Post by mikeralls on Sept 14, 2007 17:21:31 GMT -5
My selection of key quotes from Ray Bradbury's excellent book on writing can be found below. This book was recomended in the Lifewriting program IIRC. There is a lot of good advice in this book.
mikesbooknotes.blogspot.com/2007/09/zen-and-art-of-writing-by-ray-bradbury.html
Bradbury, Ray. Zen and the Art of Writing. Santa Barbara: Joshua Odell Editions, 1996.
XI. His nine year old self found the courage to be an individual. “I love that nine-year old, whoever in hell he was.”
XII. “And what you ask, does writing teach us?
First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and a privilege, not a right. . . . 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.”
XIII. “Remember the 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, and after three days, his audience would know.”
XIII. “You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
XIV. Use personal tragedy as a springboard, not as a reason for slowing down.
XIV. “Aristotle said it for the ages. Have you listened to him lately?”
3. Regardless of what sadness happened in their lives, the words of the great authors still live.
4. Head of Nefertiti, “The Beautiful One was here, is here, and will be here, forever.”
4. “If you are writing without zest, without gusto, without love, without fun, you are only half a writer.”
7. Enjoy the first draft, because the next six or seven are going to be torture.
21. “Season of Disbelief.” RB’s story of, “some children who refuse to believe that a very old woman was ever young, was ever a girl, a child.” Sounds interesting.
21. “It is the personal observation, the odd fancy, the strange conceit, that pays off.”
28. “I leave you now at the bottom of your own stair, at half after midnight, with a pad, a pent, and a list to be made. Conjure the nouns, alert the secret self, taste the darkness.”
31. Keeping and feeding a muse. “It isn’t easy. Nobody has ever done it consistently. Those who try hardest, scare it off into the woods.”
32. “Are will fly if held too lightly,
Art will die if held too tightly,
Lightly, tightly how do I know
Whether I’m holding or letting Art go?”
33. “For it is the totality of experience reckoned with, filed, and forgotten, that each man is truly different from all others in he world. For no man sees the same events in the same order, in his life.”
35. We can learn from everyone about what it is to be human.
36. Advice to read poetry every day of your life.
37. Tons of ideas in poetry books, but they are not often recommended for that purpose.
37. Read any poetry that moves you. Don’t push yourself to read the “hard” stuff just because you think you are supposed to. Take your time.
37. Also advises to read books of essays.
38. “The most improbable tales can be made believable, if your reader, through his senses, feels certain that he stands at the middle of events.”
41. Your tastes will change over time. Accept this. “At ten, Jules Verne is accepted, Huxley rejected. At eighteen, Thomas Wolfe accepted, and Buck Rogers left behind. At thirty, Melville discovered, and Thomas Wolfe lost.”
45. “A well-fed man keeps and calmly gives forth his infinitesimal portions of eternity.”
45. Make a list of first’s on your course to becoming a professional writer. First movie saw. First drawing. First awe. First story you read, First time from home. First decision about your career. Etc.
50. “Writing is supposed to be difficult, agonizing, a dreadful exercise, a terrible occupation.” Is it? Always?
51. “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. Others have criticized, and they have criticized themselves, into embarrassment.”
52. Goes back to Buck Rogers in fourth grade. “Since then, I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room.”
59. Bradbury helped plan Spaceship Earth at Epcot. Huh. I didn’t know that.
61. Reality. “You can run into it head-on, which is a dire business, or you can skirt around it, give it a poke, dance for it, make up a song, write you a tale, prolong the gab, fill up the flask.”
62. Writing schedule. Monday: First draft. Tuesday; Second draft. Wednesday: Third. Thursday: Fourth. Friday: Fifth. Saturday: Mail it out. Sunday: Think of new idea.
65. His short stories. “They contain half the d**ning truths I suspected at midnight, and half of the saving truths I re-found next noon. If anything is taught here, it is simply the charting of the life of someone who started out to somewhere – and went. I have not so much thought my way through life as done things and found what it was and how I was after the doing.”
69. RB paid $9.80 to write Fahrenheit 451 because he was using a public library pay typewriter at a dime every half hour. That is one way to motivate yourself to type fast.
73. The Fire chief in F451 loved books. But then, “Life. The usual. The same. The love that wasn’t quite right, the dream that went sour, the sex that fell apart, the deaths that came swiftly to friends not deserving, the murder of someone or another, the insanity of someone close, the slow death of a mother, the abrupt suicide of a father – a stampede of elephants, an onslaught of disease. And nowhere, nowhere the right book for the right time to stuff in he crumbling wall of the breaking d**n to hold back the deluge, give or take a metaphor, lose or find a simile.”
