Read poetry every day of your life. Poetry is good because it flexes muscles you don’t often use enough. Poetry expands the senses and keeps them in prime condition. It keeps you aware of your nose, your eyes, your ear, your tongue, and your hand. And, above all, poetry is compacted metaphor or simile. ~ Ray Bradbury
writing
Ray Bradbury’s Writing Wisdom #10
We can learn from every man or woman or child around us when, we can learn from every man or woman or child around us when, touched and moved, they tell us something they loved or hated this day, Yesterday, or some other day long past. At a given moment, the fuse, after sputtering wetly, flares, and the fireworks begin. ~ Ray Bradbury
Ray Bradbury’s Writing Wisdom #9
I leave you now at the bottom of your own stairs, at half after midnight, with a pad, a pen, and a list to be made. Conjure the nouns, alert the secret self, taste the darkness. Your own thing stands waiting way up there in the attic shadows. If you speak softly, and write any old word that wants to jump out of your nerves onto the page, your thing at the top of your stairs in your own private night may well come down. ~ Ray Bradbury
Ray Bradbury’s Writing Wisdom #8
Be certain of this: when honest love speaks, went true admiration begins, when excitement rises, when hate curls like smoke, you need never doubt that creativity will stay with you for a lifetime. ~ Ray Bradbury
Ray Bradbury’s Writing Wisdom #7
When people ask me where I get my ideas, I laugh. How strange, we’re so busy looking out, to find ways and means, we forget to look in. ~ Ray Bradbury
Ray Bradbury’s Writing Wisdom #6
What can we writers learn from lizards, lift from the birds? In quickness is truth. 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 with deadfalling or tiger-trapping.~ Ray Bradbury
Ray Bradbury’s Writing Wisdom #3
The first thing every writer should be is excited. He should be a thing of fevers and enthusiasms. ~ Ray Bradbury
Ray Bradbury’s Writing Wisdom #2
If I were asked to name the most important items in a writer’s make-up, the things that shape his material and rush him where he wants to go, I could only warn him to look to his zest, see to his gusto. ~ Ray Bradbury
Ray Bradbury’s Writing Wisdom #1
Ray Bradbury’s Writing Wisdom #1
“And what, you ask, does writing teach us? First and foremost, it reminds us that we are alive and that is a privilege, not a right. … Secondly, writing is survival … Not to write, for many of us, is to die.”
Thoughts on Writing by Ray Bradbury
For the next (fill in a number) days I will present Thoughts on Writing by Ray Bradbury from his book, Zen in the Art of Writing.
I’ve read Bradbury’s book four times and I’m starting my fifth read. Beginning tomorrow, I will share Ray Bradbury’s wisdom on writing as I re-read his book. ENJOY.
