Thoughts on Zen in the Art of Writing

I picked up Ray Bradbury's Zen in the Art of Writing on Meadow's recommendation at least a year back. He referenced it in relation to how Bradbury tells us not to take our writing too seriously.

I knew right away I needed to read it.

After first starting, I quickly blazed through the first couple of essays. Then I, for some reason, just let it linger. Reluctant to abandon it, it sat on my Reading list all this time, until one day a couple of weeks back I decided it was time to get back to it.

With so much time having passed, I just started again from scratch.

Before reading this book, I knew very little about Ray Bradbury. My familiarity to his works was limited to having watched that movie rendition of Fahrenheit 451 featuring Michael B. Jordan and that guy who's not Steve Buscemi from Boardwalk Empire.

After reading this book, I know that Bradbury is a strange fellow. He came across as lively and intelligent with a fervour for writing and living in equal measure. My kind of strange fellow, in other words.

Memorable quotes

The book is full of quotable lines. Here are a few that I highlighted:

So that, in one way or another, is what this book is all about. Taking your pinch of arsenic every morn so you can survive to sunset. Another pinch at sunset so that you can more-than-survive until dawn. The micro-arsenic-dose swallowed here prepares you not to be poisoned and destroyed up ahead.

A recurring theme throughout the book is that you must pay your dues to be able to find "zen in the art of writing". That means learning the craft by putting in the time and writing down the words.

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.

And:

Quantity gives experience. From experience alone can quality come.

How much time does experience and, by extension, quality require? Well:

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.

Then there's this:

If this all sounds mechanical, it wasn't. My ideas drove me to it, you see. The more I did, the more I wanted to do. You grow ravenous. you run fevers. You know exhilarations. You can't sleep at night, because your beast-creature ideas want out and turn you in your bed. It is a grand way to live.

It echoes a quote I read many years ago who-knows-where, that there's freedom in discipline. The structure of a disciplined approach is what enables passion and unleashes deep-seated creativity.

On how to write, he says:

But today - explode - fly apart - disintegrate! The other size or seven drafts are going to be pure torture. So why not enjoy the first draft

Bradbury's method was all about getting out the way when working on the first draft. Write completely without inhibition and simply let words flow. I am terrible at this. And I find it almost impossible to write without constantly editing myself along the way. A habit of which Bradbury says:

The faster your 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.

And:

And when a man talks from his heart, in his moment of truth, he speaks poetry.

I want to practice Bradbury's approach. To write freely, but without access to the backspace button.

Then there's this quote about how some old man (father or uncle, can't remember) spoke truth in telling stories:

But after he had talked 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.

Storytelling is culture in the part of the country where I grew up. To be able to grab hold of a room with a story a cherished and valued skill. Even with the same story, time and time again, every retelling differing slightly from the last one. To see that framed as truth and poetry struck a chord.

It is truth. Not the menial, fact-based kind. The poetic kind. The kind that matters.

Why and how? Because I say it is so.

Indeed.

Bradbury also writes about fantasy and science-fiction, and why it matters:

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.

His views mirror a thought I've been harbouring lately: All that man can imagine, man will eventually create. Case in point:

The children sensed, if they could not say, that fantasy, and its robot child science fiction, is not escape at all. But a circling round of reality to enchant it and make it behave. What is an airplane, after all, but a circling of reality, an approach to gravity which says: Look, with my magic machine, I defy you. Gravity be gone. Distance, stand aside.

And then, there's this absolute truth, which was a driving force of Fahrenheit 451:

We all think that 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, 'Wow! They know all the secrets.'

They don't, of course. Nobody does. And that's the rub. We all have to find out own way, one way or another. Every book, every song, every poem, it can but offer up a little pointer.

Back to writing, Bradbury uses the term "work" for what you must do, and you must be relaxed in your approach to do it well:

Impossible! you say. How can you work and relax? How can you create and not be a nervous wreck? It can be done. It is done, every day of every week of every year. Athletes do it. Painters do it. Mountain climbers do it. Zen Buddhists with their little bows and arrows do it. Even I can do it.

I wholly concur with his point of view here. Work, in its pure and meaningful form, is human expression. And that is of the same essence whether you're expressing yourself through athletic pursuits, writing or music.

Closing thoughts

I'm glad Meadow mentioned this book in an email, and that I picked it up again after all this time. It has helped crystallised my thoughts on what it means and what it takes to be a writer. And it inspired me to keep doing the work.