Then write about the former, and “kill” the later-also by writing about them. List ten things you love, and ten things you hate. He recommended “word association” to break down any creative blockages, since “you don’t know what’s in you until you test it.” Just type any old thing that comes into your head. He claims that it simply isn’t possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row. Give yourself time to improve with each week and month, you’ll see your stories improve. Don’t start out writing novels-they take too long-“write a hell of a lot of short stories,” he said. Here’s some of Ray’s tips interpreted by Colin Marshall on From experience alone can quality come.īradbury, the man of many words, stories, books and ideas offers some inspirational and practical advice to jump-start your daily writing practice. Let there be words, many of them! I believe that eventually quantity will make for quality.

Another pinch at sunset so that you can more-than-survive until dawn. Taking your pinch of arsenic every morn so you can survive to sunset. So that, in one way or another, is what this book is all about. I’m on my feet, running in circles, and yelling for a clean pair of spats. Four and I might as well be a hog, suffering the flux in a wallow. I have learned, on my journeys, that if I let a day go by without writing, I grow uneasy. If you did not write every day, the poisons would accumulate and you would begin to die, or act crazy, or both.įor 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. But what would happen is that the world would catch up with and try to sicken you. Not that your style, whatever that is, would melt out of shape in those few days. 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.Ī variation of this is true for writers. The smallest effort to win means, at the end of each day, a sort of victory. We must take arms each and every day, perhaps knowing that the battle cannot be entirely won, but fight we must, if only a gentle bout. Any art, any good work, of course, is that.

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. Life asks for rewards back because it has favored us with animation.

We must earn life once it has been awarded us. Zen in the Art of Writing - excerpt from Prefaceįirst and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and a privilege, not a right.

Zen and the art of writing ray bradbury