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.