“Now, I would like to believe that everyone reading this article is not interested in those two forms of lying. It is a lie to write in such a way as to be rewarded by fame offered you by some snobbish quasi-literary group in the intellectual gazettes. “It is a lie to write in such a way as to be rewarded by money in the commercial market.
What are we trying to uncover in this flow? The one person irreplaceable to the world, of which there is no duplicate. At last the surge, the agreeable blending of work, not thinking and relaxation will be like the blood in one’s body, flowing because it has to flow, moving because it must move, from the heart.
At night, the very phosphorescence of his insides will throw shadows long on the wall. Then, through the emotions, working steadily, over a long period of time, his writing will clarify he will relax because he thinks right and he will think even righter because he relaxes. He must ask himself, ‘What do I really think of the world, what do I love, fear, hate?’ and begin to pour this on paper. He must forget the money waiting for him in mass-circulation. I repeat myself, but, the writer who wants to tap the larger truth in himself must reject the temptations of Joyce or Camus or Tennessee Williams, as exhibited in the literary reviews. “But work, without right thinking, is almost useless. Not to work is to cease, tighten up, become nervous and therefore destructive of the creative process. Work done and behind you is a lesson to be studied. But you are in the midst of a moving process. So we should not look down on work nor look down on the forty-five out of fifty-two stories written in our first year as failures.
Work then, hard work, prepares the way for the first stages of relaxation, when one begins to approach what Orwell might call Not Think! As in learning to typewrite, a day comes when the single letters a-s-d-f and j-k-l- give way to a flow of words. “By work, by quantitative experience, man releases himself from obligation to anything but the task at hand… The writer must let his fingers run out the story of his characters, who, being only human and full of strange dreams and obsessions, are only too glad to run. There’s more to be said about this, so I’ll let Ray Bradbury explain in his own words, excerpted from Zen in the Art of Writing: And ‘Don’t Think!’ means not second guessing yourself or interrupting the flow of Relaxation. ‘Relaxation’ means getting into the Zone and letting the writing write itself. In this great essay, Ray Bradbury gives us four words of advice that are essential for writing, or any kind of creativity:
0 kommentar(er)
