Zen in the Art of Writing: Essays on Creativity is a collection of essays written by Ray Bradbury on the topic of writing. He describes his creative process and gives background on how several of his stories came to exist. A balanced mixture of biography and instruction, this book has a lot to offer in terms of lessons you can incorporate into your own writing.
You might notice that there are a lot of quotes below. For several topics, Bradbury gives an excellent explanation, so I have opted to share more quotes where it seemed appropriate (particularly lesson #6 and onward). I did this with the intention of allowing Bradbury to explain exactly what he means, rather than paraphrasing things that already made perfect sense in the original. If you find this post a little too quote heavy, please let me know in the comments below so that I can adjust for future posts!
Here are 12 lessons I learned from Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury:
1. Write as often as you can.
Remember that pianist who said that if he did not practice every day he would know, if he did not practice for two days, the critics would know, after three days, his audiences would know. A variation of this is true for writers.
In the preface to this book, Bradbury states that you should write every day.
Now, I’m tempted to disagree with this particular statement. I don’t believe that it is imperative to write every single day, but I do believe that you should dedicate time each week to writing. It can be a couple of hours on a Saturday morning if that is all you can afford. Or, it can be a half hour here and 15 minutes there, if that’s what fits best into your schedule. Some writers wake up an hour earlier to write. I think the main point here is to write consistently. Carve out time when it works for you and just do it (don’t let your dreams be dreams).
2. Learn from your previous work.
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… Quantity gives experience. From experience alone can quality come.
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.
There is no substitute for practice. Over time you will learn what to leave out and what to keep in. You will learn how to make your writing flow. You will find your unique style. You will make mistakes and learn what to avoid, and you will write excellent pieces and learn what worked well.
I’ve always found that I learn better from making my own mistakes rather than solely learning from the mistakes of others. Yes, learning from the mistakes of others can save you time, but it’s less personal not nearly as impactful. When you make your own mistakes, you can also look back at your progress and see how far you’ve come, which goes a long way toward validating your efforts.
3. Write with zest and gusto.
So, simply then, here is my formula. 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.
Bradbury encourages us to write about our loves and hates, as these are passionate and will fuel your story (or essay, or article). In fiction, your character needs to have a raison d’être, whether it be something you relate to or something you’ve concocted specifically for your character. Their love/hate will form part of their motivation, which will propel the plot forward.
4. When writing your first draft, don’t edit. Just write.
The history of each story, then, should read almost like a weather report: Hot today, cool tomorrow. This afternoon, burn down the house. Tomorrow, pour cold critical water upon the simmering coals. Time enough to think and cut and rewrite tomorrow. But today—explode—fly apart—disintegrate! 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?
Bradbury reminds us that a first draft is just that—a first draft.
There will be plenty of time to cut and edit later. When putting your story on paper for the first time, just write and follow where it takes you. Enjoy the first draft, for you only get to write it once.
5. Write quickly.
What can writers learn from lizards, lift from birds? In quickness is truth. 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.
When you write quickly, without overthinking, you’re more original. If you hesitate, if you overthink, then you will hamper your creativity. You might find yourself distracted by how things sound rather than what you are actually saying. Say exactly what you mean first, then go back and tweak it afterwards.
As I touched on above, there’s a reason why it’s called a first draft. It’s much easier to refine and cut things out once they are on the page than it is to pluck fresh ideas out of thin air. So pluck while you can, and do so fast enough that you don’t get distracted from your truth.
We’ll expand on this point in lesson #12.
As I mentioned before, from here on out it gets a little bit more quote-heavy, so take a quick break if you need it!
These next lessons are also some of the more meaningful ones in my opinion, so get ready to take notes.
6. Feed your subconscious (aka, your muse).
Through a lifetime, by ingesting food and water, we build cells, we grow, we become larger and more substantial. That which was not, is. The process is undetectable. It can be viewed only at intervals along the way. We know it is happening, but we don’t know quite how or why. Similarly, in a lifetime, we stuff ourselves with sounds, sights, smells, tastes, and textures of people, animals, landscapes, events, large and small. We stuff ourselves with these impressions and experiences and our reaction to them. Into our subconscious go not only factual data but reactive data, our movement toward or away from the sensed events. These are the stuffs, the foods, on which The Muse grows.
