Zen in the Art of Writing

by Ray Bradbury

We use the grand and beautiful facts of existence in order to put up with the horrors that afflict us directly

the first thing a writer should be is—excited. He should be a thing of fevers and enthusiasms. Without such vigor, he might as well be out picking peaches or digging ditches; God knows it’d be better for his health.

The other six or seven drafts are going to be pure torture. So why not enjoy the first draft, in the hope that your joy will seek and find others in the world who, reading your story, will catch fire, too?

Look for the little loves, find and shape the little bitternesses. Savor them in your mouth, try them on your typewriter.

What fun you are missing, then. 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.

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.

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.

The Feeding of the Muse then, which we have spent most of our time on here, seems to me to be the continual running after loves, the checking of these loves against one’s present and future needs, the moving on from simple textures to more complex ones, from naïve ones to more informed ones, from nonintellectual to intellectual ones. 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 theatre, 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 be a child of one’s time is to do all these things. Do not, for money, turn away from all the stuff you have collected in a lifetime. Do not, for the vanity of intellectual publications, turn away from what you are—the material within you which makes you individual, and therefore indispensable to others. 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.

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.

By the time many people are fourteen or fifteen, they have been divested of their loves, their ancient and intuitive tastes, one by one, until when they reach maturity there is no fun left, no zest, no gusto, no flavor.

I am not seeing directly, that my subconscious is doing most of the “sponging” and it will be years before any usable impressions surface.

the Mechanical Hound, my robot clone of A. Conan Doyle’s great Baskerville beast.

isn’t that what life is all about, the ability to go around back and come up inside other people’s heads to look out at the damned fool miracle and say: oh, so that’s how you see it!? Well, now, I must remember that.

If you went into the average library as you motored across America in 1932, 1945, or 1953 you would have found: No Edgar Rice Burroughs. No L. Frank Baum and no Oz. In 1958 or 1962 you would have found no Asimov, no Heinlein, no Van Vogt, and, er, no Bradbury. Here and there, perhaps one book or two by the above. For the rest: a desert.

The kids sensed, if they could not speak it, that the first science-fiction writers were cavemen who were trying to figure out the first sciences—which were what? How to capture fire. What to do about that lout of a mammoth hanging around outside the cave. How to play dentist to the sabre-tooth tiger and turn him into a house-cat.

Indirection is everything. Metaphor is the medicine.

In the last five years I have borrowed or bought a good many European and American Idea Plays to read; I have watched the Absurd and the More-Than-Absurd Theater. In the aggregate I could not help but judge the plays as frail exercises, more often than not half-witted, but above all lacking in the prime requisites of imagination and ability. It is only fair, given this flat opinion, I should now put my own head on the chopping-block. You may, if you wish, be my executioners.

Literary history is filled with writers who, rightly or wrongly, felt they could tidy up, improve upon, or revolutionize a given field.

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. We build tensions toward violence, light the fuse, and run. We build the strange tensions of love, where so many of the other tensions mix to be modified and transcended, and allow that fruition in the mind of the audience. We build tensions, especially today, toward sickness and then, if we are good enough, talented enough, observant enough, allow our audiences to be sick. 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.

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.

Just day-to-day sitting and saying, “Instead of these six lines of dialogue, can’t you find a way of saying it with two?” He challenged me to go find a shorter way to say it; so I found it; so it was the indirect suggestion and the knowledge that he was backing me psychologically that was important.

If you can find the right metaphor, the right image, and put it in a scene, it can replace four pages of dialogue.

All of my short stories can be shot right off the page. Each paragraph is a shot.

We all think that at a certain time in our lives—don’t we?—when we discover books. We think in an emergency all you’ve got to do is open the Bible or Shakespeare or Emily Dickinson, and we think, “Wow! They know all the secrets.”

I never put up with anything from my ideas. You just slap them into place? As soon as things get difficult, I walk away. 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?”

Quantity gives experience. From experience alone can quality come. All arts, big and small, are the elimination of waste motion in favor of the concise declaration.

What we are trying to do is find a way to release the truth that lies in all of us.

He must ask himself, “What do I really think of the world, what do I love, fear, hate?” and begin to pour this on paper.

There is only one type of story in the world. Your story.

at heart, all good stories are the one kind of story, the story written by an individual man from his individual truth.

I don’t think, after this long article, I have to show you, here, the relationship between archery and the writer’s art. I have already warned against thinking on targets.

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. That is all Plot ever should be. It is human desire let run, running, and reaching a goal. It cannot be mechanical. It can only be dynamic.

additional reading to supplement what I have said, 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.

Your merest molecule is right and true. Look there for destinies indelible and fine And rare.

DOING IS BEING Doing is being. To have done’s not enough; To stuff yourself with doing—that’s the game. To name yourself each hour by what’s done, To tabulate your time at sunset’s gun And find yourself in acts You could not know before the facts You wooed from secret self, which much needs wooing, So doing brings it out, Kills doubt by simply jumping, rushing, running Forth to be The now-discovered me. To not do is to die, Or lie about and lie about the things You just might do some day. Away with that! Tomorrow empty stays If no man plays it into being With his motioned way of seeing. Let your body lead your mind— Blood the guide dog to the blind; So then practice and rehearse To find heart-soul’s universe, Knowing that by moving/seeing Proves for all time: Doing’s being!

We have our Arts so we won’t die of Truth.

Poe divining tides of blood Builds Ark of bone to sail the flood.