Zen in the Art of Writing, Ray Bradbury

This is book 499 of the first 500 and I'm about to embark on the second 500 for the New Year.

I've read Bradbury's short stories, The Martian Chronicles, and Farhenheit 451 and as always, I'm interested to see what a famous author has to say about the experience of writing. Some other interesting books have been penned by Susie Bright, Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul, Milan Kundera and Stephen King.

The essays in this collection tend to be repetitive with many of the same ideas propounded over and over again: word association, childhood memories, and writing a short story a week. Maybe this is what Bradbury had in mind when he said Zen in the writing -- constant, meditative, mind numbing repitition. Along with the essays on writings, he throws in some poetry, which I found lacking, wishing he'd stuck with prose.

The strongest essay in the book is the title piece, in which Bradbury discloses that he knows almost nothing about Zen Buddhism, but found some parallels in the art of writing and the practice of Zen. To fully flush out the Zen/writing connection, the books of Natalie Goldberg are excellent, particularly Writing Down the Bones.

The strength of Bradbury's essay though isn't on the comparison of writing to Zen, but on the observation that the writer yearning for commercial success and the writer yearning for acceptance in literary circles are still both yearning and that desire affects their ability to create art. I've always struggled and felt torn in my own writing between my desire for a literary masterpiece and a commercial success. Bradbury suggests that you forget about either and focus on the craft and in creating something that is uniquely you and if your talent and your work ethic are sufficient, then you may just achieve both. Bradbury, himself, has done this on occasion with his work, transcending pop science fiction culture into literary realms, which gives his argument validity.

So, here are the writing books in the last 500 that relate to this post:

103 The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury
16 Writing Down the Bones, Natalie Goldberg
56 Long, Quiet Highway, Natalie Goldberg
258 Thunder and Lightning, Natalie Goldberg
464 The Great Failure, Natalie Goldberg
215 Reading and Writing, V.S. Naipaul
241 On Writing, Stephen King
497 How to Write a Dirty Story, Susie Bright
284 The Art of the Novel, Milan Kundera