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 naive ones to more informed ones, 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, … there is basic excellence to be winnowed out, truths found, kept, savoured, and used on some later day.
From now on I hope always to stay alert, to educate myself as best I can. But, lacking this, in future I will relaxedly turn back to my secret mind to see what it has observed when I thought I was sitting this one out. We never sit anything out. We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled. The trick is, knowing how to tip ourselves over and let the beautiful stuff out.
I was rich and didn’t know it. We all are rich and ignore the buried fact of accumulated wisdom.
I was gathering images all of my life, storing them away, and forgetting them. Somehow I had to send myself back, with words as catalysts, to open the memories out and see what they had to offer… I learned to let my senses and my Past tell me all that was somehow true… Once I learned to keep going back and back again to those times, I had plenty of memories and sense impressions to play with.
“How to Keep and Feed a Muse” might be one of my favourite essays of the bunch, which is why I’ve selected so many quotes for this particular lesson. They are all simply so wonderful that I couldn’t bear to cut any of them out.
In this essay, Bradbury writes that we feed our subconscious (our muse) with experiences that turn into memories to be accessed at a later date, especially when we use word association (see lesson #8).
Experiences need not just be those we conventionally think of, such as life experiences, but can also comprise books and film—he calls the former “events that have happened to us”, and the latter “forced feeding”. While “forced feeding” certainly has a negative connotation, Bradbury doesn’t come to a conclusion in his essay regarding which is superior.
I don’t see anything wrong with “forced feeding” since that’s essentially what I am doing here—spooning a healthy helping (or 12) of writing advice into your mouth for you to chew on. Hopefully you swallow some of it, but if you spit it back out, I won’t take offence.
Bradbury might roll over in his grave though.
7. Read poetry, essays, short stories, and/or novels every day.
If we are going to diet our subconscious, how prepare the menu? Well, we might start our list like this: Read poetry every day of your life. Poetry is good because it flexes muscles you don’t use often enough… And, above all, poetry is compacted metaphor or simile… Ideas lie everywhere through the poetry books, yet how rarely have I heard short story teachers recommending them for browsing.
In these cases, and dozens of others, I have had a metaphor jump at me, give me a spin, and run me off to do a story.*
In your reading, find books to improve your color sense, your sense of shape and size in the world. Why not learn about the senses of smell and hearing? Your characters must sometimes use their noses and ears or they may miss half the smells and sounds of the city, and all of the sounds of the wilderness still loose in the trees and on the lawns of the city.
Why all this insistence on the senses? Because 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. He cannot refuse, then, to participate…
Poetry, essays. What about short stories, novels? Of course. Read those authors who write the way you hope to write, those who think the way you would like to think. But also read those who do not think as you think or write as you want to write, and so be stimulated in directions you might not take for many years.
Beyond life experiences, these are the things with which you can (force) feed your subconscious. Bradbury recommends poetry, essays, short stories, and novels. I would add film and television to the list as well—I have often paused a film or television series in awe of the clever storytelling (look out for a future post on this topic!). Inspiration can come from anywhere, and the more you expose yourself to different sources, the more likely it is that something will spark an idea.
Also, not limiting yourself to reading authors you admire is really excellent advice. This is how I stumbled upon The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami. I’d heard good things, but wasn’t particularly drawn to the author’s writing myself. What I did find though was a gold mine of clever similes, which really surprised me. And at the same time, there were several decisions Murakami made that are not decisions I would have personally made (particularly in terms of pacing, as the story felt a little slow to me at times). Yet, this in itself was illuminating, for it alerted me to things that I would like to avoid in my own writing.
* This quote reminds me of The Dark Tower series by Stephen King (I’m currently on book 4 as I write this). In the foreword, King mentions that the series was inspired by Robert Browning’s narrative poem “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came”. I think Bradbury is really on to something here with this poetry business! And I say that as someone not generally drawn to poetry.
8. Word association is an incredibly useful tool.
It was with great relief... that in my early twenties I floundered into a word-association process in which I simply got out of bed each morning, walked to my desk, and put down any word or series of words that happened along in my head.
