Thursday Thirteen #725

These quotes are from Zen in the Art of Writing, by Ray Bradbury.

1. To try to know beforehand is to freeze and kill.

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

3. We writers "build tensions toward laughter, then give permission, and laughter comes."

4. We writers "build tensions toward sorrow, and at last say cry, and hope to see our audience in tears."

5. We writers "build tensions toward violence, light the fuse, and run."

6. We writers "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."

7. "We build tensions, especially today, toward sickness and then, if we are good enough, talented enough, observant enough, allow our audiences to be sick."

8. No tensions . . . must be built which remains unreleased. Without this, any art ends incomplete, halfway to its goal. And in real life, as we know, the failure to relax a particular tension can lead to madness."

9. Again and again my stories and my plays teach me, remind me, that I must never doubt myself, my gut, my ganglion, or my Ouija subconscious again.

10. It is a lie to write in such a way as to be rewarded by money in the commercial market.

11. It is a lie to write in such a way as to be rewarded by fame offered you by some snobbish quasi-literary group in the intellectual gazettes.

12. Each of you, curious about creativity, wants to make contact with that thing in yourself that is truly original. You want fame and fortune, yes, but only as rewards for work well and truly done.

13. What is the greatest reward a writer can have? Isn't it that day when someone rushes up to you, his face bursting with honesty, his eyes afire with admiration and cries, "That new story of yours was fine, really wonderful!" Then and only then is writing worthwhile.

Just an FYI, this is one of the few books on writing that I didn't really care for. The other was Stephen King's book, On Writing, which I know receives many oohs and ahhs from writers but I found it very male oriented and patronizing. Bradbury's book is simply out of date and reads dated, unlike say, Bird by Bird, by Ann Lamont, or Writing Down the Bones, by Natalie Goldberg. I have an entire shelf full of books on writing, and there are only a few that I did not find particularly useful. This Bradbury book had a few nuggets in it, but not enough that I want to keep the book, and nothing I'd not read elsewhere.

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Thursday Thirteen is played by lots of people; there is a list here if you want to read other Thursday Thirteens and/or play along. I've been playing for a while and this is my 725th time to do a list of 13 on a Thursday. Or so sayth the Blogger counter, anyway.