Zen in the Art of Writing

Remember that pianist who said that if he did not practice every day he would know, if he did not practice for two days, the critics would know, after three days, his audiences would know.

if you are writing without zest, without gusto, without love, without fun, you are only half a writer.

What are the best things and the worst things in your life, and when are you going to get around to whispering or shouting them?

What do you want more than anything else in the world? What do you love, or what do you hate? Find a character, like yourself, who will want something or not want something, with all his heart. Give him running orders. Shoot him off. Then follow as fast as you can go. The character, in his great love, or hate, will rush you through to the end of the story. The zest and gusto of his need, and there is zest in hate as well as in love, will fire the landscape and raise the temperature of your typewriter thirty degrees.

ideas lie everywhere, like apples fallen and melting in the grass for lack of wayfaring strangers with an eye and a tongue for beauty, whether absurd, horrific, or genteel.

Life is short, misery sure, mortality certain. But on the way, in your work, why not carry those two inflated pig-bladders labeled Zest and Gusto.

The faster you blurt, the more swiftly you write, the more honest you are. In hesitation is thought. In delay comes the effort for a style, instead of leaping upon truth which is the only style worth deadfalling or tiger-trapping.

And when a man talks from his heart, in his moment of truth, he speaks poetry.

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. It keeps you aware of your nose, your eye, your ear, your tongue, your hand. 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 for browsing.

Every time you hear an echo from your Subconscious, you know yourself a little better. A small echo may start an idea. A big echo may result in a story.

in order to convince your reader that he is there, you must assault each of his senses, in turn, with color, sound, taste, and texture.

The most improbable tales can be made believable, if your reader, through his senses, feels certain that he stands at the middle of events. He cannot refuse, then, to participate.

Everything I’ve ever done was done with excitement, because I wanted to do it, because I loved doing it.

By living well, by observing as you live, by reading well and observing as you read, you have fed Your Most Original Self.

when there was a man with something to tell, and ones, quiet and wise, to listen.

to work creatively he must put flesh into it, and enjoy it as a lark, or as a fascinating adventure.

I wrote a thousand words a day. For ten years I wrote at least one short story a week, somehow guessing that a day would finally come when I truly got out of the way and let it happen. The day came in 1942 when I wrote ‘The Lake’. Ten years of doing everything wrong suddenly became the right idea, the right scene, the right characters, the right day, the right creative time.

If this all sounds mechanical, it wasn’t. My ideas drove me to it, you see. The more I did, the more I wanted to do. You grow ravenous. You run fevers. You know exhilarations. You can’t sleep at night, because your beast-creature ideas want out and turn you in your bed. It is a grand way to live.

I blundered into creativity as blindly as any child learning to walk and see. I learned to let my senses and my Past tell me all that was somehow true.

That Truth again: the History of Ideas, which is all that science fiction ever has been.

Self-consciousness is the enemy of all art, be it acting, writing, painting, or living itself, which is the greatest art of all.

Here’s how my theory goes. We writers are up to the following: We build tensions toward laughter, then give permission, and laughter comes. We build tensions toward sorrow, and at last say cry, and hope to see our audience in tears. We build tensions toward violence, light the fuse, and run. We build the strange tensions of love, where so many of the other tensions mix to be modified and transcended, and allow that fruition in the mind of the audience.

We are cups, constantly and quietly being filled.

I intend my plays to be first entertaining and grand fun that will stimulate, provoke, terrify, and, one hopes, amuse.

There’s a relationship between the great poems of the world and the great screenplays: they both deal in compact images. If you can find the right metaphor, the right image, and put it in a scene, it can replace four pages of dialogue.

WORK. It is, above all, the word about which your career will revolve for a lifetime. Beginning now you should become not its slave, which is too mean a term, but its partner. Once you are really a co-sharer of existence with your work, that word will lose its repellent aspects.

Impossible! you say. How can you work and relax? How can you create and not be a nervous wreck? It can be done. It is done, every day of every week of every year. Athletes do it. Painters do it. Mountain climbers do it. Zen Buddhists with their little bows and arrows do it.

For I believe that eventually quantity will make for quality. How so? 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 the 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 utilize this muscle, rather than that. Is the writer different? I think not. His greatest art will often be what he does not say, what he leaves out, his ability to state simply with clear emotion, the way he wants to go.

By work, by quantitative experience, man releases himself from obligation to anything but the task at hand.

The artist must not think of the critical rewards or money he will get for painting pictures. He must think of beauty here in this brush ready to flow if he will release it.

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.

Tenseness results from not knowing or giving up trying to know. Work, giving us experience, results in new confidence and eventually in relaxation. The type of dynamic relaxation again, as in sculpting, where the sculptor does not consciously have to tell his fingers what to do. The surgeon does not tell his scalpel what to do. Nor does the athlete advise his body. Suddenly, a natural rhythm is achieved. The body thinks for itself.

WORK· RELAXATION· DON’T THINK, Once separated out. Now, all three together in a process. For if one works, one finally relaxes and stops thinking. True creation occurs then and only then.

Every wood-turner, every sculptor worth his marble, every ballerina, practices what Zen preaches without having heard the word in all their lives.

‘It is a wise father that knows his own child,’ should be paraphrased to ‘It is a wise writer who knows his own Subconscious.’ And not only knows it but lets it speak of the world as it and it alone has sensed it and shaped it to its own truth.