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. The lists ran something like this: The lake. The night. The crickets. The ravine. The attic. The basement. The trapdoor. The baby. The crowd. The night train. The fog horn. The scythe. The carnival. The carousel. The dwarf. The mirror maze. The skeleton... I was beginning to see a pattern in the list, in these words that I had simply flung forth on paper, trusting my subconscious to give bread, as it were, to the birds.
I would then take arms against the word, or for it, and bring on an assortment of characters to weigh the word and show me its meaning in my own life.
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. I began to run through those lists, pick a noun, and then sit down to write a long prose-poem-essay on it. Somewhere along about the middle of the page, or perhaps on the second page, the prose poem would turn into a story. Which is to say that a character suddenly appeared and said, “That’s me”; or, “That’s an idea I like!” And the character would then finish the tale for me.
It began to be obvious that I was learning from my list of nouns, and that I was further learning that my characters would do my work for me, if I let them alone, if I gave them their heads, which is to say, their fantasies, their frights.
I leave you now at the bottom of your own stair, at half after midnight, with a pad, a pen, and a list to be made. Conjure the nouns, alert the secret self, taste the darkness. Your own Thing stands waiting way up there in the attic shadows. If you speak softly, and write any old word that wants to jump out of your nerves and onto the page… Your Thing at the top of your stairs in your own private night… may well come down.
Again, I couldn’t bear to limit the number of quotations here, for Bradbury explains so precisely his word association process. How could I hope to paraphrase it any better?
These quotes were a bit spooky for me to read because I’ve been making similar lists for years. It never really occurred to me that this could be common practice for other writers. I have several things in my list right now: character names, city/country/planet names, various nouns, and of course, titles. If you haven’t been making lists, you’re missing out!
What’s wonderful about lists is that if you need a name or a concept, you just refer back to the list of items that you accumulated when inspiration happened to strike organically. There’s no pressure to pull something out of thin air in that particular moment because you’ve already done that part in the past.
9. Always make good on promises made to your reader.
Here’s how my theory goes: We writers are up to the following: We build tensions toward laughter, then give permission, and the 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.
There are seeming exceptions to this, in which novels or plays end at the height of tension, but the release is implied. The audience is asked to go forth into the world and explode an idea. The final action is passed on from creator to reader-viewer whose job it is to finish off the laughter, the tears, the violence, the sexuality, or the sickness.
If I were to advise new writers, if I were to advise the new writer in myself, ... I would advise like this: 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.
The art aesthetic is all encompassing, there is room in it for every horror, every delight, if the tensions representing these are carried to their furthest perimeters and released in action. I ask for no happy endings. I ask only for proper endings based on proper assessments of energy contained and given detonation.
Have you ever read a book or watched a film or TV series that left major questions unanswered? Or built up to something and then never addressed it again? Didn’t it leave you feeling utterly disappointed? Make promises to your reader and keep them. Build tensions and release them (or strongly imply their release). Don’t leave any loose ends untied, which could otherwise leave your reader with this intensely dissatisfied feeling.
10. Imitation is helpful, especially in the early stages.
Imitation is natural and necessary to the beginning writer. In the preparatory years, a writer must select that field where he thinks his ideas will develop comfortably. If his nature in any way resembles the Hemingway philosophy, it is correct that he will imitate Hemingway… Work and imitation go together in the process of learning. It is only when imitation outruns its natural function that a man prevents his becoming truly creative. Some writers will take years, some a few months, before they come upon the truly original story in themselves.
Remember then that picking a field to write in is totally different form slanting within that field. If your great love happens to be the world of the future, it is only right that you spend your energies on science fiction. Your passion will protect you from slanting or imitation beyond the allowable learning-point.
Bradbury argues that imitation is part of the learning process. You look to writers you enjoy, read their work critically and with an analytical eye, and then attempt to employ similar tactics in your own writing. You might also look to particular genres you enjoy and imitate the works in those genres. This will familiarize you to the conventions in these genres and help you to acquire a natural sense for authors in these genres write. At the same time, you can pick out topics which might be expanded upon, or find room for your unique ideas to flourish within the genre you are so drawn to.
11. However, don’t get carried away with imitation.
I tried to write stories heavily influenced by various of these writers, and succeeded in making quadruple-layered muddies, all language and style, that would not float, and sank without a trace. I was too young to identify my problem, I was so busy imitating.
