About ten percent, he says, is the good stuff. Write a thousand words a day for fifty years and some of it will be breathtakingly good but a lot of it won't is what he himself says. Ray was, from his writings here, a scared, sensitive child who once listed all the things that scared him - the attic, skeletons, the carnival, the thing on the stairs, the old man, the old woman, the storm etc - and decided to write about each one to set loose the fear and excitement attached to it. But it feels very dated, lacking in irony and sometimes hypey in its attempts to evoke wonder and portent and fear today. And watching The Upstart Crow in which a comic Shakespeare defends dramatising a sentence by 'putting all the words in the wrong order' because 'that's what I do' is a reminder that a style of writing suited to Astounding Stories and often coming across as written by an excitable boy for excitable boys can be endearing in small doses now. But the backwards Yoda speak is not just occasional, it is everywhere in Bradbury's writing. Something Wicked This Way Comes is one of the most arresting titles of any piece of writing. Grandparents are all kind, all wisdom, compared in the cringiest passages to Aristotle with Ray and the other kids at their feet on the lawns, soaking up their age old wisdom and philosophy and goodness. The naivete and optimism of the mid 20th century mid West are everywhere. And the real not faux naivete that fuels the excitable flow of words: his writing on how to write is full of the kind of gosh, darn, golly, mouth wide open awe that you'd expect from a kid growing up in small town America decades ago.

His grandiloquence - that's his kind of word - can get wearing though, and these essays are overflowing with it. 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. 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. 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. In this exuberant book, the incomparable Ray Bradbury shares the wisdom, experience, and excitement of a lifetime of writing. These are the qualities every writer must have, as well as a spirit of adventure. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces back together. 'Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a land mine.

Zen in the art of writing