Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Some notes from Ray Bradbury’s “Zen in the Art of Writing.”

For many years I read one book on writing every year. This was something I did in January or so. I would find a book that looked good and read it, marking lots of things in the book with pencil. I don’t do that every year now as instead I spend more time actually writing instead of reading about writing. Those years of reading about writing were not wasted; I learned a lot and put it to practice.

I recently stumbled on a small book by Rad Bradbury (his official page and a page in Wikipedia) on writing. I really like that book. As you can see, reading the book caused me to do a little research on Bradbury. I was not surprised to learn that he wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote – he claims to have written about three million words before someone published his words and paid him for them. He also did not go to college – too poor in the Great Depression – but instead educated himself at the library.

Some notes:

Word association – write nouns that mean something to you, combine them, start writing about a combination. Somewhere on the second page or so a real story will probably appear.

Find something that scared you to death. There are great stories in that.

Find an old nightmare.

Find something you did for which you have not forgiven yourself.

Read relentlessly. Any type of writing about any subject.

“One constant remains: the search, the finding, the admiration, the love, the honest response to materials at hand, no matter how shabby they one day seem, when looked back on.”

“Since then, I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas.”

Write one short story a week for at least ten years.

He wrote Fahrenheit 451 in the basement of the UCLA library renting typewriters at ten cents a half hour.

Word association – “I simply got out of bed each morning, walked to my desk, and put down any word or series of words that happened along in my head.”

“If you can find the right metaphor, the right image, and put it in a scene, it can replace four pages of dialogue.”

Now I am off to find a book written by a Dorothea Brande in 1934 called Becoming a Writer. I suppose I will read at least two books on writing this year.