It was only when I began to discover the treats and tricks that came with word association that I began to find some true way through the minefields of imitation. I finally figured out that if you are going to step on a live mine, make it your own. Be blown up, as it were, by your own delights and despairs.
Bradbury instructs us to be wary of imitation, for while it is a useful tool, especially for burgeoning writers, it can also be quite limiting. It can hinder you from writing something that is authentically yours. He credits his use of word association to combat his tendency toward imitation.
12. Be authentic.
What is The Subconscious to every other man, in its creative aspect becomes, for writers, The Muse. They are two names for one thing. But no matter what we call it, here is the core of the individual we pretend to extol, to whom we build shrines and hold lip services in our democratic society. Here is the stuff of originality. For it is in the totality of experience reckoned with, filed, and forgotten, that each man is truly different from all others in the world. For no man sees the same events in the same order, in his life. One man sees death younger than another, one man knows love more quickly than another. Two men, as we know, seeing the same accident, file it with different cross-references, in another part of their own alien alphabet.
If it seems I’ve come the long way around, perhaps I have. But I wanted to show what we all have in us, that it has always been there, and so few of us bother to notice. 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.
By living well, by observing as you live, by reading well and observing as your 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. You have learned to go immediately to the typewriter and preserve the inspiration for all time by putting it on paper.
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.
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 in such a way as to be rewarded by fame offered to you by some snobbish quasi-literary group in the intellectual gazettes.
Now, I would like to believe that everyone reading this article is not interested in those two forms of lying. Each of you, curious about creativity, wants to make contact with that thing in yourself that is truly original. You want fame and fortune, yes, but only as rewards for work well and truly done. Notoriety and a fat bank balance must come after everything else is finished and done. That means that they cannot even be considered while you are at the typewriter. The man who considers them lies one of the two ways, to please a tiny audience that can only beat an Idea insensible and then to death, or a large audience that wouldn’t know an Idea if it came up and bit them.
We hear a lot about slanting for the commercial market, but not enough about slanting for the literary cliques. Both approaches, in the final analysis, are unhappy ways for a writer to live in this world. No one remembers, no one brings up, no one discusses the slanted story, be it diminuendoed Hemingway or third-time-around Elinor Glyn.
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, Moliere, 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 only, our individual truths.
Of all of the lessons I’ve outlined, this one deserves its own post.
There are two main points here:
1. Authenticity comes from within, since no one else in the world has your experiences.
2. Don’t get trapped into writing what you think will sell.
To quote Dr. Seuss, “Today you are You, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is Youer than You.” The culmination of all of your experiences gives you a truly unique repository to draw from. Why cast this aside in favour of copying what “successful” writers are doing? Again, try not to overdo it with imitation, especially when you have your sights set on achieving market success.
I’m all for chasing your dreams, but at some point you have to realize that achieving fame and fortune in writing, or any profession for that matter, is, at least in part, out of your hands. There is more luck involved than we might like to acknowledge. Your work has to land in front of the right editor at the right time to have a proper shot. And even if they take a chance on you, there is no guarantee that the wider audience will take the same chance.
Brandon Sanderson, fantasy author, has said that he knows many novelists who have managed to go pro, and many more who have not. All of them, even the ones who did not achieve market success or were not signed at all, are still happy that they wrote their novels. It’s also worth mentioning that Brandon Sanderson wrote 12 novels before managing to sell a single one. You have to love the process. If your main drive to write is the hope of being published one day, you will be miserable. It’s okay to hope, but that shouldn’t be your primary motivation.
Would you rather fail trying to do what others have done before you, or would you rather go down speaking your truth, writing your stories, and being unapologetically yourself? When put this way, I think a lot of us would choose the latter.
Conclusion
Despite already including way too many quotes here, there are even more truly phenomenal quotes from this book that I wish I could have included. But if I did, this post would definitely have been too long.
I’m considering making a list of my favourite writing quotes at some point, perhaps before the end of the year—let me know if this is something that would interest you!
One last thing: I find posts like this extremely helpful, but they do take a bit more energy to prepare (see my previous post for a taste of my frustration). I’m hoping to post something like this at least once per month.
What is your favourite lesson? What is your favourite quote?
As always, feel free to discuss in the comments below or reach out via the contact form. I’d love to hear from you!
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