Zen in the Art of Writing (1973) (edit title/settings)

Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit see section history

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Characters/People edit see section history

• Muse: Add a description of this character.
• Lon Chaney
• Edgar Rice Burroughs
• John Houston

Quotes edit see section history

• “So I collected comics, fell in love with carnivals and World's Fairs and began to write. And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is gift and a privilege, not a right. We must earn life once it has been awarded us. Life asks for rewards back because it has favored us with animation. So while our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all. Second, writing is survival. Any art, any good work, of course, is that. Not to write, for many of us, is to die.”

  Ray Bradbury

• “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. For 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.”

  Ray Bradbury

• “Have you given up this primary business as obsolete in your own writing? 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. But on the way, in your work, why not carry those two inflated pig-bladders labeled Zest and Gusto.”

  Ray Bradbury

• “But along through those years I began to make lists of titles, to put down long lines of nouns. These lists were the provocations, finally, that caused my better stuff to surface. I was feeling my way toward something honest, hidden under the trapdoor on the top of my skull....But back to my lists. And why go back to them? Where am I leading you? Well, if you are a writer, or would hope to be one, similar lists, dredged out of the lopside of your brain, might well help you discover you, even as I flopped around and finally found me.”

  Ray Bradbury

• “We know how fresh and original is each man, even the slowest and dullest. If we come at him right, talk him along, and give him his head, and at last say, What do you want? . . . every man will speak his dream. And when a man talks from his heart, in his moment of truth, he speaks poetry.”

  Ray Bradbury

• “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 for 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. The Muse was suddenly there for Dad. The Truth lay easy in his mind. The Subconscious lay saying its say, untouched, and flowing off his tongue. As we must learn to do in our writing.”

  Ray Bradbury

• “What is the pattern that holds all this together? If I have fed my Muse on equal parts of trash and treasure, how have I come out at the farther end of life with what some people take to be acceptable stories? 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.”

  Ray Bradbury

• “To be a child of one's time is to do all these things. (Running after loves: simple textures to complex, naïve to informed, nonintellectual to intellectual; having an ever-roaming curiosity in all the arts: from bad radio to good theatre, from nursery rhyme to symphony.) 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.”

  Ray Bradbury

• “The Muse must have shape. You will write a thousand words a day for ten or twenty years in order to try to give it shape, to learn enough about grammar and story construction so that these become part of the Subconscious, without restraining or distorting the Muse.”

  Ray Bradbury

• “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 mad 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 type writer and preserve the inspiration for all time by putting it on paper.”

  Ray Bradbury

• “How did I begin? . . . I wrote a thousand words a day. For ten years I wrote at least one short story a week, somehow guessing that a day would finally come when I truly got out of the ways and let it happen. The day come in 1942 when I wrote "The Lake." Ten years of doing everything wrong suddenly became the right idea, the right scene, the right characters, the right day, the right creative time.”

  Ray Bradbury

• “I don't believe in tampering with any young writer's material, especially when that young writer was once myself.”

  Ray Bradbury

• “It is a lie to write in such a way as to be rewarded by money in the commercial market. It is a lie to write i such a way as to be rewarded by fame offered you by some snobbish quasi-literary group in the intellectual gazettes. . . The avant-garde liar kids himself he will be remember for his pedantic lie. The commercial liar, too, on his own level, kids himself that while he is slanting, it is only because the world is tilted; everyone walks like that.”

  Ray Bradbury

• “Work - (Do) something like this. One-thousand or two-thousand words every day for the next twenty years. At the start you might shoot for one short story a week. . . You will have to write and put away or burn a lot of material before you are comfortable in this medium. You might as well start now and get the necessary work done. For I believe that eventually quantity will make for quality. How so? Michelangelo's, da Vinci's, Tintoretto's billion sketches, the quantitative, prepared them for the qualitative, single sketches further down the line, single portraits, single landscapes of incredible control and beauty.”

• “A great surgeon dissects and re-dissects a thousand, ten thousand bodies, tissues, organs, preparing thus by quantity the time when quality will count—with a living creature under his knife. An athlete may run ten thousand miles in order to prepare for one hundred yards. 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.”

• “The artist must work so hard, so long, that a brain develops and lives, all of itself, in his fingers.”

• “Work then, hard work, prepares the way for the first stages of relaxation, when one begins to approach what Orwell might call Not think! As in learning to typewrite, a day comes when the single letters a-s-d-f and j-k-l-; give way to a flow of words. So we should not look down on work . . . To fail is to give up. But you are in the midst of a moving process. Nothing fails then. All goes on. Work is done. If good, you learn from it. If bad, you learn even more. Work done and behind you is a lesson to be studied. There is no failure unless one stops. Not to work is to cease, tighten up, become nervous, and therefore destructive of the creative process.”

• “Tenseness results from not knowing or giving up trying to know. Work, giving us experience, results in new confidence and eventually in relaxation. The type of dynamic relaxation again, as in sculpting, where the sculptor does not consciously have to tell his fingers what to do. The surgeon does not tell his scalpel what to do. . . Suddenly, a natural rhythm is achieved. The body thinks for itself.”

• “So again the three signs. Put them together any way you wish. Work Relaxation Don't Think Once separated out. Now, all three together in a process. For if one works, one finally relaxes and stops thinking. True creation occurs then and only then.”

• “He (the writer) must ask himself, "What do I really think of the world, what do I love, fear, hate?" and begin to pour this on paper. Then, through the emotions, working steadily, over a long period of time, his writing will clarify; he will relax because he thinks right and he will think ever righter because he relaxes. The two will become interchangeable. . . What are we trying to uncover in this flow? The one person irreplaceable to the world, of which there is no duplicate. You. As there was only one Shakespeare, Molière, Dr. Johnson, so you are that precious commodity, the individual man, the man we all democratically proclaim, but who, so often, gets lost, or loses himself, in the shuffle.”

• “How does one get lost? Through incorrect aims, as I have said. Through wanting literary fame too quickly. From wanting money too soon. If only we could remember, fame and money are gifts given us only after we have gifted the world with our best, our lonely, our individual truths. Now we must build our better mousetrap, heedless if a path is being beaten our door.”

• “There is only one type of story in the world. Your story. If you write your story it could possibly sell to any magazine.”

Setting & Locations edit see section history

• Illinois
• Ireland
• Mexico
• Rome
• Los Angeles
• Waukegan
• Dublin
• Byzantium

First Sentence edit see section history

Table of Contents edit see section history

Themes & Symbolism edit see section history

• Creative writing: Describe this theme.

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. Ray Bradbury (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: PN149 .B7
• Dewey: 808.02

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Reference › Writing › Writing Skills
• Books › Religion & Spirituality › New Age › Mysticism
• Books › Reference › Words & Language › Rhetoric
• Books › Religion & Spirituality › Occult

More Books Like This edit see section history