75. Didn’t go back and change the novel when given the opportunity. “I don’t believe in tampering with any young writer’s material, especially when that young writer was once myself.
75. Only recently did he realize that some of the names for F451 came from a paper manufacturer, and a maker of pencils. “What a sly thing my subconscious was, to name them thus.
And not tell me!”
79. “Before that, like every beginner, I thought you could beat, pummel, and thrash an idea into existence.”
82. “Trains and boxcars and the smell of coal and fire are not ugly to children. Ugliness is a concept that we happen on later and become self-conscious about.”
83. “In other words, if your boy is a poet, horse manure can only mean flowers to him; which is, of course, what horse manure has always been about.”
104. Science fiction as problem solving.
112. RB thought he wouldn’t get any stories out of Ireland, but he thought the same about Mexico. With Mexico, it just took a few years for the stories to come, but come they did and the same would be true of Ireland.
116. “ For only after, can one nail down, examine, explain.
To try to know beforehand is to freeze and kill.
Self-consciousness is the enemy of all art, be it acting, writing, painting, or living itself, which is the greatest art of all.”
117. Advice. “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 hid the target.
I might strike you, instead.
Above all, sicken me not unless you show me the way to the ship’s rail.”
118. “Even beasts know when it is good and proper to throw up. Teach me how to be sick then, in the right time and place, so that I may again walk in he fields and with the wise and smiling dogs know enough to chew sweet grass.”
118. “I ask for no happy endings. I ask only for proper endings based on proper assessments of energy contained and given detonation.”
120. “For the first time in the long and plague-some history of man, ideas do not merely exist on paper, as philosophies in books do.
Today's ideas are blueprinted, mocked-up, engineered, electrified, wound-tight and set loose to rev men up and run men down.”
121. “I do not want to be a snobbish lecturer, a grandiloquent do-gooder, or a boring reformer.
I do wish to run, seize this greatest time in all history of man to be alive, stuff my senses with it, eye it, touch it, listen to it, smell it, taste it, and hope that others will run with me, pursuing and pursued by ideas and ideas-made machines.”
126. Way to cut something down is to start small. First cut 40 pages. When that is done, cut 40 more. When that is done, 40 more. Repeat until desired length. Don’t try to cut it all at once. Too daunting.
127. “If you can find the right metaphor, the right image, and put it in a scene, it can replace four pages of dialogue.”
128. You can learn a lot from a bad film. “I’ll never do that, and I’ll never do that, and I’ll never do that.”
134. He doesn’t have problems with his ideas. Interviewer, “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.” . . . Then the cat follows you out of curiosity: “Well, what’s wrong with you that you don’t love me?””
139. The Zen of writing, “ WORK.
That’s the first one.
RELAXATION.
That’s the second. Followed by two final ones:
DON’T THINK!”
140. Work. “Beginning now you should become not its slave, which is too mean a term, but its partner. Once you are really a co-sharer of existence with your work, that word will lose its repellent aspects.”
141. Both working only for the money, or only for the acclaim of intellectuals are forms of lying. “You want fame and fortune, yes, but only as rewards for work well and truly done.”
143. Says people say its impossible to work and relax. I’ve never thought so as long as you are “in the zone.”
144. Your schedule as a writer, “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, fifty-two stories a year, for five years. 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.”
145. “An athlete may run ten thousand miles in order to prepare for one hundred yards.
Quality gives experience. From experience alone can quality come.”
146. “We should not look down on work nor look down on the forty-five out of fifty-two stories written in our first year as failures. 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.”
148. “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 lonely, our individual truths. Now we must build our better mousetrap, heedless if a path is being beaten to our door.
150. If you love the genre you are working in, working in that genre will help protect you from slanting or imitation.
152. “Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations. . . . So, stand aside, forget targets, let the characters, your fingers, body, blood, and heart do. . . . “It is a wise father that knows his own child,” should be paraphrased to “It is a wise writer who knows his own subconscious.””
153. “Be pragmatic, then. If you’re not happy with the way your writing has gone, you might give my method a try.
If you do, I think you might easily find a new definition for Work.
And the word is LOVE.”
162. The Other Me. Quote from the Poem. “He Phantom is, and I façade
That hides the opera he writes with God,
While I, all blind,
Wait raptureless until his mind
Steals down my arm to wrist, to hand, to
Fingertips
And, stealing, find
Such truths as fall from tongues” I liked this poem, especially the last line, “Praise other me.”
167. Go Not With Ruins in Your Mind. “Think on your joyless blood, take care,
Rome’s scattered bricks and bones lie there
In every chromosome and gene
Lie all that was, or might have been.”
171. 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”
173. We Have Our Arts So We Won’t Die of Truth. “Know only Real? Fall dead.
So Nietzsche said.
