Zen in the Art of Writing

by Ray Bradbury

All arts, big and small, are the elimination of waste motion in favor of the concise declaration. The artist learns what to leave out. The surgeon knows how to go directly to the source of trouble, how to avoid wasted time and complications. The athlete learns how to conserve power and apply it now here, now there, how to utilize this muscle, rather than that. Is the writer different? I think not. His greatest art will often be what he does not say, what he leaves out, his ability to state simply with clear emotion, the way he wants to go. The artist must work so hard, so long, that a brain develops and lives, all of itself, in his fingers. So with the surgeon whose hand at last, like the hand of da Vinci, must sketch lifesaving designs on the flesh of man. So with the athlete whose body at last is educated and becomes, of itself, a mind. By work, by quantitative experience, man releases himself from obligation to anything but the task at hand.