Zen in the Art of Writing

by Ray Bradbury

You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

They knew fun in their work. No matter if creation came hard here and there along the way, or what illnesses and tragedies touched their most private lives. The important things are those passed down to us from their hands and minds and these are full to bursting with animal vigor and intellectual vitality.

this: if you are writing without zest, without gusto, without love, without fun, you are only half a writer. It means you are so busy keeping one eye on the commercial market, or one ear peeled for the avant-garde coterie, that you are not being yourself. You don’t even know yourself.

How long has it been since you wrote a story where your real love or your real hatred somehow got onto the paper? When was the last time you dared release a cherished prejudice

What do you want more than anything else in the world? What do you love, or what do you hate? 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. The zest and gusto of his need, and there is zest in hate as well as in love, will fire the landscape and raise the temperature of your typewriter thirty degrees.

The fun of anger and disillusion, the fun of loving and being loved, of moving and being moved by this masked ball which dances us from cradle to churchyard. 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.

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.

How do you commence to start to begin an almost new kind of writing, to terrify and scare? You stumble into it, mostly. You don’t know what you’re doing, and suddenly, it’s done. You don’t set out to reform a certain kind of writing. It evolves out of your own life and night scares. Suddenly you look

around and see that you have done something almost fresh.

I finally figured out that if you are going to step on a live mine, make it your own.

want?) every man will speak his dream. And when a man talks from his heart, in his moment of truth, he speaks poetry.

Not in the first minute, or the second, or the third minute, no, did the thing happen to Dad’s voice, did the right cadence come, or the right words. But after he had talked five or six minutes and got his pipe going, quite suddenly the old passion was back, the old days, the old tunes, the weather, the look of the sun, the sound of the voices, the boxcars

traveling late at night, the jails, the tracks narrowing to golden dust behind, as the West opened up before – all, all of it, and the cadence there, the moment, the many moments of truth, and, therefore, poetry.

As we can learn from every man or woman or child around us when, touched and moved, they tell of something they loved or hated this day, yesterday, or some other day long past.

And they were all, when their souls grew warm, poets.

If it seems I’ve come the long way around, perhaps I have. But I wanted to show what we all have in us, that it has always been there, and so few of us bother to notice.

How strange – we’re so busy looking out, to find ways and means, ...

Don’t force yourself too hard. Take it easy.

Every time you hear an echo from your Subconscious, you know yourself a little better.

In your reading, find books to improve your color sense, your sense of shape and size in the world.

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.

Of course. 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. Here again, don’t let the snobbery of others prevent you from reading Kipling, say, while no one else is reading him.

Ours is a culture and a time immensely rich in trash as it is in treasures.

I believe one thing holds it all together. Everything I’ve ever done was done with excitement, because I wanted to do it, because I loved doing it.

At thirty, Melville discovered, and Thomas Wolfe lost. The constant remains: the search, the finding, the admiration, the love, the honest response to materials at hand, no matter how shabby they one day seem, when looked back on.

Nothing is ever lost. If you have moved over vast territories and dared to love silly things, you will have learned even from the most primitive items collected and put aside in your life.

From an ever-roaming curiosity in all the arts, from bad radio to good theater, from nursery rhyme to symphony, from jungle compound to Kafka’s Castle, there is basic excellence to be winnowed out, truths found, kept, savored, and used on some later day.

To feed your Muse, then, you should always have been hungry about life since you were a child. If not, it is a little late to start. Better late than never, of course. Do you feel up to it?

It means you must still take long walks at night around your city or town, or walks in the country by day. And long walks, at any time, through bookstores and libraries. And while feeding, How to Keep Your Muse is our final problem.

By living well, by observing as you live, by reading well and observing as you read, you have fed Your Most Original Self. By training yourself in writing, by repetitious exercise, imitation, good example, you have made a clean, well-lighted place to keep the Muse. You have given her, him, it, or whatever, room to turn around in. And through training, you have relaxed yourself enough not to stare discourteously when inspiration comes into the room. You have learned to go immediately to the typewriter and preserve the inspiration for all time by putting it on paper.

Look at yourself then. Consider everything you have fed yourself over the years. Was it a banquet or a starvation diet?

And finally, have you trained well enough so you can say what you want to say without getting hamstrung? Have you written enough so that you are relaxed and can allow the truth to get out without being ruined by self-conscious posturings or changed by a desire to become rich?

And I decided to become a writer. And between the decision and the reality lay eight years of junior high school, high school, and selling newspapers on a street corner in Los Angeles, while I wrote three million words.

needed that approval. We all need someone higher, wiser, older to tell us we’re not crazy after all, that what we’re doing is all right. All right, hell, fine!

On Monday morning I wrote the first draft of a new story. On Tuesday I did a second draft. On Wednesday a third. On Thursday a fourth. On Friday a fifth. And on Saturday at noon I mailed out the sixth and final draft to New York. Sunday? I thought about all the wild ideas scrambling for my attention, waiting under the attic lid, confident at last that, because of ‘The Lake’, I would soon let them out.

You know exhilarations. You can’t sleep at night, because your beast-creature ideas want out and turn you in your bed. It is a grand way to live.

Self-consciousness is the enemy of all art, be it acting, writing, painting, or living itself, which is the greatest art of all. Here’s how my theory goes. We writers are up to the following:

We build tensions toward laughter, then give permission, and laughter comes. We build tensions toward sorrow, and at last say cry, and hope to see our audience in tears.

Not to know this is not to know the essence of creativity, which, at heart, is the essence of man’s being.

Tell me no pointless jokes. I will laugh at your refusal to allow me laughter. Build me no tension toward tears and refuse me my lamentations. I will go find me better wailing walls. Do not clench my fists for me and hide the target. I might strike you, instead. Above all, sicken me not unless you show me the way to the ship’s rail.

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.

I ask for no happy endings. I ask only for proper endings based on proper assessments of energy contained and given detonation.

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.

From now on I hope always to stay alert, to educate myself as best I can. But, lacking this, in future I will relaxedly turn back to my secret mind to see what it has observed when I thought I was sitting this one out.

We never sit anything out. We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves ov...

I do wish to run, seize this greatest time in all the history of man to be alive, stuff my senses with it, eye it, touch it, listen to it, smell it, taste it, and hope that others will run with me, pursuing and pursued by ideas and ideas-made machines.

Everything. The main thing is compression.

Now, I would like to believe that everyone reading this article is not interested in those two forms of lying.