"Every morning I jump out of bed and step on  a land mine. The land mine is me. After the  explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the  pieces back together. Now, it's your turn. Jump!"  Zest. Gusto. Curiosity. These are the qualities  every writer must have, as well as a spirit of  adventure. In this exuberant book, the incomparable  Ray Bradbury shares the wisdom, experience, and  excitement of a lifetime of writing. Here are  practical tips on the art of writing from a master of  the craft-everything from finding original ideas to  developing your own voice and style-as well as the  inside story of Bradbury's own remarkable career  as a prolific author of novels, stories, poems,  films, and plays. Zen In The Art Of  Writing is more than just a how-to manual for the  would-be writer: it is a celebration of the act of  writing itself that will delight, impassion, and  inspire the writer in you. In it, Bradbury  encourages us to follow the unique path of our instincts  and enthusiasms to the place where our inner genius  dwells, and he shows that success as a writer  depends on how well you know one subject: your own  life.

Publishers Weekly

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.'' (Mar.)