-thousand or two-thousand words every day for the next twenty years. At the start, you might shoot for one short story a week, fifty-two stories a year, for five years. You will have to write and put away or burn a lot of material before you are comfortable in this medium. You might as well start now and get the necessary work done.
For I believe that eventually quantity will make for quality.
o Quantity gives experience. From experience alone can quality come.
o The artist must work so hard, that a brain develops and lives, all of itself, in his fingers.
o There is no failure unless one stops. Not to work is to cease, tighten up, become nervous and therefore destructive of the creative process.
o Let the world burn through you. Throw the prism light white hot on paper.
#22 HOW MUCH IMITATION?
o Work and imitation go together in the process of learning. It is only when imitation outruns its natural function that a man prevents his becoming truly creative. Some writers will take years, some a few months, before they come upon the truly original story in themselves.
Ending with a lovely quote from the book:
“We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled.
The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.”