We have our Arts so we won’t die of Truth.
The World is too much with us.”
End thoughts: A really good book on writing. Highly recommend.
mikesbooknotes.blogspot.com/2007/09/zen-and-art-of-writing-by-ray-bradbury.html
Bradbury, Ray. Zen and the Art of Writing. Santa Barbara: Joshua Odell Editions, 1996.
XI. His nine year old self found the courage to be an individual. “I love that nine-year old, whoever in hell he was.”
XII. “And what you ask, does writing teach us?
First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that it is a gift and a privilege, not a right. . . . 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.”
XIII. “Remember the 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, and after three days, his audience would know.”
XIII. “You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”
XIV. Use personal tragedy as a springboard, not as a reason for slowing down.
XIV. “Aristotle said it for the ages. Have you listened to him lately?”
3. Regardless of what sadness happened in their lives, the words of the great authors still live.
4. Head of Nefertiti, “The Beautiful One was here, is here, and will be here, forever.”
4. “If you are writing without zest, without gusto, without love, without fun, you are only half a writer.”
7. Enjoy the first draft, because the next six or seven are going to be torture.
21. “Season of Disbelief.” RB’s story of, “some children who refuse to believe that a very old woman was ever young, was ever a girl, a child.” Sounds interesting.
21. “It is the personal observation, the odd fancy, the strange conceit, that pays off.”
28. “I leave you now at the bottom of your own stair, at half after midnight, with a pad, a pent, and a list to be made. Conjure the nouns, alert the secret self, taste the darkness.”
31. Keeping and feeding a muse. “It isn’t easy. Nobody has ever done it consistently. Those who try hardest, scare it off into the woods.”
32. “Are will fly if held too lightly,
Art will die if held too tightly,
Lightly, tightly how do I know
Whether I’m holding or letting Art go?”
33. “For it is the totality of experience reckoned with, filed, and forgotten, that each man is truly different from all others in he world. For no man sees the same events in the same order, in his life.”
35. We can learn from everyone about what it is to be human.
36. Advice to read poetry every day of your life.
37. Tons of ideas in poetry books, but they are not often recommended for that purpose.
37. Read any poetry that moves you. Don’t push yourself to read the “hard” stuff just because you think you are supposed to. Take your time.
37. Also advises to read books of essays.
38. “The most improbable tales can be made believable, if your reader, through his senses, feels certain that he stands at the middle of events.”
41. Your tastes will change over time. Accept this. “At ten, Jules Verne is accepted, Huxley rejected. At eighteen, Thomas Wolfe accepted, and Buck Rogers left behind. At thirty, Melville discovered, and Thomas Wolfe lost.”
45. “A well-fed man keeps and calmly gives forth his infinitesimal portions of eternity.”
45. Make a list of first’s on your course to becoming a professional writer. First movie saw. First drawing. First awe. First story you read, First time from home. First decision about your career. Etc.
50. “Writing is supposed to be difficult, agonizing, a dreadful exercise, a terrible occupation.” Is it? Always?
51. “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. Others have criticized, and they have criticized themselves, into embarrassment.”
52. Goes back to Buck Rogers in fourth grade. “Since then, I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room.”
59. Bradbury helped plan Spaceship Earth at Epcot. Huh. I didn’t know that.
61. Reality. “You can run into it head-on, which is a dire business, or you can skirt around it, give it a poke, dance for it, make up a song, write you a tale, prolong the gab, fill up the flask.”
62. Writing schedule. Monday: First draft. Tuesday; Second draft. Wednesday: Third. Thursday: Fourth. Friday: Fifth. Saturday: Mail it out. Sunday: Think of new idea.
65. His short stories. “They contain half the d**ning truths I suspected at midnight, and half of the saving truths I re-found next noon. If anything is taught here, it is simply the charting of the life of someone who started out to somewhere – and went. I have not so much thought my way through life as done things and found what it was and how I was after the doing.”
69. RB paid $9.80 to write Fahrenheit 451 because he was using a public library pay typewriter at a dime every half hour. That is one way to motivate yourself to type fast.
73. The Fire chief in F451 loved books. But then, “Life. The usual. The same. The love that wasn’t quite right, the dream that went sour, the sex that fell apart, the deaths that came swiftly to friends not deserving, the murder of someone or another, the insanity of someone close, the slow death of a mother, the abrupt suicide of a father – a stampede of elephants, an onslaught of disease. And nowhere, nowhere the right book for the right time to stuff in he crumbling wall of the breaking d**n to hold back the deluge, give or take a metaphor, lose or find a simile.”
75. Didn’t go back and change the novel when given the opportunity. “I don’t believe in tampering with any young writer’s material, especially when that young writer was once myself.
