I’m still riffing on Dean Wesley Smith’s advice to writers from the other day: “Have fun … If sitting alone in a room and making up a story you want to tell is not fun and challenging, you are doing it wrong.”

I am eager to recapture the fun, and so I started re-reading Zen in the Art of Writing — Ray Bradbury says writing (any art, actually) is survival.

“Not to write, for many of us, is to die.”

“You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.”

How do I recapture the fun? By coming back to Bradbury and his zest for making stuff up. By watching a movie like Superman with its joy for the story.

Exposing myself to other fun writing is how I recapture the fun. I love reading Bradbury rolling along in love with the idea of writing — it reminds me that I love to write, and I love to run off-leash letting the words sing for no other reason than to hear the music. Who says it has to make sense? What if the words just go together like rama lama ding dong shoobie doobie doo?

Ultimately if you let yourself have fun, you might find yourself at an elite boarding school for young wizards, or you might ride the Orient Express with a brilliant Belgian detective, or you might craft a tale of star-crossed young lovers whose families have never stopped feuding.

The whole idea is to start having fun with it all — don’t overthink what you’re doing; in fact, Bradbury says don’t think at all.

I read the essay “How to Keep and Feed a Muse” out in the sun, on the back deck, with two puzzled golden retrievers panting nearby — feeling the warmth on my neck, sitting on the heated chair, with tourist traffic and birdsong as background music, thinking about how my attitudes were shaped by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby and Ray Harryhausen and Leonard Nimoy and George Orwell and Diana Rigg and Nathaniel Hawthorne. 

I needed some rocket fuel before I head back into space. It turns out all this time I needed rest, a deep breath before I try to resume running.

(The older dog just yelped in the heat to insist we go back inside.)

I move into my air-cooled office, cluttered with memories, books yet to be read, music yet to be heard, and a chair that has held my bulk countless times. The pages of my journal are still warm to the touch as I contemplate what I absorbed out in the brightness.

Bradbury advises reading poetry and essays and stories and novels from as wide a variety of voices as we can, and so, when I sit and read and listen while my conscience cries, “You have other obligations,” let me be bold and self-aware enough to say, “No, I need these, too.” Let me also be aware enough to seek out not just Bradbury’s advice and the familiar old songs but also places I haven’t been before. There are thousands of stories and songs just within these walls, hundreds I still haven’t consumed, and many millions out there in the rest of the world.

Yes, the lawn must be mowed, the gardens tended, and the old trim repainted, but I also have a muse to keep and feed, so enough with the guilty feelings.