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Wynelda-Ann Shelton

Zen in the Art of Writing

Zen in the Art of Writing
Expanded Edition
By: Ray Bradbury
Joshua Odell Editions
ISBN 1-877741-09-4
$12.95 USD

What would it be like to sit down to write and explode onto the page? To know that not only have you written true, but that it resonates with others? Ray Bradbury, in Zen in the Art of Writing, attempts to tell us exactly how to do such a thing. A collection of essays on writing, the entire book is extremely helpful. However, I want to concentrate on one of his suggestion: make lists. Lists of things you hate, things that scare the bejabbers out of you, things that you love. Simple nouns will do.

His list went something like this:

The Lake. The Night. The Crickets. The Ravine. The Attic. The Basement. The Trap-Door. The Baby. The Crowd. The Night Train. The Fog Horn. The Scythe. The Carnival. The Carousel. The Dwarf. The Mirror Maze. The Skeleton. (Page 17)

Of the lists, Bradbury says:

“These lists were the provocations, finally, that caused my better stuff to surface. I was feeling my way toward something honest, hidden under the trapdoor on the top of my skull,” (Page 17).

The lists that Bradbury made were the front runners of stories such as “R is for Rocket”, “Season of Disbelief”, and “Something Wicked This Way Comes.” Some became more than one story, others languished.

What would my list look like if I were brave enough to write it? What would yours? And what would we do with the list when it was time to start writing? According to Bradbury, we should write fast. Super fast. Because “In quickness is truth. The faster you blurt, the more swiftly you write, the more honest you are” (Page 13).

The lists start to plumb the depths of our own experience: a remembered fright from childhood, the sick fascination with the macabre, the love of melted ice cream. In blurting the truth out, we fool ourselves. Bradbury himself says that his first attempts started out as prose-poem-essays. About half way down, he would find himself in the middle of a really good story. He would forget where he was, what he was doing, and become immersed in the words that he was creating.

I hope to be able to blurt a story into being soon. I know, personally, that I’m much better off writing quickly than I am taking my time. I need that rush to get the true story out.

Until then, I’m making my list and checking it twice.