Every year, I re-read the book Zen in the art of writing by Ray Bradbury. The book is essentially about the tips a novice and an experienced writer needs throughout his/her career. The book provides tips that can help you in improving your writing.
Also, I enjoy the style in which Ray tells about his writing habit and how one can develop an acute style of his or her own. In this post, I will share the notes from the book and I hope they will help you to write more and better equally.
Story or writing – what do you prefer?
Improving your writing should be a constant goal for every writer. These tips from the book will help in improving your writing.
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Stay drunk on writing so reality can not destroy you
Keep writing is simple advice with this tip. Life is hard and there are ups and downs in daily life. As humans, we have built enough resilience that we will live through our emotional turmoil, but what should not be stopped is the habit of writing. A lot of people get into bad habits of alcohol when there are setbacks and as writers, we will have similar setbacks, but that should not stop our writing. Writing will help us handle any setback that comes our way. Get drunk on writing so much that life will have no option but to be at your fingertips.
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If you didn’t write every day, the poisons would accumulate and you would begin to die or act crazy
Building a habit is difficult, especially a good habit. We are born procrastinators, the only way we can build a good habit is if some way we can reward ourselves or reduce our expectations. Most of the time, we procrastinate because we put a lot of burden on ourselves. Even after we have built a habit of writing, some days life happens in between and it becomes harder to write. You will miss on writing for a few days or months and then when you will come back to writing, it will feel harder, you will also feel to give up on writing. But if you really want to be a writer, then every day that you don’t write, you should feel suffocated. Writing should become your breathing. You can do anything else in life, but not stop writing. Some days, it will be harder. What you can do in such circumstances, you can reduce the pressure on yourself by writing only for 10 minutes or 15 minutes.
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If you are writing without zest, without gusto, without love, without fun, you are only half a writer. For a first thing, a writer should be: excited
When you get an idea to a story, you are all excited and as time passes, slowly your emotions fade about the idea. This is natural. When you sit down and write, if you don’t feel excited about your story, you must change that story. Remember if you don’t feel excited writing the story you want to write, how do you expect readers to feel excited reading your stories? If you must take anything from this post, then it will be this thing. You must feel excited, gusto about your writing, about your story, about your ideas. Without excitement, you are just a naive writer.
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Write about what you love, what you hate, what angers you, random incidents, irritations, indignation
As a writer, most ideas come from your own life. But how do you find those ideas? Many writers struggle to get better ideas after they have written a couple of books. They shouldn’t look anywhere else but in their own lives. You can write about what you love, what you hate, what angers you, irritations, and indignation. Childhood is filled with many stories, it takes time to contemplate on that. But the writer can never run out of ideas. If you want to write, you must live a life of experiences, good or bad.
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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.
Most fiction writers write fiction, but in that fiction lies a truth that only the writer knows. In short, most writers are truth seekers. When you are writing, you should write as fast as you can, you should blurt it out faster. In that fastness, in that quickness lies the truth. Your subconscious mind will guide you with the truth and you must trust it from the beginning of your writing career. Every time, you stop and think about what to write next, you are trying hard for a style and not necessarily for the truth. First drafts are for ideas, second drafts are for polishing the truth, bringing the right style.
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Make a list of titles or nouns. Which you can use possibly for future stories that you will write.
How to find ideas? Write down the nouns that come to your mind or any random title that you can think of. Make a list. When you are going to write, visit the list and see if any of the nouns or titles you added in the list, inspire you to write a story. Many of my personal ideas have come from nouns like “The house”, “The Traffic”, “The Train”.
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Diet for improving your writing
As a writer, if you want to continue to write beyond one or two books, you must live life. Daily mundane experiences will feed you with the content that you can use for writing. Reading is the other activity you must do daily. Without reading, you will not be able to write. You must read anything that you enjoy. Read fiction, non-fiction, newspaper articles. Read, read and read. For great writing, your daily diet should include one short story, one poem, and one essay. Writing is a craft and you must practice it daily. Similarly to be conscious of that craft, you must read daily. Read great writers of yesteryears and understand the literature, how they wrote, how they crafted stories.
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Word-association is your friend. Play with it, dance with it.
The more you write and read, the better your vocabulary will be. But words are your friends and darlings. As a writer, you must find ways to improve your craft. Also, YOU MUST ENJOY THE ACT OF WRITING. One fun game that Ray suggests in the book, is the word-association. Word-Association is finding nouns and related phrases as fast as you can. You start with a random word and then find immediately another word that you associate with the first word. You continue till you want to play.
Improving your writing will not happen with few tips, it’s a constant process. Trust the process.