75. Only recently did he realize that some of the names for F451 came from a paper manufacturer, and a maker of pencils. “What a sly thing my subconscious was, to name them thus.
And not tell me!”
79. “Before that, like every beginner, I thought you could beat, pummel, and thrash an idea into existence.”
82. “Trains and boxcars and the smell of coal and fire are not ugly to children. Ugliness is a concept that we happen on later and become self-conscious about.”
83. “In other words, if your boy is a poet, horse manure can only mean flowers to him; which is, of course, what horse manure has always been about.”
104. Science fiction as problem solving.
112. RB thought he wouldn’t get any stories out of Ireland, but he thought the same about Mexico. With Mexico, it just took a few years for the stories to come, but come they did and the same would be true of Ireland.
116. “ For only after, can one nail down, examine, explain.
To try to know beforehand is to freeze and kill.
Self-consciousness is the enemy of all art, be it acting, writing, painting, or living itself, which is the greatest art of all.”
117. Advice. “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 hid the target.
I might strike you, instead.
Above all, sicken me not unless you show me the way to the ship’s rail.”
118. “Even beasts know when it is good and proper to throw up. Teach me how to be sick then, in the right time and place, so that I may again walk in he fields and with the wise and smiling dogs know enough to chew sweet grass.”
118. “I ask for no happy endings. I ask only for proper endings based on proper assessments of energy contained and given detonation.”
120. “For the first time in the long and plague-some history of man, ideas do not merely exist on paper, as philosophies in books do.
Today's ideas are blueprinted, mocked-up, engineered, electrified, wound-tight and set loose to rev men up and run men down.”
121. “I do not want to be a snobbish lecturer, a grandiloquent do-gooder, or a boring reformer.
I do wish to run, seize this greatest time in all history of man to be alive, stuff my senses with it, eye it, touch it, listen to it, smell it, taste it, and hope that others will run with me, pursuing and pursued by ideas and ideas-made machines.”
126. Way to cut something down is to start small. First cut 40 pages. When that is done, cut 40 more. When that is done, 40 more. Repeat until desired length. Don’t try to cut it all at once. Too daunting.
127. “If you can find the right metaphor, the right image, and put it in a scene, it can replace four pages of dialogue.”
128. You can learn a lot from a bad film. “I’ll never do that, and I’ll never do that, and I’ll never do that.”
134. He doesn’t have problems with his ideas. Interviewer, “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.” . . . Then the cat follows you out of curiosity: “Well, what’s wrong with you that you don’t love me?””
139. The Zen of writing, “ WORK.
That’s the first one.
RELAXATION.
That’s the second. Followed by two final ones:
DON’T THINK!”
140. Work. “Beginning now you should become not its slave, which is too mean a term, but its partner. Once you are really a co-sharer of existence with your work, that word will lose its repellent aspects.”
141. Both working only for the money, or only for the acclaim of intellectuals are forms of lying. “You want fame and fortune, yes, but only as rewards for work well and truly done.”
143. Says people say its impossible to work and relax. I’ve never thought so as long as you are “in the zone.”
144. Your schedule as a writer, “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, fifty-two stories a year, for five years. 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.”
145. “An athlete may run ten thousand miles in order to prepare for one hundred yards.
Quality gives experience. From experience alone can quality come.”
146. “We should not look down on work nor look down on the forty-five out of fifty-two stories written in our first year as failures. 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.”
148. “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 lonely, our individual truths. Now we must build our better mousetrap, heedless if a path is being beaten to our door.
150. If you love the genre you are working in, working in that genre will help protect you from slanting or imitation.
152. “Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations. . . . So, stand aside, forget targets, let the characters, your fingers, body, blood, and heart do. . . . “It is a wise father that knows his own child,” should be paraphrased to “It is a wise writer who knows his own subconscious.””
153. “Be pragmatic, then. If you’re not happy with the way your writing has gone, you might give my method a try.
If you do, I think you might easily find a new definition for Work.
And the word is LOVE.”
162. The Other Me. Quote from the Poem. “He Phantom is, and I façade
That hides the opera he writes with God,
While I, all blind,
Wait raptureless until his mind
Steals down my arm to wrist, to hand, to
Fingertips
And, stealing, find
Such truths as fall from tongues” I liked this poem, especially the last line, “Praise other me.”
167. Go Not With Ruins in Your Mind. “Think on your joyless blood, take care,
Rome’s scattered bricks and bones lie there
In every chromosome and gene
Lie all that was, or might have been.”
171. 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”
173. We Have Our Arts So We Won’t Die of Truth. “Know only Real? Fall dead.
So Nietzsche said.
We have our Arts so we won’t die of Truth.
The World is too much with us.”
End thoughts: A really good book on writing. Highly recommend.