Zen in the Art of Writing

by Ray Bradbury

First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and a privilege, not a right.

We must earn life once it has been awarded us.

But what would happen is that the world would catch up with and try to sicken you. If you did not write every day, 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.

I won’t use the word ‘therapy,’ it’s too clean, too sterile a word. I only say when death slows others, you must leap to set up your diving board and dive head first into your typewriter.

Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine. The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces together. Now, it’s your turn. Jump!

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.

What are the best things and the worst things in your life, and when are you going to get around to whispering or shouting them?

The shoes were to him, the surge of antelope and gazelle on African summer veldt. The energy of unleashed rivers and summer storms lay in the shoes; he had to have them more than anything else in the world.

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.

Thomas Wolfe ate the world and vomited lava.

Dickens dined at a different table every hour of his life. Molière, tasting society, turned to pick up his scalpel, as did Pope and Shaw. Everywhere you look in the literary cosmos, the great ones are busy loving and hating.

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.

And when a man talks from his heart, in his moment of truth, he speaks poetry.

By living well, by observing as you live, by reading well and observing as you read, you have fed Your Most Original Self.

But, you see, 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.

In other words, if your boy is a poet, horse manure can only mean flowers to him; which is, of course, what horse manure has always been about.

The children guessed, if they did not whisper it, that all science fiction is an attempt to solve problems by pretending to look the other way.

So science fiction pretends at futures in order to cure sick dogs lying in today’s road.

Self-consciousness is the enemy of all art, be it acting, writing, painting, or living itself, which is the greatest art of all.