Happy Birthday, Bradbury

For there comes a time in the day's occupations when old Money Writer falls so in love with an idea that he begins to gallop, steam, pant, rave, and write from the heart, in spite of himself.  So, too, the man with the quill pen is suddenly taken with fevers, gives up purple ink for pure hot perspiration. Then he tatters quills by the dozen and, hours later, emerges ruinous from the bed of creation looking as if he had channeled an avalanche through his house.

Now, you ask, what transpired? What caused these two almost compulsive liars to start telling the truth?

Let me haul out my signs again.

WORK

It's quite obvious that both men were working.

And work itself, after awhile, takes on a rhythm. The mechanical begins to fall away. The body begins to take over. The guard goes down. What happens then?

RELAXATION

And then the men are happily following my last advice:

DON'T THINK

Which results in more relaxation and more unthinkingness and greater creativity.

Now that I have you thoroughly confused, let me pause to hear your own dismayed cry.

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.

Even I can do it.

And if even I can do it, as you are probably hissing now, through clenched teeth, you can do it, too!

All right, let's line up the signs again. We could put them in any order, really. RELAXATION or DON'T THINK could come first, or simultaneously, followed by WORK.

But, for convenience let's do it this way, with a fourth developmental sign added:

WORK RELAXATION DON'T THINK FURTHER RELAXATION

Shall we analyze word number one?

WORK

You have been working, haven't you?

Or do you plan some sort of schedule for yourself starting as soon as you put down this article?

What kind of schedule?

Something like this. One-thousand or two-thousand words every day for the next twenty years. At the start, you might shoot for one short story a week, fifty-two stories a year, for five years.  You will have to write and put away or burn a lot of material before you are comfortable in this medium. You might as well start now and get the necessary work done.

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.

Ray Bradbury, born on this day in 1920, from Zen in the Art of Writing: Essays on Creativity