Play Book Tag discussion

Zen In the Art of Writing –Ray Bradbury
2**

This short collection of essays shows a first-published date of Nov 1973, but each essay was individually published in a variety of magazines or journals, ranging from 1961 through 1986.

I am a fan of Ray Bradbury’s and I initially found it interesting to read about where his story ideas came from. I particularly liked the image of a young (child? teen?) Bradbury keeping a notebook or journal where he jotted random words that struck his fancy, only to have those words percolate in his subconscious mind for years until Voila! a story idea was born. The word might be “baby” or “skeleton” or “carnival” or “dandelion.”

More than anything I get the impression that he was open to anything. He spent his life observing and absorbing as much as possible to fuel his creative engine. And while he is probably best known as a writer of science fiction, he penned love stories and even wrote the screenplay for Moby Dick (yes, the movie starring Gregory Peck as Ahab).

All that being said, and despite my liking his works of fiction, I found this collection dissatisfying as a whole. The fact that the collected essays spanned a couple of decades of his thoughts / writings probably didn’t help. And unlike Stephen King’s memoir, On Writing , this work did nothing to improve my own “reading” skills.


LINK to my review