What a joy it was to read an essay from beginning to end this morning! I haven't accomplished such a feat in several months. This was a particularly short essay of about 15 small pages, but it can take me several days or even weeks to finish a book chapter, essay, or academic article. I'm slowly and perpetually in the middle of five to ten various pieces.
These are the passages I found striking and most essential from Ray Bradbury's 1973 essay Zen in the Art of Writing. The entire book can be read here, with this particular essay beginning on page 136. (Forgive some of his cheesiness and the gendered universal pronouns.)
- We hear a lot about slanting for the commercial market, but not enough about slanting for the literary cliques. Both approaches, in the final analysis, are unhappy ways for a writer to live in this world.
{All of the truth in this essay applies not just to authors, but equally well to composers, and to visual artists working in any medium.}
- …There comes a time in the day's occupations when old Money Writer falls so in love with an idea that he begins to gallop, steam, pant, rave, and write from the heart, in spite of himself.
So, too, the man with the quill pen is suddenly taken with fevers, gives up purple ink for pure hot perspiration. Then he tatters quills by the dozen and, hours later, emerges ruinous from the bed of creation looking as if he had channeled an avalanche through his house.
Now, you ask, what transpired? What caused these two almost compulsive liars to start telling the truth?
…
WORK
It's quite obvious that both men were working.
And work itself, after awhile, takes on a rhythm. The mechanical begins to fall away. The body begins to take over. The guard goes down. What happens then?
RELAXATION
And then the men are happily following my last advice:
DON'T THINK
Which results in more relaxation and more unthinkingness and greater creativity.
- We could put [the signs] in any order, really. RELAXATION or DON'T THINK could come first, or simultaneously, followed by WORK.
- [A schedule could look] something like this. One-thousand or two-thousand words every day for the next twenty years. At the start, you might shoot for one short story a week, fifty-two stories a year, for five years. You will have to write and put away or burn a lot of material before you are comfortable in this medium. You might as well start now and get the necessary work done.
- Michelangelo's, da Vinci's, Tintoretto's billion sketches, the quantitative, prepared them for the qualitative, single sketches further down the line, single portraits, single landscapes of incredible control and beauty.
A great surgeon dissects and re-dissects a thousand, ten thousand bodies, tissues, organs, preparing thus by quantity the time when quality will count–with a living creature under his knife.
An athlete may run ten thousand miles in order to prepare for one hundred yards.
Quantity gives experience. From experience alone can quality come.
All arts, big and small, are the elimination of waste motion in favor of concise declaration.
The artist learns what to leave out.
- The artist must work so hard, so long, that a brain develops and lives, all of itself, in his fingers.
- We should not look down on work nor look down on the forty-five out of fifty-two stories written in our first year as failures. To fail is to give up. But you are in the midst of a moving process. Nothing fails then. All goes on. Work is done. If good, you learn from it. If bad, you learn even more. Work done and behind you is a lesson to be studied. There is no failure unless one stops. Not to work is to cease, tighten up, become nervous and therefore destructive of the creative process.
- What we are trying to do is find a way to release the truth that lies in all of us.
- Work, giving us experience, results in new confidence and eventually in relaxation. The type of relaxation again, as in sculpting, where the sculptor does not consciously have to tell his fingers what to do.
- [The writer] must ask himself, “What do I really think of the world, what do I love, fear, hate?” and begin to pour this on paper.
Then, through the emotions, working steadily, over a long period of time, his writing will clarify; he will relax because he thinks right and he will think even righter because he relaxes. The two will become interchangeable. At last he will begin to see himself.
- If only we could remember, fame and money are gifts given us only after we have gifted the world with our best, our lonely, our individual truths.
- You, the prism, measure the light of the world; it burns through your mind to throw a different spectroscopic reading onto white paper than anyone else can throw.
- A sense of inferiority…in a person quite often means true inferiority in craft through simple lack of experience. Work then, gain experience, so that you will be at ease in your writing.
- …In the art of archery, long years must pass where one learns simply the act of drawing the bow and fitting the arrow. Then the process, sometimes tedious and nerve-wracking, of preparing to allow the string, the arrow, to release itself.
{Here Bradbury is referring to Eugen Herrigel's Zen in the Art of Archery.
This rings true, reminding me of the gradual process of adjusting to the fiddle's ergonomics.
I was lucky to have a job teaching fiddle beginners in the public school system, because almost daily I was: opening the case, tightening the bow, rosining the bow, putting the shoulder rest on, adjusting the shoulder rest's placement, picking up the bow, adjusting my bow hold, etc.
What an obstacle all of this is to a beginner! I am excited to be finally reaching a point where I don't have to consciously consider every little aspect in order to play. Though I do still have to consciously remind myself to rest the bow between my pointer finger's big and middle knuckles.}
- Remember: Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations. Plot is observed after the fact rather than before. It cannot precede action. It is the chart that remains when an action is through. That is all Plot ever should be.
So, stand aside, forget targets, let the characters, your fingers, body, blood, and heart do.
{In the realms of music or visual art instead of literal fictional 'characters' this concept could represent nearly any artistic element (motivic elements, figurative elements, instrumental roles, timbres, colors, etc.}
- Contemplate…your subconscious with what Wordsworth called “a wise passiveness.”
- Zen, like all philosophies, followed but in the tracks of men who learned from instinct what was good for them. Every wood-turner, every sculptor worth his marble, every ballerina, practices what Zen preaches without having heard the word in all their lives.
- Schiller advised those who would compose to “Remove the watchers from the gates of intelligence.”
- I think you might easily find a new definition for Work.
And the word is LOVE.
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