“Read those authors who write the way you hope to write, those who think the way you would like to think.

The most improbable tales can be made believable, if your reader, through his senses, feels certain that he stands at the middle of events.” 10.

If your reader feels the sun on his flesh, the wind fluttering his shirt sleeves, half your fight is won. “Why all this insistence on the senses? Because in order to convince your reader that he is there, you must assault each of his senses, in turn, with color, sound, taste, and texture. And, above all, poetry is compacted metaphor or simile.” 9. It keeps you aware of your nose, your eye, your ear, your tongue, your hand. Poetry expands the senses and keeps them in prime condition. Poetry is good because it flexes muscles you don’t use often enough. So, too, embarrassment, self-consciousness, remembered criticisms, can stifle the average person so that less and less in his lifetime can he open himself out.” 8. We know how fragile is the pattern woven by our fathers or uncles or friends, who can have their moment destroyed by a wrong word, a slammed door, or a passing fire-wagon. And yet we know it is not as easy as that. “All that is most original lies waiting for us to summon it forth. How strange – we’re so busy looing out, to find ways and means, we forget to look in. “When people ask me where I get my ideas, I laugh. In delay comes the effort for a style, instead of leaping upon truth which is the only style worth dead falling or tiger-trapping.” 6. The faster you blurt, the more swiftly you write, the more honest you are. “What can we writers learn from lizards, lift from birds? In quickness is truth. “Everywhere you look in the literary cosmos, the great ones are busy loving and hating.” 5. “How long has it been since you wrote a story where your real love or your real hatred somehow got onto the paper? When was the last time you dared release a cherished prejudice so it slammed the page like a lightning bolt? What are the best things and the worst things in your life, and when are you going to get around to whispering or shouting them?” 4. Without such vigor, he might as well be out picking peaches or digging ditches God knows it’d be better for his health.” 3.

He should be a thing of fevers and enthusiasms.

For the first thing a writer should be is – excited. It means you are so busy keeping one eye on the commercial market, or one ear peeled for the avant-garde coterie, that you are not being yourself. “If you are writing without zest, without gusto, without love, without fun, you are only half a writer. “You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.” 2.

Zen and the art of writing ray bradbury