Ray Bradbury’s Zen in the Art of Writing is not about Zen at all. The Zen part is a marketing trick, he admits in the book.

The book is about writing though. In a cast-iron writing style.

• Find a character that wants something, or not.
• Start without thinking, explode!
• Ideas live everywhere.
• Be extreme. Love and hate, Zest and Gusto.
• Write fast, that guarantees honesty.
• How to start something new? Be doing and stumbling into it.
• Ideas come from our subconscious. Feed it with poetry, essays, novels and short stories, movies.
• Write passionate, with a loud voice.
• Plot is something for after the fact.
• Your writing grows with experience and labor.
• Take a series of words in your head and write a story.
• Children have become our teachers. for the genre of Science Fiction in his time, but similarly for Young Adult books in these days.
• Don’t get too serious. Just Run!
• Don’t think. Self-conscious is the enemy of art.
• Get a thing done. Then cut it appropriately.
• The ideas follow you. When they are off-guard, grab them.
• WORK. RELAX. DON’T THINK. RELAX MORE.
• Quantity will make for quality.
• Don’t expect money or fame.

At the level of Stephen King’s On Writing or Steven Pressfield‘s War of Art.