Things I Highlighted In Bradbury's Zen In The Art Of Writing

As I flipped through sticky tabs, occurred to me he was channeling Baudelaire and Faulkner and so many writers that went before.

You know what I wish? I wish there was a library where I could check out books other people highlighted. Of course, then it would become like Medium and the whole thing would be highlighted and then it would just be a nuisance. lol

I was standing in front of my bookshelf deciding what to write about. Plucked out Bradbury’s Zen In The Art Of Writing and as I flipped through sticky tabs, it occurred to me he was channeling Baudelaire and Faulkner and so many writers that went before him. Don’t know what that never occurred to me when I first read it, that it’s the same advice over and over, but there it was clear as day. Writers have been saying the same things and giving the same advice forever, I guess. For centuries.

Here’s what else occurred to me. When people talk about Bradbury, they always say the same thing. Same quote. Write every day, read intensely, see what happens.

Quotation sites are easy to lean on, especially if one needs to keep a blog populated with content. Problem is they’re not always correctly sourced and even when they are, too often the selected quotes are trite. In Bradbury’s case, they don’t touch on some of the magical thoughts he had. Thought I’d share some of what I highlighted.

On poetry and metaphorical writing…

“Read poetry every day of your life. Poetry is good because it flexes muscles you don’t use often enough. Poetry expands the senses and keeps them in prime condition...
And, above all, poetry is compacted metaphor or simile.
Such metaphors, like Japanese paper flowers, may expand outward into gigantic shapes. Ideas lie everywhere through the poetry books, yet how rarely have I heard short story teachers recommending them...
What poetry? Any poetry that makes your hair stand up along your arms...”

Metaphorical writing goes straight from eyes to heart. Shakespeare comparing a lover to a summer’s day or Juliet to the sun, shining on the balcony. Emily Dickenson’s hope is the thing with feathers that perches in your soul is metaphor. Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” is an entire metaphorical poem about choices in our lives.

Metaphorical writing is beautiful, a step beyond it’s simple cousin, simile. A century before Bradbury, Baudelaire suggested writers always be a poet, even in prose. Bradbury simplified. Says just read poetry.

Not to store it in your head, plucking things from here and there to use patchwork in your writing. But because it teaches us to see. Read enough metaphorical writing, and you can’t help but start to see the world through the eyes of a poet.

On feeding the muse…

“In a lifetime, we stuff ourselves with sounds, sights, smells, tastes, and textures of people, animals, landscapes, events large and small. We stuff ourselves with these impressions and experiences and our reactions to them. Into our subconscious go not only factual data but reactive data, our movement toward or away from the sensed events.
These are the stuffs, the foods, on which the Muse grows. This is the storehouse, the file, to which we must return waking hour to check reality against memory…”

David Foster Wallace once said reading “is the opportunity to watch somebody reasonably bright, but also reasonably average, pay far closer attention and think at far more length about all sorts of different stuff than most of us have a chance to in our daily lives.”

A writer’s job is to notice. Biggest job. Hands down. Because if we don’t notice, then we risk editorializing. So much writing is contrived and could have been saved by observation. Which again, writers saying the same thing decade after decade, because it’s what Anton Chekhov meant in that letter to his brother in 1886 when he said, “Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”

On what to leave out…

“All arts, big and small, are the elimination of waste motion in favor of concise declaration. The artist learns what to leave out.
The surgeon knows how to go directly to the source of trouble, how to avoid wasted time and complications.
The athlete learns how to conserve power and apply it now here, now there, how to use this muscle rather than that.
Is the writer different? I think not. His greatest art will be what he does not say, what he leaves out, his ability to state simply, with clear emotion, the way he wants to go.
The artist must work so hard, so long, that a brain develops and lives, all of itself, in his fingers. ”

I wrote a piece on Medium once on a New York agent who has the Midas touch when it comes to finding authors that are gold. He said it only takes him one page to accept or reject an author. I mention this a lot, because it’s important to know that while good writing is subjective, bad writing is immediately evident. Shows itself on the first page of a manuscript. First paragraph of a story.

Mostly, bad writing is writing that contains too much of that which should have been omitted. The fluff, the rambling, excessive description.

William Zinsser talks about how to know what to leave out in his book On Writing Well. Stephen King rants on adverbs. Arthur Quiller-Couch and William Faulkner on killing your darlings. It’s all the same message. Or as Antoine de Saint Exupéry said more poetically, Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

Happy writing.

“IF YOU WANT TO WRITE, if you want to create, you must be the most sublime fool that God ever turned out and sent rambling. You must write every single day of your life. You must read dreadful dumb books and glorious books, and let them wrestle in beautiful fights inside your head, vulgar one moment, brilliant the next.

You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfume and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads. I wish you a wrestling match with your Creative Muse that will last a lifetime. I wish craziness and foolishness and madness upon you. May you live with hysteria, and out of it make fine stories — science fiction or otherwise. Which finally means, may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.”
— Ray Bradbury