From Kate’s Writing Crate…
I think
anyone interested in becoming a writer should read Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg, The War of Art by Steven Pressfield, and Zen in the Art of Writing: Essays on Creativity by Ray Bradbury.
These books will also
energize anyone who is already a writer. I often pick one of them up, flip open
to a random page, read for a while then jump into writing.
In Zen in the Art of Writing, Ray Bradbury
not only encourages writing, he also shares his story of becoming a writer then
working hard to become a better writer. Read his work. His dedication and
creativity are astounding.
He’s inspiring—hard not to
be when he begins his essay “The Joy of Writing” on page 3 with:
Zest.
Gusto. How rarely one hears these words used. How rarely do we see people
living, or for that matter, creating by them. Yet 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 along the road to where he wants to go, I could only warn him to
look to his zest, see to his gusto.
Bradbury
notes on page 13:
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 the truth which is the only style worth
deadfalling or tiger-trapping.
Tiger-trapping. How exciting
that makes writing sound! We are brave. Capturing truth. Following wherever our
creativity leads us. Zest and gusto indeed!
However, sometimes writing is a
quieter craft as seen in one of my favorite essays, “How to Keep and Feed a
Muse” on page 31. On pages 32 & 33, Bradbury states:
…to
keep a Muse, you must first offer food. How you can feed something that isn’t
there is a little hard to explain. But we live surrounded by paradoxes…
…in
a lifetime, we stuff ourselves with sounds, sights, smells, tastes, and
textures of people, animals, landscapes, events…These are the stuffs, the
foods, on which The Muse grows.
…Here
is the stuff of originality. For it is the totality of experience reckoned with,
filed, and forgotten, that each man is truly different from all others in the
world.
Bradbury
also makes this recommendation to writers on page 36:
Read
poetry every day of your life…it flexes muscles you don’t use often enough…it
expands the senses and keeps them in prime condition.
In this
book, I discovered Ray Bradbury also wrote poetry. Eight of his poems are in
the back of the book including my favorite “What I Do Is Me—For That I Came for Gerard Manley Hopkins” on page 137.
I think a framed copy should be in every nursery and read nightly to every
child so he or she can be “the only you that’s truly you on Earth.”
For a
writer or not, that’s the best life goal.
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