Zen in the Art of Writing

September 1, 1989
As the title suggests, science fiction master Bradbury occasionally sounds like a Zen sage (``You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you''), but for the most part these nine lightweight, zestful essays dispense the sort of shoptalk generally associated with writers' workshops. The title piece aims to help the aspiring writer navigate between the self-consciously literary and the calculatingly commercial. Other essays deal with discovering one's imaginative self; feeding one's muse; the germination of Bradbury's novel Dandelion Wine in his Illinois boyhood; a trip to Ireland; science fiction as a search for new modes of survival; and the author's stage adaptation of his classic novel Fahrenheit 451. Eight poems on creativity round out the volume; noteworthy are ``Doing Is Being'' and ``We Have Our Arts So We Won't Die of Truth.''