Authors: Ray Bradbury
ISBN-13: 9780553296341, ISBN-10: 0553296345
Format: Mass Market Paperback
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Date Published: March 1992
Edition: Reissue
A veteran sci-fi author with side talents for poetry, plays and screenwriting, Ray Bradbury has had a long career of provoking thought and a compelling uneasiness in generations of readers. But rather than create worlds made for escape, Bradbury refracts our own foibles through otherworldly prisms.
"Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a land mine. The land mine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces back together. Now, it's your turn. Jump!" Zest. Gusto. Curiosity. These are the qualities every writer must have, as well as a spirit of adventure. In this exuberant book, the incomparable Ray Bradbury shares the wisdom, experience, and excitement of a lifetime of writing. Here are practical tips on the art of writing from a master of the craft-everything from finding original ideas to developing your own voice and style-as well as the inside story of Bradbury's own remarkable career as a prolific author of novels, stories, poems, films, and plays. Zen In The Art Of Writing is more than just a how-to manual for the would-be writer: it is a celebration of the act of writing itself that will delight, impassion, and inspire the writer in you. In it, Bradbury encourages us to follow the unique path of our instincts and enthusiasms to the place where our inner genius dwells, and he shows that success as a writer depends on how well you know one subject: your own life.
As the title suggests, science fiction master Bradbury occasionally sounds like a Zen sage (``You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you''), but for the most part these nine lightweight, zestful essays dispense the sort of shoptalk generally associated with writers' workshops. The title piece aims to help the aspiring writer navigate between the self-consciously literary and the calculatingly commercial. Other essays deal with discovering one's imaginative self; feeding one's muse; the germination of Bradbury's novel Dandelion Wine in his Illinois boyhood; a trip to Ireland; science fiction as a search for new modes of survival; and the author's stage adaptation of his classic novel Fahrenheit 451. Eight poems on creativity round out the volume; noteworthy are ``Doing Is Being'' and ``We Have Our Arts So We Won't Die of Truth.'' (Mar.)
Preface | ||
The Joy of Writing | 3 | |
Run Fast, Stand Still, or, the Thing at the Top of the Stairs, or, New Ghosts from Old Minds | 13 | |
How to Keep and Feed a Muse | 31 | |
Drunk, and in Charge of a Bicycle | 49 | |
Investing Dimes: Fahrenheit 451 | 69 | |
Just this Side of Byzantium: Dandelion Wine | 79 | |
The Long Road to Mars | 91 | |
On the Shoulders of Giants | 99 | |
The Secret Mind | 111 | |
Shooting Haiku in a Barrel | 125 | |
Zen in the Art of Writing | 139 | |
. . . On Creativity | 157 |