Zen in the Art of Writing

by Ray Bradbury

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. For writing allows just the proper recipes of truth, life, reality as you are able to eat, drink, and digest without hyperventilating and flopping like a dead fish in your bed.

“King of the Grey Spaces,”

Death Is a Lonely Business.

“The Jar,”

Along the way, he gave me a copy of Winesburg, Ohio, by Sherwood Anderson. Finishing the book, I said to myself, “Someday I would like to write a novel laid on the planet Mars, with somewhat similar people.”

We might start off by paraphrasing Oscar Wilde’s poem, substituting the word “Art” for “Love.” Art will fly if held too lightly, Art will die if held too tightly, Lightly, tightly, how do I know Whether I’m holding or letting Art go? For “Art” substitute, if you wish, “Creativity” or “The Subconscious” or “Heat” or whatever your own word is for what happens when you spin like a firewheel

So, too, with our Muse. If we focus beyond her, she regains her poise, and stands out of the way. It is my contention that in order to Keep a Muse, you must first offer food. How you can feed something that isn’t yet there is a little hard to explain. But we live surrounded by paradoxes. One more shouldn’t hurt us.

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.

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.

I went back to collecting Buck Rogers. My life has been happy ever since. For that was the beginning of my writing science fiction. Since then, I 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.

“McGillahee’s Brat”

“The Terrible Conflagration up at the Place.”

“The Lake.”

“The Picasso Summer”

“The Parrot Who Met Papa.”

“Back in 1944, I was so impressed by Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, that I told myself I must try to write something half as good, and set it on Mars.

The children sensed, if they could not speak, that the entire history of mankind is problem solving, or science fiction swallowing ideas, digesting them, and excreting formulas for survival. You can’t have one without the other. No fantasy, no reality. No studies concerning loss, no gain. No imagination, no will. No impossible dreams: No possible solutions.

Do we want the stars? We can have them. Can we borrow cups of fire from the sun? We can and must and light the world. Everywhere we look: problems. Everywhere we further deeply look: solutions. The children of men, the children of time, how can they not be fascinated with these challenges? Thus: science fiction and its recent history.

I hope we will not get too serious here, for seriousness is the Red Death if we let it move too freely amongst us. Its freedom is our prison and our defeat and death. A good idea should worry us like a dog. We should not, in turn, worry it into the grave, smother it with intellect, pontificate it into snoozing, kill it with the death of a thousand analytical slices.

I came home via Sicily and Italy where I had baked myself free of the Irish winter, assuring one and all, “I’ll write nothing ever about the Connemara Lightfoots and the Donnybrook Gazelles.”

Aldous Huxley’s “The Education of an Amphibian” in his book, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow.

And, a really fine book, Dorothea Brande’s Becoming A Writer; published many years ago, but detailing many of the ways a writer can find out who he is and how to get the stuff of himself out on paper, often through word-association.

Know only Real? Fall dead. So Nietzsche said. We have our Arts so we won’t die of Truth. The World is too much with us. The Flood stays on beyond the Forty Days.